Business Fiscal Year-End Planning Checklist
Prepare for year-end. Understand performance. Plan for what comes next.
Your fiscal year-end is more than an accounting and tax deadline. It is an opportunity to evaluate your company’s financial health, identify improvements, and make better decisions—regardless of when your fiscal year ends. Use this checklist starting 60–90 days before your fiscal year-end.
1. 60–90 Days Before Year-End
Get Financial Records in Order
- ☐ Reconcile bank accounts, credit cards, and loans; review receivables, payables, and unusual balances.
- ☐ Plan a physical inventory count and review valuation, obsolete products, and slow-moving merchandise. See our GMROI Calculator.
- ☐ Reconcile rental contracts and the rental lease pool.
- ☐ Review consignment items, special orders, layaways, and customer deposits.
- ☐ Reconcile gift card and store credit balances.
- ☐ Gather current-year equipment purchases and dispositions.
- ☐ Review preliminary financial statements for missing entries and unexpected balances.
Review Tax Planning Opportunities
- ☐ Estimate federal and state taxable income and potential tax payments.
- ☐ Review planned equipment purchases, depreciation, Section 179, bonus depreciation, and placed-in-service dates.
- ☐ Evaluate retirement plan contributions and applicable deadlines.
- ☐ Review owner compensation, employee and owner bonuses, and payment timing.
- ☐ Review related-party rent, interest, management fees, and shareholder loans or advances.
- ☐ Consider state pass-through entity tax (PTET) elections and payments, including possible federal deductions for qualifying entity-level state taxes; rules and deadlines vary by state.
Some tax decisions must be completed before fiscal year-end; others have calendar-year payroll deadlines. Review them with your tax advisor in advance.
Owners: also see the Individual Year-End Tax Planning Checklist →
2. On Your Year-End Date — Protect the Cutoff
After the final fiscal-year activity is recorded and before new-year activity begins:
- ☐ Finish and post all transactions through the cutoff date.
- ☐ Run, save, and confirm you can open the required year-end reports.
- ☐ Create a separate, dated year-end backup of your accounting or POS database, apart from regular rolling backups.
Why timing matters: Some year-end reports reflect only the information available when they are run and may not be reliably recreated once new-year activity begins. Run and save them after close of business on your year-end date, before the first new-year transaction.
Two Different Backup Needs
Regular, tested backups: keep routine, secure backups all year and periodically test that you can restore them. They protect against hardware problems, accidental deletion, system failures, and cybersecurity incidents.
A separate year-end snapshot: after all year-end transactions are recorded and before new-year activity begins, save a dated backup of your accounting or POS data and store it apart from your rolling backups so it is not overwritten. Keep it with your saved year-end reports; it does not replace them.
POS or accounting data out of sync? Book a 30-minute Data Cleanup meeting and we’ll help you get your records in order before year-end.
3. First 30–60 Days After — Close the Books
- ☐ Complete reconciliations and adjusting entries.
- ☐ Finalize year-end financial statements.
- ☐ Provide your tax preparer with final statements and supporting schedules. MRAS clients: watch your email for our year-end request list with the items we need from you.
4. Review Results and Plan Ahead
- ☐ Compare revenue, gross margins, expenses, and net profit with prior years.
- ☐ Review profitability by department—sales, rentals, repairs, and lessons.
- ☐ Evaluate cash flow, working capital, debt, and upcoming cash needs.
- ☐ Set next-year budgets and a small set of measurable targets for revenue, staffing, and profitability.
- ☐ Evaluate major investments, capital purchases, and financing needs.
Track these numbers monthly with our KPI Tracker (coming soon). Want to compare your results with similar music stores? Learn about benchmarking →
Make Time to Work ON Your Business
Running a business keeps you busy. Set aside time to evaluate what is working, what needs attention, and where you want to go. You do not need all the answers before you start asking the questions.
At Music Retail Accountants & Specialists, we help owners use financial information to make practical decisions about profitability and cash flow.
General information only — not tax or legal advice for your specific situation. Please contact us before acting on any item.