What your CPA needs at year-end

The January email

Your accountant asks for last year’s depreciation schedule. You open QuickBooks, search, find nothing, and assume it was never produced.

It was. It just does not live in QuickBooks. Depreciation schedules are generated by tax software, whether that’s Lacerte, Drake, ProConnect or UltraTax, and they stay there. What reaches your accounting file is at most a journal entry once a year recording the total. The detail behind it, asset by asset, sits in the prior return as Form 4562 and in the preparer’s own asset module.

That single misunderstanding produces a large share of the back-and-forth every filing season, and it is nobody’s mistake. It is a gap between two systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

What is missing, and why QuickBooks cannot supply it

What you send	What the preparer needs	Why QuickBooks doesn’t have it
The file, as-is	Accounts that map to tax form lines	Your chart was built for running a business, not for a Schedule C or an 1120-S
Last year’s return	The depreciation schedule behind it	Generated in tax software; QuickBooks sees only the annual total, if that
A loan payment in expenses	An amortization schedule splitting principal from interest	The bank feed shows one payment. The split lives with the lender
Bank feeds marked reviewed	Accounts reconciled to statements	A reviewed feed only proves the feed agrees with itself
Owner transfers in a catch-all	Draws posted to equity	Bank rules code by payee, and equity movements rarely look distinctive
Contractor payments	A W-9 on file for each	Payment data is in the file. Tax IDs are not

The pattern in the right-hand column is worth noticing. QuickBooks records what happened. A return also needs a set of positions: how an asset is being written off, how a loan divides, what an owner took out. Those are decisions made outside the accounting file.

The three ways a file arrives incomplete

Transactions that never got in. They are on the statement and not in the register. Usually a feed that dropped and was reconnected, or a card added in March that nobody linked. You find these by reconciling to statements. You do not find them by looking at the bank feed, because the feed does not know about the transactions it never received.

Transactions in, coded wrong in a way that matters. A restaurant meal in Office Supplies is a rounding error. These are not:

• A loan payment expensed whole. Overstates expenses by the principal portion, every month.
• Owner draws in expenses. Understates profit, overstates deductions, and misstates equity.
• Equipment expensed instead of capitalized. Changes the return and leaves the balance sheet wrong until someone goes back and fixes the prior year.
• A transfer between your own accounts booked as income. Inflates revenue, and the business pays tax on money it moved from one pocket to another.

Two of those four persist into future years even after you correct the current one.

Whole periods absent. Entire quarters never entered. Less common than the internet suggests, more common than anyone admits, and the one case where the answer is catch-up work rather than tidying.

What does a clean handoff pack contain?

Stop sending a login. Send a package. Seven items, assembled the same way each year:

1. Reconciled accounts. Every bank and card, reconciled through the year end, with the December statement attached to each. QuickBooks stores these under Reports, Reconciliation Reports; export them instead of making your preparer hunt.
2. Trial balance as at year end, exported.
3. Fixed asset detail. What was bought, when, what it cost, and whether it was financed or paid outright. Financing changes the entry and it is the detail most often left out.
4. Loan schedules for every note, showing the principal and interest split for the year. Request these from the lender in December. They take a week to arrive and everyone asks in April.
5. Equity movements. Draws, distributions and contributions, listed separately from operations.
6. Contractor list with W-9 status marked against each name, checked before the 1099 deadline, not during it.
7. An open-items note. The things you could not resolve, written down plainly with amounts and dates.

The seventh item is the one nearly every handoff omits and the one that saves the most billable time. A flagged unknown costs your preparer a minute. The same unknown, unflagged, costs an hour of investigation and an email to you asking about a transaction from eight months ago that you will not remember.

Why this is worth doing in October

Not because it is cheaper, though it is, but because of when the work happens.

A file handed over in January gets fixed during the four weeks of the year when your accountant has the least time and the highest hourly rate. The same file prepared in October gets fixed when there is room to think about it. The work is the same. The conditions are not, and neither is the bill.

There is a second reason if you are a bookkeeper instead of the business owner. Preparers refer work to bookkeepers whose files arrive ready. Not out of goodwill, but because a clean file makes their January easier and they remember. A handoff pack instead of a login is the most direct thing you can do to earn that.

Having it assembled for you

The handoff pack is a defined one-time engagement, priced per client file:

$299 per client, one-time

If the file needs work before a pack means anything, whether that’s months that are wrong or months missing, that is cleanup or catch-up first. The free 48-hour file review says which applies, and how many months, in writing.

If it’s your own business, this is how it works for a small business, with the fees published in full.

If you prepare returns, see write-up and year-end handoff for CPA firms: the same pack, delivered under your firm’s name, before the file reaches your desk.