The Canadian year-end checklist
Year-end is twelve month-ends plus five special jobs. If the months were closed properly, this is days, not weeks.
1. Close the final month normally
Everything in the month-end checklist, for the last month of the fiscal year.
2. Count the inventory
A physical count near year-end, with differences posted as reasoned adjustments. The balance-sheet inventory number must be a counted number.
3. Record the year's CCA
Depreciation for each asset class, half-year rule on additions. In SeroBooks this is the Record-this-year action in Fixed Assets.
4. Review the GIFI mapping
Every account carries a GIFI code, including anything added this year. Your accountant's T2 software will thank you.
5. Sweep the odd balances
Undeposited funds should be near zero; suspense accounts should BE zero; owner accounts reconciled to reality.
6. Give your accountant access
An accountant link, with the Accountant role — they review in the live books instead of a shoebox of exports.
7. Close the year and lock it
Run the year-end close: retained earnings roll, then the period locks — enforced at the ledger, so the filed year can never quietly change.
The mistake: treating year-end as an event
Year-end is not a project you do in March; it is the accumulated quality of twelve months of bookkeeping, discovered all at once. Businesses that dread it are usually discovering, not closing — finding the unentered purchases, the stock that was never counted, the reconciliations that were skipped in July.
The work that makes year-end short happens between January and December.
What your accountant actually needs
A balanced trial balance, a balance sheet that balances, a profit figure that agrees between the two statements, journals that each balance individually, a reconciled bank position, a defensible stock count, and the documents behind anything unusual. Everything else is detail they can derive.
Providing those in a form they can drill into — rather than as a PDF pack — is what turns a review into a conversation.
What SeroBooks does with this
The Year-End screen runs the four integrity checks before hand-over and shows each green or names its problem, then freezes the period at the ledger so nothing can post into it afterwards. Fixed assets carry book depreciation and a CCA schedule with the half-year rule; GIFI codes map on the chart for the T2.
Because the books posted themselves all year, the checklist passes because the system kept it passable — not because someone spent a week making it pass.
See it in your own numbers.
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