What records to send us for your year-end accounts

The single biggest cause of a slow year-end is missing information — not months of missing bookkeeping, just a handful of documents that take five minutes to find but hold up a set of accounts for weeks if they're not there from the start. Here's what to have ready.

The essentials

• Bank statements covering the full year, including any accounts opened or closed during it
• Sales invoices and a record of amounts still owed to you at the year end
• Purchase invoices and receipts, particularly for anything over a few hundred pounds
• Payroll records, including P60s, P11Ds and any pension contributions
• Any HMRC or Companies House letters received during the year

Easy to forget, but important

• Loan or hire purchase agreements for vehicles or equipment bought during the year
• A stocktake figure at the year end, if you hold stock
• Details of any assets bought or sold — even small ones like a laptop or a van
• Personal expenses paid through the business, and business expenses paid personally

If in doubt, send it anyway

It's always quicker for us to set aside something irrelevant than to chase you for it later. If you're not sure whether a document matters, the safest option is to include it — we'll work out what's needed once it's with us.

Sending everything together, rather than in instalments as you remember things, is what actually saves time — it lets us prepare your accounts in one pass rather than starting, stopping and picking the file back up each time something new arrives.