What your bookkeeper or accountant needs from your accounting software

We make AcboBooks, one of the products discussed here.

Your accountant is the person who will spend the most time with your books after you. A program that makes their job slow costs you in fees every year. Before you choose, check these five things, and ideally ask your accountant to look at the trial version with you.

The reports they will ask for

• Trial balance as of any date. This is where every review starts: every account and its balance, debits equal to credits.
• General ledger with every transaction behind every balance, for any date range.
• Balance sheet and profit and loss, ideally comparative (this year against last).
• Accounts receivable and payable agings as of the period end, so they can check what is really owed.
• Bank reconciliation reports for every account, every month (see how to reconcile).
• Cash and accrual views of the same books, since tax and management reporting often use different bases (see cash vs accrual).
• Payroll summaries and year-end forms: W-2 and 1099 in the US, T4 and T4A in Canada.

The test is simple: can you produce each of these as of a date in the past, and does the trial balance still balance? A program that is not true double-entry underneath will struggle here.

Adjusting entries

At year-end your accountant will usually post adjusting journal entries: depreciation, accruals, prepaid expenses, reclassifications. They need:

• a general journal entry screen that accepts any accounts,
• a way to mark entries as adjusting so they can be listed separately,
• an adjusted trial balance showing balances before and after the adjustments,
• a way to get the entries into your file without retyping, if they worked on a copy.

In AcboBooks the accountant can flag a journal entry as adjusting, run the Adjusting Entries and Adjusted Trial Balance reports, and, if they worked on a backup copy, export their changes for you to import. Entries already in your file are matched by date, memo and amount, so nothing posts twice.

A closing date and an audit trail

Once a period is reviewed and the tax return is filed, the numbers must not move. Two controls protect that:

• A closing date with a password. Changes dated on or before the closing date are blocked unless someone enters the password. Without this, a well-meaning edit to last year's invoice silently changes a filed return.
• An audit trail recording who added, changed or deleted what, and when. When a balance moves unexpectedly, this is how your accountant finds out why in minutes instead of hours.

Ask to see both. In AcboBooks the closing date and password are set by an administrator, and changes to closed periods land in the audit log with the user who made them. A good month-end routine ends with setting the closing date.

Exports that work

Accountants keep working papers in their own tools, usually Excel. Check that reports export to:

• Excel, as real numbers rather than text, so they can be summed and tied out,
• CSV, for importing into tax and audit software,
• PDF, for the file and for the client.

AcboBooks exports reports to all three. The general ledger and trial balance are the two your accountant will want exported every year.

A way in

Your accountant needs to see the books without you sitting beside them. The options differ by program:

In AcboBooks you can do all three. An administrator can create an accountant invite code, read-only or able to edit, with an optional expiry date and a revoke button; the accountant connects to the computer hosting the company file, on the office network or over a VPN. Or you send a backup and use the accountant exchange described above. Your accountant does not need to buy a licence or a seat. Details for firms are on the accountants page.

Whatever program you choose, ask your accountant which programs they already work in, and whether they can run the reports above in yours. A file they can review on day one saves you fees.