Prepare Documents for Your Accountant: Year-End Checklist

At a glance

The documents actually required depend on the nature and size of the business; your accountant or auditor may ask for more.

Bank: this is the foundation

Every account, the whole year, every month.

“Every” matters — including:

• The account you barely use (even with three transactions all year)
• Foreign currency accounts
• Credit card and charge card statements
• Payment platform accounts (collection platforms, e-wallets)

Miss one account and the whole set of accounts will not reconcile — and finding out where usually takes far longer than supplying the statements would have.

A practical reminder: download once a year; do not rely on the bank’s online records persisting. See how long records have to be kept.

Income: watch the “no invoice issued” batch

Most people hand over invoices and receipts fine. What actually gets missed is:

Money received with no invoice yet — customer prepayments, deposits. These land in the bank with no matching invoice, so the accountant has to ask.

Cash income — most common in retail and food. Without a daily record there is no way to verify it.

Platform receipts — third-party platforms usually deduct their fee before paying you. The income is the gross figure before the fee, and the fee is a separate expense. Plenty of people record only the net, which under-reports both income and expenditure.

Expenditure: the personal card is the biggest blind spot

Rent, wages and utilities are generally remembered. What gets missed is usually:

• Company items bought on a personal credit card
• Small items bought in cash
• Subscriptions (software, cloud, ad platforms) — charged automatically, with nobody recording them
• Overseas payments — with no local invoice

All of these are deductible expenses; not recording them is simply giving them away. On how to handle it, see separating company and personal money.

Stock: the item most people skip entirely

If you carry stock, count it on the year end date or as close to it as possible.

What to hand over: item, quantity, unit cost.

This one cannot be reconstructed afterwards — once the year end has passed, you will not know how much was actually there on the day. And the stock figure feeds straight into profit: count too high and profit is overstated and tax overpaid; count too low and profit is understated and later questioned.

If you carry stock and have never counted it, start this year. An imperfect first count is fine; having a record beats not having one.

Current accounts: hand over the explanation, not just the figure

Director’s current account, shareholder’s current account, related-company balances — the accountant will always ask about these.

What is needed is not only the balance but the nature of each significant entry: an expense paid on the company’s behalf? A drawing? Salary? A repayment?

Without an explanation the accountant has no choice but to treat everything as unconfirmed, and the audit side will then come back for it. Two rounds of that and the time all goes here.

The practical answer: write a line when it happens. “3/5 director paid rent $18,000” — one line is enough, and beats relying on memory a year later.

Company documents: not just accounting material

Many people assume these are unrelated to the accounts. They are very much related:

• Last year’s audit report — this year’s opening balances come from it
• Notices of assessment — confirming last year’s tax and the provisional tax
• Any letter from the IRD — enquiry letters, penalty notices; the accountant needs to know about all of them
• Bank accounts newly opened or closed
• Company changes during the year — a name change, a change of director, share transfers

Why does handing over a complete set save money?

Because an accountant’s work splits into two kinds: processing and chasing.

Complete material → pure processing, with predictable time.

Scattered material → cross-referencing, estimating, chasing by email one item at a time. That part usually takes several times as long as the processing, and it shows up directly in the fee and the schedule.

So half a day spent organising typically saves more than half a day of fees — plus several weeks of back and forth.

One approach that makes this permanently painless

The root of year-end pain is having to reconstruct a whole year from memory in one go.

The answer is not to work faster at year end; it is not to wait for year end:

• Each month, put that month’s receipts into a folder
• Each month, download the bank statements
• For any large or unusual transaction, write a line of explanation the same day
• Each month, reconcile against the bank

Four things, about fifteen minutes a month between them. Do them and the year end is simply handing over what is already sorted.

That is also the most practical benefit of doing the books monthly — not prettier reports, but a year end that is no longer a firefight.

Want to hand this over entirely and stop tracking it each month? Talk to us, or get started.

This is general information and does not constitute accounting advice. The documents actually required depend on the nature and size of the business, and on what your accountant or auditor asks for.