What should my bookkeeper be doing every month?
Nine things should arrive from an outside bookkeeper every month, and each one leaves a document behind. Here is the document for each, what to look at on it, and the one thing that never transfers with the work.
Every monthly bookkeeping deliverable has a document behind it, and the fastest one to check is the reconciliation report: the difference on it should be zero, and this month’s beginning balance should equal last month’s ending balance.
No US agency, standards board or professional body sets a deadline for closing a small business’s books, so a close date is a term to agree in writing rather than a standard you can hold anyone to.
The IRS states that an employer is ultimately responsible for the deposit and payment of federal employment tax liabilities even where a third party is forwarded the money to make the deposits, and may assess penalties and interest on the employer’s account if that third party fails to pay.
Nine deliverables, and every one of them leaves a document behind. What should my bookkeeper be doing every month is a question with a checkable answer, and the checkable half is the one that usually goes missing: not the work, but the artifact that proves the work happened.
You are paying someone precisely so you do not have to learn any of this. So the standard below is written to be applied by someone who cannot read a balance sheet and has no intention of learning one. Each row names one thing that should arrive and one document you can open to see whether it did. The first two take about 30 seconds each.
One thing this page will not do is tell you what date your books should be closed by. No agency, no standards board and no professional body sets one for a business your size, and every number in circulation is somebody’s preference wearing the clothes of a standard. What to ask for instead is further down.
What should arrive each month, and what proves it arrived?
Nine things should arrive, and each one has a document attached to it that you can open. The table below is the whole standard. Read the right column first, because it is the half that makes the left column checkable and it is the half that lists of bookkeeping duties leave out.
What should arrive | What proves it arrived, and what you look at |
|---|---|
Every bank and credit card account reconciled to that account’s statement | A reconciliation report for each account. One number decides it: the difference, which should be zero. Intuit’s QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, says you keep matching transactions until the difference is $0.00, and that QuickBooks saves a reconciliation report once you finish |
This month’s reconciliation starting where last month’s stopped | The beginning balance printed on this month’s reconciliation report. It should equal the ending balance on last month’s. Intuit’s documentation, read in September 2026, says QuickBooks checks this first and will not let the reconciliation continue until a difference is accounted for |
Every transaction coded to a real account | The balance of the uncategorized or "ask my accountant" account on the last day of the month, which should be zero. Anything parked there is a question about your own business that nobody has asked you |
A profit and loss for the month | The report itself, for that single month rather than year to date, sitting next to the month before it |
A balance sheet dated the last day of the month | The report itself, dated the last calendar day rather than today’s date. Cash on it is the book balance and not the bank’s, which is why the reconciliation report is the first row on this list and not the fifth |
An accounts receivable aging report | The report, and one comparison: its total should equal the accounts receivable line on the balance sheet for the same date |
An accounts payable aging report | The same test in the other direction, against the accounts payable line |
Documents attached to the transactions that need them | Open any three transactions above a figure you choose and look for the attachment. Three is enough to tell you whether it is a habit |
The month closed, so it cannot quietly change afterwards | The closing date set on the file, and who holds the password. Intuit’s QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, describes a lock date after which changes need a warning or a password, and an exceptions to closing date report listing anything altered after the books were closed |
Two of those comparisons are the same move made twice. The aging report total and the balance sheet line are two different pages describing the same debt, produced by the same software from the same data, and they should agree to the cent. When they do not, one of them has been edited by hand. It is also the quickest route into what an aging report is actually telling you about who pays, which is a longer subject than the report’s own layout suggests.
How do I check a reconciliation if I cannot read accounts?
You check one number and one date, and neither asks anything of you. Reconciliation is matching every line on your bank statement to a line in your books, and the reconciliation report is what that exercise leaves behind. The number is the difference, and it should be zero. The date is the statement period, and it should be last month’s.
Here is what the zero is protecting you from. Suppose a $2,100 payment from a customer gets into your books twice, once when the invoice is marked paid and once when the deposit lands in the bank feed. Your books now show $2,100 more cash than the bank does, and your income for the month is overstated by the same amount. Nothing on the profit and loss looks wrong. The reconciliation is the only place that catches it, because it is the only place your books are compared against a document your bookkeeper did not produce.
A reconciliation report is the one page in your books that has been checked against a document your bookkeeper did not write.
The second check is the beginning balance, and it is the one people skip. Each month’s reconciliation should start at the number last month’s finished on. If it does not, something in a period you already signed off on has been changed since. Intuit’s QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, describes the saved reconciliation report as carrying the beginning and ending balances and listing which transactions were cleared and which were left uncleared, which is why the report rather than a verbal confirmation is the thing to ask for.
This is a narrow version of a wider habit: every line on a balance sheet should tie to something outside the books, and reading a balance sheet line by line against the documents behind it is the longer form of the same test. The reconciliation report is simply the line where the outside document is easiest to get hold of.
Who sets the deadline for closing your books?
Nobody does. The IRS sets deposit and filing deadlines and says nothing about when your management accounts are finished. No standards board publishes a close deadline for a company with 12 employees, no state requires one, and no professional body issues one. Every number you will read on this question, whether it is two to five business days or the 10th or the 15th, is a preference somebody published without a source behind it.
So do not take a date from an article, this one included. A close date is a term, not a standard, which means it is agreed between you and whoever keeps your books and then written down. The useful question is not how long it should take. It is this: by which working day of the month will last month’s reports be in my inbox, and what do you need from me, and by when, for that date to hold?
The second half is what makes the first half real. A close that waits on a bank statement, a payroll report and an answer from you about four transactions is not a date your bookkeeper can hold on their own, and agreeing to one without saying so sets both of you up to be annoyed in about six weeks.
One set of dates in your month genuinely is fixed, and it is not the close. For taxes reported on Form 941, the IRS sets two deposit schedules, monthly and semiweekly, and which one applies to you is determined by the total tax you reported in a four-quarter lookback period. A monthly schedule depositor deposits employment taxes on payments made during a month by the 15th day of the following month. Those dates do not move because the books are not finished.
Find last month’s reconciliation report for your main checking account and look at two things: the difference, which should be zero, and the beginning balance, which should equal the ending balance on the month before. If both are what they should be, that account is genuinely reconciled and you now know it rather than assuming it. If you cannot find the report at all, that is the first thing to ask for.
What does not transfer when someone else keeps your books?
The liability does not transfer. The IRS states that the employer is ultimately responsible for the deposit and payment of federal employment tax liabilities, even where the employer forwards the tax amounts to a third party to make the deposits, and that if the third party fails to make the payments, the IRS may assess penalties and interest on the employer’s account.
The same rule appears a second time on the IRS’s page for third party payer arrangements, which says an employer’s use of a reporting agent does not relieve the employer of its responsibility for ensuring that all of its federal employment tax duties are met. Two pages, one rule, and it is worth knowing because it is the one item on this page that delegation cannot reach.
The IRS’s own suggestion about it is a verification step, which is the same shape as everything else here. It says employers should ensure their payroll providers are using EFTPS so that employers can confirm payments are being made on their behalf, and that employers should register on EFTPS to get their own PIN and use it to periodically verify payments. Where a third party enrolls the employer, the employer receives an Inquiry PIN, and the IRS says to activate it and use it to monitor the account.
There is a third thing that does not transfer, and it is the address. The IRS strongly suggests that an employer does not change its address of record to the payroll service provider’s, because doing so may significantly limit the employer’s ability to be informed of tax matters involving the business. If something goes wrong with the account, the correspondence goes to the address of record. You want that to be you.
None of this is an argument for taking payroll back in-house, and none of it suggests anything has gone wrong with yours. Payroll runs through your payroll provider either way. What reaches your books is the journal entry that run produces, and that entry is one of the things that has to reconcile. The bookkeeping is the narrow part. The liability sits outside it, with you.
How long do the records have to be kept, and who holds them?
Three years for most things and at least four for anything to do with employment taxes, and the file is yours rather than your bookkeeper’s.
The IRS ties the general period to the period of limitations for the return, which is the window in which you can amend to claim a credit or refund or the IRS can assess additional tax, and says to keep records for three years where none of its longer exceptions applies. Employment tax records are the exception most likely to apply to a business with staff: keep them for at least four years after the date the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later.
What counts as a record is broader than the accounting file. Publication 583, revised December 2024, describes a recordkeeping system as a summary of your business transactions kept in your books, supported by the documents those transactions generate: sales slips, paid bills, invoices, receipts, deposit slips and canceled checks. The books are the summary. The paperwork is the support, and both halves have to survive.
Which raises the question of where they live. If the receipts are attached to the transactions inside an accounting file you own the subscription to, you hold your own records. If they sit in a folder on somebody else’s drive, or the subscription is billed to their firm, you do not, and that is a fact worth establishing before you need it to be true. Intuit’s QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, notes that the audit history showing who changed a transaction and when is kept for two years, which is shorter than either retention period above. Find out where the file lives on a quiet Tuesday rather than during a handover.
What should I ask for if none of this is arriving?
Ask for the documents rather than for reassurance. Four requests, in this order, and none of them is an accusation. Every one is something your bookkeeper either already has or can produce in a few minutes.
Last month’s reconciliation report for every bank and credit card account.
The balance of the uncategorized account on the last day of last month.
The closing date currently set on the file, and who holds the password.
A date: by which working day will last month’s reports arrive, and what is needed from me to hold it.
If all four come back inside a day, you have your answer and you can stop reading. If they do not, you also have your answer, and the next move is to ask why before you decide anything. There are ordinary reasons a reconciliation is not finished on the 3rd, and "the bank statement does not arrive until the 6th" is one of them. There are fewer ordinary reasons for no reconciliation report to exist at all.
If it turns out that nobody has been doing the monthly coding and reconciling, that is work somebody has to do every month whoever ends up doing it, and what it costs moves with your transaction volume and how far behind the file already is. Whether that person should be a bookkeeper or an accountant is a different question with a different answer, and this page is not it.
What should a bookkeeper give me every month?
A bookkeeper should give you a reconciliation report for every bank and credit card account, a profit and loss for the month, a balance sheet dated the last day of the month, accounts receivable and accounts payable aging reports, and confirmation that the period has been closed. Every one of those is a document you can open. If what arrives is a summary email describing the month rather than the reports themselves, ask for the reports: they take seconds to export, and they are the only version you can check.
How long should a month-end close take?
There is no published standard. No US agency, standards board or professional body sets a deadline for closing a small business’s books, so any specific number, whether it is five business days or the 15th, is a preference rather than a rule. Treat the close date as a term you agree in writing with whoever keeps your books, and agree at the same time what they need from you and by when. The deadlines that are genuinely fixed in your month are the IRS’s deposit and filing dates, and those apply whether or not the books are closed.
Is my bookkeeper supposed to do payroll?
Only if your engagement says so, and many do not. Payroll is usually run through a payroll provider, and the bookkeeping job is what happens next: the journal entry the payroll run produces has to land in the right accounts and the right period, and the cash that leaves your bank for wages and for tax deposits has to reconcile. Ask which of those two things your bookkeeper is doing, because "handles payroll" means both of them to some people and neither to others.
Who is responsible if my bookkeeper misses a payroll tax deposit?
The employer is. The IRS states that the employer is ultimately responsible for the deposit and payment of federal employment tax liabilities even where the employer forwards the tax amounts to a third party to make the deposits, and that the IRS may assess penalties and interest on the employer’s account if the third party fails to make the payments. The check the IRS suggests is to make sure your provider uses EFTPS and to register on EFTPS yourself so you can verify that payments were made. That is one setup and a few minutes a quarter.
Do I still need a bookkeeper if I use QuickBooks?
QuickBooks does the recording; somebody still has to do the deciding. The software imports the transaction, suggests a category from what it has seen before, and produces the reports on demand. What it cannot do is know that the $1,800 wire was a deposit on equipment rather than an expense, notice that a customer payment was recorded twice, or reconcile an account against a statement it has never seen. Plenty of owners do that work themselves and do it well. The question is not whether the software is enough. It is whether the deciding is getting done by anyone.
Books you can check, every month
If the reconciliation reports, the monthly statements and the closed period are not arriving, that is the work Bookist does: automation handles the monthly bookkeeping and an accountant reviews it before it reaches you. Bring last month’s reports to a call and we will go through them against the standard on this page.
This article explains how the rules generally work and what to ask for. It is not tax advice for your situation.
Has migrated more companies off legacy accounting systems than he’d like to admit. Reviews the tools, integrations, and duct tape holding modern finance stacks together.
