April is not the month to discover that your records for last season are a truck full of receipts and a bank app. The year-end package is one download that gives your accountant the whole year in a form they can actually work with.
1 Set the range and download it
Go to Reports, set your date range, and under Year-end package click Download year-end package (ZIP).
It is not locked to a calendar year. Set whatever range you need, and the file is named for the range you picked so you can keep several without confusing them.
2 What is in the zip
Six CSVs, each one a plain spreadsheet your accountant can open:
- summary.csv is the one-page overview: total invoiced, sales tax invoiced, payments received, gross received, tips, refunds dated in the range, and net received.
- invoices.csv is every invoice in the range with its customer, dates, status and amounts.
- payments.csv is every payment by the date it was paid.
- refunds.csv is refunds by their own date.
- sales_tax_invoiced_by_month.csv breaks the sales tax out month by month.
- worker_earnings.csv is revenue on the jobs each worker worked.
3 The two things to tell your accountant
These are stated in the header of every file, and they are worth repeating because they are the source of most accounting confusion:
Invoices are counted by issue date. Payments are counted by payment date. That is accrual for the invoices and cash for the payments, on purpose, because the two questions are different questions. An invoice raised on 28 December and paid on 4 January belongs to December in one file and January in the other, and that is correct in both.
Sales tax is reported as invoiced, not as collected. So sales_tax_invoiced_by_month.csv is what you billed, which may not be what has landed yet.
If your accountant works on one basis and not the other, tell them which file to use rather than trying to reconcile the two yourself.
4 Two figures that are not what they look like
Gross received includes tips, and net received does not. summary.csv gives you both plus the tips figure on its own line, so you can see the bridge. A tip is not your service revenue, and adding it in overstates what the business earned.
worker_earnings.csv is not payroll. It is the invoice revenue on the jobs that worker worked, which is a useful number for judging whether a crew pays for itself. It is not what you paid them, and the file says so in its own note. For hours worked, use the CSV export from Timesheets.
Drafts and voided invoices are excluded from all of it, because neither is part of your books.
5 Do it in November
Download the package in late autumn rather than in March. Two reasons, and the second is the real one:
Your accountant is not busy in November, and you are not either.
And it gives you a chance to find the problems while you can still fix them: a customer with a year of unpaid invoices, a service you have been under-pricing since spring, sales tax that does not look like what you expected. Those are answerable in November. In April they are just numbers on a return.
Pair it with a reconcile and a print for everyone who owes run, and the off-season admin is basically done in an afternoon.