As someone who manages clients, and a team of bookkeepers and accountants, one challenge has always been creating an easy-to-follow process for closing our clients’ monthly books.

First and foremost, you need to make sure that your process ensures that the clients’ books are accurately closed on time. From there, it’s all about developing a system that is easy to replicate across all your bookkeepers and clients, so that you can easily scale up as new clients are brought on and bookkeepers are onboarded.

What I love about the new month-end review feature available in QuickBooks® Online Accountant is that it makes things smoother for the bookkeeper and the manager. First, month-end review guides you through a three-step flow that surfaces common issues and surfaces anomalies that are sometimes easy to miss. Next, progress tracking keeps you on task and on time so you never miss a step. From your client list in Quickbooks Online Accountant, the new bookkeeping tab lets you see the status of all your clients in one place. As a manager, you can go one step further and filter by team member to drill down on the progress of each individual bookkeeper. This provides me the confidence that our work is being done on time, without having to bother my team for status updates and letting us focus on resolving issues for our clients.

I’ve put together two videos that show how I use month-end review, both as a bookkeeper and as a manager. I hope it gives you ideas for how to implement month-end review in your firm’s monthly close process!

Managing your clients’ books

Managing your teams’ books

From my conversations with the QuickBooks team, month-end review is an ever-evolving tool. Be on the lookout for more ways to automate and track your clients’ monthly closing.