Monthly Bookkeeping Checklist: What Your Bookkeeper Should Be Doing Every Month
Not sure what "monthly bookkeeping" actually includes? Here's the exact checklist a good bookkeeper should be working through every month - so you know what to expect.
7/25/20263 min read
"Monthly bookkeeping" sounds simple, but it's easy to assume it just means someone logs your expenses once a month and calls it done. In reality, proper monthly bookkeeping is a repeatable process with several distinct steps - and if any of them get skipped, your numbers quietly become less reliable over time.
Here's exactly what should be happening every month, whether you're doing it yourself or evaluating whether your current bookkeeper is doing it right.
1. Transaction categorization
Every transaction - every expense, every payment, every transfer - needs to be reviewed and assigned to the correct category in your chart of accounts. This sounds basic, but it's the foundation everything else is built on. A transaction filed under the wrong category can quietly distort your reports for months before anyone notices.
2. Bank and credit card reconciliation
This is the step that catches errors before they become expensive ones. Reconciliation means matching every recorded transaction against your actual bank and credit card statements, line by line, until the two agree exactly. If they don't match, something was either missed, duplicated, or entered incorrectly - and reconciliation is what surfaces that.
3. Accounts receivable review
If you invoice clients, someone should be checking every month which invoices are still unpaid, how overdue they are, and whether any follow-up is needed. Left unchecked, overdue invoices are easy to lose track of - and they directly affect your cash flow.
4. Accounts payable review
The same applies in reverse - a monthly check of what your business owes, to whom, and when it's due. This prevents late payments, missed vendor terms, and the kind of surprise bills that throw off a month's budget.
5. Payroll reconciliation (if applicable)
If you have employees, payroll transactions need to be reconciled against your payroll provider's records each month - confirming wages, tax withholdings, and deductions all match what was actually reported and paid.
6. Reviewing for miscategorized or duplicate transactions
Even with careful categorization, mistakes happen - a transaction entered twice, an expense filed under the wrong account, a personal expense accidentally mixed into business records. A proper monthly process includes actively reviewing for these, not just assuming everything was correct the first time.
7. Generating financial statements
By month's end, you should receive a Profit & Loss statement and a Balance Sheet reflecting the finalized numbers - not a rough draft, but figures that have already been through reconciliation and review.
8. A second reviewer checking the work
This step gets skipped more often than any other on this list, mostly because it takes real discipline to build into a process. Before your books are considered "done" for the month, a second person - not the one who did the original work - should independently verify it. This is the single most effective way to catch errors before they reach you, rather than after.
9. A plain-language summary of what changed
Numbers without context aren't very useful. A good monthly bookkeeping process ends with a short explanation: what changed since last month, why, and what it means for your business - not just a spreadsheet of figures you're left to interpret alone.
Quick reference: the full monthly checklist
✅ All transactions categorized correctly
✅ Bank and credit card accounts reconciled
✅ Accounts receivable reviewed for overdue invoices
✅ Accounts payable reviewed for upcoming bills
✅ Payroll reconciled (if applicable)
✅ Transactions checked for duplicates or miscategorization
✅ P&L and Balance Sheet generated
✅ Work independently reviewed by a second person
✅ Plain-language summary provided
If your bookkeeping is missing steps
If you've been handling this yourself, this checklist is a useful gut-check for what might be slipping through the cracks. And if you're working with a bookkeeper or firm already, it's worth asking directly which of these steps are actually part of your monthly process - particularly reconciliation and the second-review step, since those are the two most commonly skipped when a bookkeeper is stretched thin across too many clients.
The bottom line
Monthly bookkeeping isn't just "log the expenses." Done properly, it's a repeatable process of categorization, reconciliation, review, and reporting - each step catching what the last one might have missed.
Wondering if your books are getting the full process? Every set of books at Desmic Solutions goes through this exact checklist, with a mandatory second reviewer before anything reaches you. Schedule a free consultation to see what complete monthly bookkeeping actually looks like.