What Your Accountant Needs Each Month, and How to Send It Once

The reason handing material to an accountant takes time is not the volume but the scatter: some in a system, some in email, some in a folder, and some in somebody's pocket. This checklist is what is actually needed each month, and the way to hand it over in one action instead of three rounds of follow-up.

This is an operational description, not advice. Exactly what your business needs is settled with your accountant or tax adviser, and it varies with the form of the business and the nature of its activity.

The monthly checklist

The fifth row creates the most unnecessary work: a card used for both personal and business spending forces somebody to go line by line and mark. Separating cards is the highest-return change you can make in a single day.

Why access beats files

When an accountant has access to the system, three things disappear: the "I am missing" round trip, the delay until somebody is free to send, and the worry that a file never arrived. Israeli systems support this explicitly - Morning, for example, presents permissions for the accountant to act, and SUMIT presents dedicated tools for practitioners.

What to define when granting access:

• View and report permissions, not necessarily permission to change.
• What they see - income, expenses, or the bank too.
• Who else has access, so there are not three shared users.
• What happens when you change accountants - a permission that gets closed.

That last item is almost always forgotten, and worth handling the same day.

What actually delays the handover?

• Expenses never captured - the number one cause, solved by a continuous capture flow, as described in capturing supplier receipts.
• Bank statements never downloaded - especially with several accounts.
• Reconciliation never done, leaving gaps with no explanation - see reconciling card settlements without an ERP.
• Manual documents issued outside the system that nobody remembers.
• Employee expenses arriving after the month has closed.

How to turn this into a routine of minutes

1. Capture continuously rather than collecting.
2. Give access rather than sending.
3. Fix a day each month to check what is missing.
4. Ask your accountant once exactly what they need, and write it down.
5. Review quarterly whether anything changed.

Step four is the surprising one: most businesses never asked, and send what they assume is required. A ten-minute conversation sometimes halves the list.

What not to do

• Do not classify expenses yourself - it is professional judgement that gets reviewed anyway.
• Do not send everything in a pile at quarter end. That is what creates the calls.
• Do not send screenshots instead of files or access.
• Do not wait for month end if the material already exists.

What to ask your accountant once

One conversation at the start of the year saves enquiries throughout it. Five questions:

1. What exactly do you need from me monthly, and what only quarterly.
2. Which format suits you - access, files, or something else.
3. What do I do myself and what do you do - particularly on bank reconciliation.
4. What is usually missing from clients like me.
5. Is there anything I send that you do not actually need.

Question five is the most surprising of them, and the answer often shortens the list.

The three changes that matter most

If you only do three things, make them these:

• Separate the business card from the personal one. One day's work, and it erases the single largest piece of manual reconciliation.
• Give your accountant access instead of sending files. It removes the entire round trip.
• Capture receipts on the day they arrive. It erases the end-of-month pile and what goes missing along the way.

None of the three needs a new system or a budget, and together they shorten the monthly work more than any tool you could buy.

What an organised month looks like

In a business that built this, the month looks like this: receipts are captured on the day they arrive; invoices are created automatically from clearing; bank statements download automatically or weekly; and in the middle of the following month somebody spends five minutes on a short list of what is missing. The accountant sends no requests, because they can see everything themselves.

In a business that never built it, the same month looks different: three rounds of follow-up, a pile of receipts some of which are unreadable, and a bank statement somebody forgot to download. The same quantity of work, spread over three weeks instead of five minutes.

What late material costs

It is not only inconvenience. Material arriving late creates three costs: higher fees, because the work concentrates; business decisions made without data, because the report is late; and problems found too late to fix - a customer who never paid and nobody noticed because the debtors report was not current. The third is the most expensive, and also the one nobody attributes to the delay.

Sources

• Morning - accountant permissions and expense management
• SUMIT - practitioner tools and document intake
• Israel Tax Authority - Israeli invoices