Make Next Year’s Year-End Review the EASIEST You’ve Ever Had
Feb 17, 2025
Hey, bookkeepers. How are you doing at the close of your year-end rush?
At least, I hope it’s the end of the year-end rush for you!
Over here, we’ve finished up filing 1099s. Most of our clients reports are fully reconciled and ready to send to their tax preparers, so we’re feeling much better!
There is just something so cathartic about sending out a completely scrubbed and reconciled set of books for the year…which is how I know that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I love checking off these tasks. It always feels so good.
However, things can always improve. And as I finish up my final year-end check, I'm being intentional about asking my clients for certain information we can get for 2025 that we didn’t have for 2024; information I believe we can use to make sure 2025 runs even smoother than 2024!
If Your Year-End Felt Chaotic…
Even when you have just a couple of clients, the end of the year can be really stressful, if manageable. But as you grow—and especially after a year of rapid or large-scale growth—the year-end process can feel really daunting.
Not to mention you're also busy onboarding new clients, delivering for your current clients, possibly training a team, and definitely still living your life. It’s easy to get lost in the process and feel tapped out on resources, and that can lead you to lowkey dread the end of the year.
If you’re sitting here going, “Wait, what do you mean year-end?” then stop what you’re doing and go get your hands on my Year-End Workshop.
This workshop goes over my own year-end best practices and resources, and they will make implementing your own year-end review as easy as possible.
Now, if you already know what you need to do, but it still feels chaotic or you feel like you're still not done all the way in February, maybe you still need the workshop…but if you already have the workshop and it's still chaotic, here’s what I want you to do.
When you come up for air, I want you to reflect on how you could have improved your process, and what you need to tell your clients coming into 2025 to make sure that 2026 is much smoother, both for you and for them.
What To Tell Your Clients to Make Year-End Easy
I’ll get this out of the way right now: some clients are just going to do stuff wrong because it's in their nature. But that’s a very small percentage of your clients.
A slightly larger percentage of your clients are going to be the Type A, bookkeeper’s-pet type, and they’ll have all of their stuff together and ready for you.
However, the largest percentage of your clients are not necessarily going to know what you need…but they will get it right if you prepare them and tell them exactly what you need them to have ready for you at the end of the year.
One of the things we can do to benefit our year-end process is suggest changes our clients can make to their systems to make everything run smoother.
We can tell them what we need access to, how they need to pay for things so we can see those transactions, what they need to connect, etcetera.
Anything they can do to get us the information we need in a streamlined way, that will make our year-end a thousand times easier, and ensure things are less stressful for them as well.
Why Do Year-End?
The year-end review is the way you can scale comfortably. It’s the way you can reassure yourself that you can handle more clients in the upcoming year.
This year, we're doing our year-end reviews for 42 clients. My goal was to get to 40, and next year, I want it to be at least 50, and at some point I’d love to grow to 100 clients.
This kind of growth is why I push about hiring a team early—these kind of numbers can’t be tackled on your own. But after hiring a big team member this past year, I revamped so many processes and structures relating to how we get information from our clients and the way that I train my staff, and that provided the kind of foundation we needed to take on that many clients.
So if you haven’t done year-end before, these are the reasons I recommend it. It’s the best way to spot the weaknesses in your processes, highlight the places you need to shore up before attempting to scale, and give you the peace of mind that your current clients’ books are taken care of.
EPISODE RESOURCES:
LAST CALL ON BABS! Need to boost your bookkeeping basics—and want to get in on the goodness before the price goes up? Join BABs now: https://www.katieferro.com/become
Make next year’s year-end review the easiest it’s ever been. Get my year-end workshop and arm yourself with all the resources you need: https://www.katieferro.com/offers/6zgz8fUD/checkout
To get your technical questions answered and receive access to the searchable on-demand vault of replays, get your Tech Talks subscription today: www.katieferro.com/tech-talks
Want to test out the tools that make it easy to automate my business? Start your Kajabi trial today: www.katieferro.com/kajabi
Want a peek behind the curtain into LIBBY, my program all about what it really takes to have a simple and scalable (and successful) bookkeeping business? Get access to my free, on-demand four-part series, 6 Secrets to a Simple, Scalable Bookkeeping Business: www.katieferro.com/6-secrets
Learn how to take your bookkeeping skills and turn them into a business that allows you to replace (or surpass) your corporate salary, be present for your life, and profoundly impact your clients without selling your life in the process by joining Life by the Books (LIBBY).
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