What a bookkeeper needs from you each month

The five items

Statements for every account, including the card you only use occasionally. A bank feed covers this in most accounting software, but the feed needs checking against the statement — feeds drop transactions.

Sales invoices, so revenue is recorded when it is earned rather than when the money lands.

Purchase receipts, not just the card line. The line tells you an amount was spent; the receipt tells you what it was for and how much of it was HST you can claim back.

Payroll details — who was paid, how much, and any changes to hours or rates.

A note of anything unusual: an owner draw, a loan, an asset bought, a customer who paid cash, a refund. These are the transactions that cannot be classified from a bank line.

Why the receipts matter more than they look

Input tax credits are the HST you paid on business purchases, netted against the HST you collected. They are only claimable if you can support them, and a card statement line is generally not enough support on its own.

A year of missing receipts does not usually mean a rebuilt year. It means input tax credits you were entitled to and did not claim.

Doing it monthly rather than annually

The argument for monthly is not tidiness. It is that GST/HST and payroll remittances are due monthly or quarterly whether or not the books are current — so annual bookkeeping means remitting on estimates for eleven months and correcting in the twelfth.

It also means questions get asked while you still remember the answer. Nobody recalls in March what a payment in the previous May was for.