QuickBooks 2016: The Missing Manual

Chapter 17. Performing Year-End Tasks

As if your typical workday isn’t hectic enough, the end of the year brings with it an assortment of additional bookkeeping and accounting tasks. As long as you’ve kept on top of your bookkeeping during the year, you can delegate most of these year-end tasks to QuickBooks with just a few clicks. (If you shrugged off your data entry during the year, even the mighty QuickBooks can’t help.) This chapter describes the tasks you have to perform at the end of each fiscal year (or other fiscal period, for that matter) and how to delegate them to QuickBooks. (The box on QuickBooks’ Year-End Guide describes a QuickBooks feature that helps you remember these various tasks.)

Checking for Problems

If you work with an accountant, you may never run a report from the Reports→Accountant & Taxes submenu unless your accountant asks you to. But if you prepare your own tax returns, running the following reports at the end of each year will help sniff out any problems:

• The Audit Trail report (Reports→Accountant & Taxes→Audit Trail) is especially important if several people work on your company file and transactions seem to disappear or change. QuickBooks’ audit trail feature is always turned on, keeping track of changes to transactions, who makes them, and when. You can check this permanent record by running the Audit Trail report—shown in Figure 17-1—to watch for things like deleted transactions or modifications to transactions after they’ve been reconciled. (You have ...