3 Tips to Successful Onboarding With Your Accountant

When it’s time to bring a new accountant onto your team, follow these three guidelines to foster a smooth onboarding process. 

1. Monthly Cash Flow Reporting Checklist – What, When, Where, and How – This will be the first step to providing you with a checklist of what information you need to report each month. The list should contain the following: 

1. 1. Bank statement 
   2. Credit Card Statement 
   3. Loan Statement 
   4. POS/Sales Report 
   5. Additional Items 

Giving these items to your accountant by the fifth day of the month will enable them to prepare a financial statement. This ensures an accurate and timely statement by the second or third week of the month.

To access a free monthly reporting checklist template, access your first online course with coupon code ROCKNROLL. The online course Operational Cash Flow Systems includes a template Excel reporting checklist you can customize to your business while learning the essentials around creating turn-key cash flow systems to maximize cashflow! 

2. Payroll – To get payroll set up, we’ve provided the key documents they’ll need to share with you. Even if you have files, it’s good practice to have employees update them so they have their most current information on file. Your last payroll report will provide the year-to-date balances needed if you’re switching payroll providers during the year. A year-to-date payroll report will also be needed for the numbers of wages and taxes.  

You can find the required Payroll documents from this accounting firm by visiting this link for a new employee form packet.  Which will consist of: 

• Employee Set Up and Change Form
• W-4 Employee Withholding Allowance Form
• Employment Eligibility Verification I-9 Form                          
• WT-4 – Employee’s Wisconsin Withholding Exemption Certificate/New Hire Reporting
• Employee Direct Deposit Authorization Form

3. Year End taxes – Provide your new accountant with your company’s last three years of tax returns. Doing this will ensure they’re familiar with your tax situation, know all the items you have had in the past, and be able to catch an oversight the prior accountant may have missed. For example, while creating a financial statement for a small business, we came across $110,000 of expenses on a business return. Within the three years prior, they gave us nothing in office supplies, which triggered us to investigate it. Needless to say, that client got a big refund that year.

This summarizes the three important items to get your accounting relationship off to a great start.   

Schedule a complimentary strategy session and get a free complementary tax return review for potential tax-savings strategies you can discuss with your accountant. 

You can also learn more about those potential tax strategies in the Tax Essentials online course. To access your first online course for free, use coupon code ROCKNROLL and click here to access tax essentials.  To register for one of our upcoming events, click here.