With the right workflow and tools, audit preparation can happen digitally and nearly automatically (more on that later). Fortunately, digital images are acceptable as source documents in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. When you collect receipts, invoices, and bills as a standard part of your bookkeeping workflow, you’ll be better preparing your clients for an audit because all documents will be readily available. With no source documents to match transactions in reconciled statements, there may not be sufficient documentation to satisfy auditors, which can cause serious problems for your clients.
In fact, they may actually expect your help.
While there is certainly nothing wrong with being audited, trying to run a business while scrambling to gather requested documentation can leave clients playing catch-up for weeks.ĭuring a routine audit, your clients will look to you for help. Government audits are part of the reality of being a business owner. For starters, it can help your clients to prepare for an audit and increase accuracy and efficiency in your bank reconciliation workflow. While both of these reasons may be true, bookkeepers who have a process in place for collecting and managing source documents can forge more powerful business partnerships with their clients. Second, managing source documents – especially keeping track of paper – can be a huge pain. First, many accounting and bookkeeping professionals believe that it is the small business’s own responsibility to keep track of their documents. This reluctance to collect source documents usually occurs for a couple of reasons. However, as cloud-based general ledger softwares such as Xero and QuickBooks Online have become more popular, many accountants and bookkeepers have shied away from collecting client source documents. Source documents exist to provide conclusive evidence of a transaction, otherwise known as an “audit trail”. Let’s explore the importance of source documents, and how you can introduce a more efficient system to collect and manage source documents at your practice. Implementing a streamlined system for collecting and managing your clients’ source documents will not only improve the accuracy, speed, and quality of your work – it will also enable you to be a better business partner to your small business clients. However, many advisors struggle to collect and manage their clients’ source documents, or don’t collect and manage them at all. Source documents are an integral part of the accounting and bookkeeping process. Any time a business spends or receives money, a source document is created. In the accounting industry, source documents include receipts, bills, invoices, statements, checks – i.e., anything that documents a transaction.
0 kommentar(er)
