Spring has sprung, and there’s no time like the present for reviewing and updating your bookkeeping checklists! This time of year is perfect for sorting through old documents, seeing what works, and deciding which of your checklists just don’t cut it anymore.
Bookkeeping checklists are a fantastic tool for ensuring you don’t miss any important steps in your day-to-day procedures. When reviewed and updated regularly, these checklists can help you improve efficiency, reduce errors, and keep your clients satisfied through successful onboarding and client communication. But that’s the thing — they have to be reviewed and updated, or else these checklists will quickly become obsolete as your business grows and changes.
Review Your Checklists
Change is natural, and your bookkeeping checklists were never meant to be permanent. No, a good bookkeeping checklist is meant to evolve with your business. But before you can make any changes, you’ll need to do a complete audit of your existing bookkeeping checklists. Take stock of what checklists you currently have and go through them, one by one, to look for any glaring holes. This is also a good time to add checklists if you realize there are any procedures you’ve yet to record.
Talk to Your Team
When revising your checklists, the best place to start is with your bookkeeping team. You can either stage a meeting or send out a survey to your team members requesting feedback. Ask them if anything about their procedures has changed in the last year. Oftentimes, we make tweaks to our processes long before they are updated on paper — or maybe when the checklists were originally made, a particular step was not accounted for.
Update Your Checklists
Hopefully, you already have a procedure in place for updating your procedural checklists. As you go to make changes, consider who needs to be notified of these changes and whether or not additional training will be required as you switch to the new, modified procedure. Make sure the checklist is updated everywhere that it exists. The last thing you want is for your team members to be working off of different versions of the file. It’s also vital that you continue to improve your checklists as you go. It may sound redundant, but it isn’t strange to have a checklist… for updating checklists!
It’s a good idea to regularly review and update your bookkeeping checklists to ensure compliance across your firm. You want every client that passes through your doors to receive the same excellent service. Checklists help build that consistency and standardize your practice.
Maybe you aren’t reviewing your checklists this year but just starting to create them. If that’s the case, don’t forget to check out some of our other blogs to help you get started!
