Monthly bookkeeping for owner-run businesses on the Rive-Sud
Months you can actually compare
Comparing this month with last month sounds like the easiest thing books can do. It can turn out to be the hardest, and when it does, the cause is the categories rather than the numbers.
A delivery fee recorded as shipping in January, as supplies in February and as a general expense in March has cost the business the same each month and looks like three different trends. A subscription filed under office costs one quarter and software the next makes both lines jump for no reason. Nothing in either case is wrong enough to fail a reconciliation, and every comparison built on top of it says something untrue.
A chart of accounts that holds still
The fix is a chart of accounts decided once and used the same way every month. At the start, the categories are set up to match how your business actually spends: few enough to read at a glance, specific enough that a change in one of them means something. Each recurring supplier is then assigned to the category it belongs to, so the same bill lands in the same place every time, whoever records it and whatever the description on the bank line says.
When a category genuinely needs to change, because the business has changed, it changes from a stated date forward. The earlier months stay as they were recorded, with a note, so a comparison across the change can still be read honestly.
Supplier statements, not just bank lines
A bank line tells you that money left. A supplier's monthly statement tells you what was billed, what was paid and what is still owed. Reconciling regular suppliers to their statements, rather than only to the bank, is how a missing invoice or a double payment shows up while it can still be fixed.
The Rive-Sud
The Rive-Sud is several municipalities rather than one city, with no single city hall, from Longueuil to Brossard. Its businesses keep their books on Québec terms: the sales tax collected and paid is recorded on every transaction, payroll is entered as your provider processes each run with the CNESST figures alongside, and your accountant files from the package we prepare.
Who is doing this
One operator, with over 20 years of experience in bookkeeping, accounting and financial analysis, for-profit and non-profit, across a wide range of sectors, in English and in French.
Questions Rive-Sud business owners ask
Our categories have changed several times. Can the history be fixed?
Some of it. The read-only look shows how far the drift goes, and that decides whether recategorizing the past is worth the cost or whether the cleaner choice is to fix it from a start date and note the difference.
Which suppliers get reconciled to their statements?
The regular ones, where a statement exists and the amounts matter. A one-off purchase is checked against its receipt instead.
Will the categories match what our accountant uses?
They are set up with your accountant's year-end in mind, so the quarterly package maps onto what they need without being rebuilt.
One next step
A fifteen-minute call about your month, at no cost. Ask for a call.