Year-end is not a March problem. The owners who find year-end painless are the ones who treat November and December as the work, and who hand their accountant a clean, closed set of books by mid-January. Everyone else pays — in CPA billable hours, in late-filing penalties, in the quiet cost of decisions made on stale numbers.
This is the checklist we walk through with every client in the last eight weeks of the fiscal year. It is written for Vancouver owner-operators with a BC corporation, one to ten staff, and a calendar-year or December 31 year-end, though most of it applies whatever your filing date. Work through it in order. If any line gives you pause, that is where to start.
Reconcile every account to the statement
Every bank account, every credit card, every line of credit, every merchant processor. Reconciled to the penny, against the statement, for every month of the fiscal year. Not "reviewed." Reconciled.
This is the foundation. A single unreconciled month will hide duplicated transactions, missed receipts, misclassified transfers, and the occasional fraudulent charge nobody noticed in July. If you are running on QuickBooks Online or Xero, the bank feed is a convenience, not a reconciliation — the monthly statement is still the source of truth.
By mid-December, the reconciliation should be complete through November. The December reconciliation happens in the first full week of January, once the final statements post.
If any of this feels like an unreasonable amount of work, monthly bookkeeping exists to stop year-end from being a year-end event.
Collect the outstanding invoices
Pull an accounts receivable aging as of today. Anything past 60 days is a conversation; anything past 90 is a decision.
Before year-end, make those calls. The goal is not just cashflow — the goal is an AR balance sheet line you believe in. If an invoice is not going to be collected, write it off before year-end so it does not drag into next year's revenue. Your CPA will thank you, and your taxable income will reflect what actually happened.
While you are in the AR ledger, check two things. First, every invoice marked paid actually has a corresponding deposit in the bank. Second, no customer has paid you twice. Both happen more often than owners expect.
Capture every expense
Receipts, mileage, home office if you claim it, subscriptions paid on a personal card, reimbursements owed to you by the corporation. If it was a business expense and it lives in a shoebox, a drawer, or an email inbox, now is when it joins the books.
A few specifics that catch people out:
- Mileage. If you use a personal vehicle for business, you need a log. A dated, per-trip record with kilometres and purpose. Retroactive reconstruction from a calendar is acceptable; "I drove about 8,000 km" is not.
- Home office. If you run any portion of the business from home, calculate the square footage or room percentage and apply it to utilities, internet, insurance, and mortgage interest or rent. Do this once, write it down, and it takes minutes every year after.
- Personal cards used for business. Reimburse them through the corporation with a proper expense report, or book them as shareholder contributions. Don't leave them hanging.
- Subscriptions. Software, memberships, professional dues. These are easy to miss because they auto-charge. Pull twelve months of credit card statements and scan for anything recurring.
The CRA's test for a deductible expense is that it was incurred to earn business income, it is reasonable, and you can document it. The receipt is the documentation.
Review payroll totals and get T4 / T4A ready
Payroll runs through software — Wagepoint, Payworks, Deluxe, what have you — but the year-end reconciliation still needs eyes on it. Before the first week of January:
- Confirm every employee's year-to-date earnings, tax, CPP, and EI match the sum of their pay stubs.
- Confirm every T4A recipient (contractors paid over $500, board directors, beneficiaries) is accounted for.
- Resolve any discrepancies with the payroll provider before the slips are filed.
T4s and T4As are due to employees and to the CRA by the last day of February. The filing window is short; the preparation window is November and December. If there are contractor payments you are unsure about, settle the classification question with your CPA before the slips go out — once they are filed, amendments are a bigger job than getting them right the first time.
If payroll has been a grudge task, this is the piece we can usually fix first. See payroll management.
Bring GST and PST filings current
GST/HST and BC PST filings should be caught up through your most recent period before year-end prep begins. Filing returns out of sequence is always more painful than filing them on schedule, and a late period makes the year-end numbers harder to trust.
A few things to verify while you are in the GST/PST ledger:
- Input tax credits claimed only on legitimate business purchases with GST-registrant vendors.
- PST remitted on taxable goods and services where BC requires it (the list changes; if you are unsure, ask).
- No double-claiming of GST on items that were already expensed gross.
If this is the box you are dreading, GST and PST filing takes it off your desk entirely.
Capital assets — additions, disposals, and CCA setup
Capital asset purchases over the year should be captured on the balance sheet, not expensed. Equipment, vehicles, leasehold improvements, the computer you bought in June. Your CPA will handle the CCA calculation at year-end, but the bookkeeping sets them up for it.
Equally important — disposals. If you sold, traded, or scrapped a capital asset, that is a transaction with tax consequences. The gain or loss needs to be calculated against the asset's undepreciated capital cost, which means your CPA needs both the original purchase record and the disposal record. A disposal recorded only as "sold truck — $12,000" is missing half the story.
Walk through your fixed asset register line by line. Anything listed that you no longer own? Dispose of it. Anything you own that is not listed? Add it.
Inter-company transactions — for HoldCo and OpCo owners
If you run a holding company and an operating company, the inter-company transactions between them need to reconcile to the cent, in both sets of books, by year-end. Management fees charged by HoldCo to OpCo. Dividends declared and paid. Shareholder loans advanced and repaid. Rent, if the real estate sits in HoldCo.
The pattern we see: OpCo's books show $48,000 in management fees paid to HoldCo. HoldCo's books show $50,000 received. Each has been closed by a different bookkeeper, at a different time, without a reconciling entry. This is the kind of thing CPAs find in April that could have been fixed in December for a tenth of the cost.
If inter-company coordination is a recurring headache, a fractional controller is often the right answer — not more bookkeeping hours, but a single person holding both sets of books to the same standard.
What to hand your CPA
When the books are closed, your CPA should get a package, not a dump. At minimum:
- Trial balance as of year-end
- Balance sheet and income statement, comparative to the prior year
- General ledger for the full year
- Bank reconciliations for all months, with final statements
- AR and AP aging detail
- Fixed asset register with additions and disposals noted
- Payroll summary and confirmation that T4/T4A filings are on track
- GST/PST filing history
- A short written note covering anything unusual — a large one-time transaction, a change in ownership, a material accounting policy change
A package like this lets a CPA move straight to the work that needs their judgement — tax planning, year-end adjusting entries, corporate tax return preparation — rather than burning hours sorting through the books first. Many of our clients see their CPA bills drop noticeably the first year we hand over a proper package.
Our year-end preparation service is this package, every year, without the owner lifting a pen.
When to start talking to your bookkeeper
If you have a monthly bookkeeper, the year-end conversation should happen in early November. Not because anything is urgent — because by November, the first ten months are set, the last two are predictable, and the decisions that can still be made — a capital purchase, a bonus payment, a dividend declaration — are decisions you can actually influence.
If you do not have a monthly bookkeeper and you are reading this in February, the honest answer is that year-end will be harder than it needs to be, but it is fixable. A two-to-three week catch-up engagement, a proper close, a clean package to your CPA, and by next November you are in front of it.
Either way: the work is not complicated. It is just work, and it compounds when ignored. The owners whose year-ends are quiet are the ones who refuse to let the books drift in the first place.
For a broader, reference-grade version of this checklist — written for any Canadian owner-operator, not only Vancouver, with a ten-step timeline and the full CPA handover package — see the year-end bookkeeping checklist for Canada.