Reconcile every bank account and credit card first. This is the foundation. Go month by month and make sure the ending balance in your accounting software matches the ending balance on your bank statement. If those numbers don’t agree, nothing else in your books can be trusted. Reconciliation also surfaces duplicate entries, missing transactions, and bank errors you never caught.

Once your accounts are reconciled, deal with uncategorized transactions. Open your chart of accounts and look for anything sitting in “Uncategorized Expense” or “Ask My Accountant.” Every one of those needs a proper category. Office supplies, contractor payments, software subscriptions, meals. Your accountant needs these categorized correctly to place them on the right lines of your tax return. Guessing or lumping everything into miscellaneous costs you money in missed deductions.

Gather missing documentation. Go through your expenses and make sure you have receipts or records for anything that could be questioned. You don’t need a receipt for every $5 charge, but large purchases, travel expenses, and meals with clients should all have backup. If you’ve been tossing receipts all year, do your best to pull digital copies from email confirmations or vendor portals.

Review your contractor payments. If you paid any individual or unincorporated business $600 or more during the year, you likely need to file a 1099. Pull a report of all payments to vendors and contractors and verify you have W-9s on file for each one. 1099s are due to recipients by January 31, so this can’t wait until March.

Check your payroll records if you have employees. Make sure all pay runs were recorded, payroll taxes were deposited on time, and W-2 information is accurate. Payroll mistakes are expensive to fix after the fact and can trigger penalties.

Pull your Profit and Loss statement and Balance Sheet and actually read them. Does revenue look right compared to what you invoiced or deposited? Do expenses seem reasonable? Are there any large round numbers that might be estimates instead of actual figures? Look for anything that seems off. A $10,000 expense in a category that usually runs $500 a month is worth investigating before your accountant finds it.

If your books are months behind, be honest about how much time you realistically have. Cleaning up a full year of neglected bookkeeping in January while also running your business is stressful and prone to errors. Catch-up bookkeeping is one of the most common things business owners need help with heading into tax season, and getting professional help now is better than filing an extension because nothing was ready.

The best way to avoid this scramble next year is to keep your books current throughout the year. Even basic monthly small business bookkeeping means that when January rolls around, you’re reviewing clean financials instead of rebuilding them from scratch. Tax season doesn’t have to feel like an emergency if the work is already done.