If you are a Houston small business and your books are not in great shape, October is the month to find that out, not December. Waiting until the last week of the year means you close out under pressure, and your CPA either works from bad numbers or bills you extra to sort them out first.
We already have two full walkthroughs on this site for the actual mechanics: a 25-step QuickBooks cleanup checklist and a general year-end bookkeeping checklist. If you know your books need work and you just want the step-by-step, start there.
This post is the five minutes that come before either of those: a quick way to tell how bad it actually is, and whether working through a checklist yourself is still the right move.
The 60-Second Triage
Open your QuickBooks file and check three things:
- Is your most recent bank reconciliation dated this month? If not, how many months back does it go?
- Does “Uncategorized Expense” or “Ask My Accountant” have more than a handful of transactions in it?
- Do you recognize every account in your chart of accounts, or are there a few you are not sure why they exist?
Your answers roughly sort into three situations.
You are current, or close to it
Reconciliations are recent, uncategorized transactions are rare, and the chart of accounts looks familiar. Go work through the full checklist yourself — an afternoon, maybe two, and you will close out the year in good shape.
You are a few months behind
This is the most common spot to be in going into Q4. It is still very doable yourself, but budget real hours for it, not an afternoon. The year-end checklist walks through it in order — reconciliation first, then everything downstream of it, since nothing else on a books checklist means much until reconciliation is current.
You genuinely do not know how far behind you are
This is the situation a checklist does not fix, because a checklist assumes you can tell when an item is done correctly. If reconciliations have not happened in six months or more, or the chart of accounts has grown accounts nobody remembers creating, working through a DIY list can spend real time without actually resolving anything — you can check every box and still not know if the underlying numbers are right.
That is not a knock on doing your own books. It is just a different problem than a checklist solves. Two ways to get an honest read without committing to anything:
- The free bookkeeping health check — a short assessment that tells you where things actually stand.
- The cleanup cost calculator — once you have a rough sense of how far behind you are, this gives you an hours estimate for what professional cleanup would take. Cleanup work is billed hourly, scoped and agreed on a free call before anything starts — no surprise invoices.
One Thing Worth Flagging Regardless of Which Group You’re In
1099 vendor tracking is the item that causes the most scrambling in January, because by then it is genuinely too late to fix cleanly. Whichever path you take, confirm now — while the relationship with the vendor is current — that every contractor you paid $600 or more this year has a W-9 on file. Note also that payments made by credit card or a third-party platform generally do not count toward a 1099-NEC, since the platform handles that reporting instead; only checks and ACH payments do. Worth a second look with your CPA if you are unsure how a specific vendor should be tracked.
Either Way
Whether you spend the next month working a checklist yourself or decide it makes more sense to bring someone in, the goal is the same: close out the year on numbers you actually trust, so tax season is a formality instead of a fire drill.
Not sure which situation you’re in? Book a free consultation and we will give you an honest read on where your books stand.