End of financial year prep is the work a firm does to close off a client’s books for the year, sign off the key balances, and hand a clean set of records to the accountant or tax agent. For most New Zealand businesses the balance date is 31 March, so the same crunch lands across a firm’s whole client base at once. The job covers reconciling bank, loan, and credit card accounts, squaring off GST and payroll liabilities, reviewing the asset register, posting year-end adjustments, and producing the reports the tax agent needs to prepare the return.
When it lives in someone’s head or a personal spreadsheet, EOFY prep is where things slip. A GST period gets missed, PAYE or KiwiSaver balances do not tie back to what is owing to Inland Revenue, drawings and shareholder current accounts go unreviewed, or the workpapers arrive incomplete and the tax agent has to chase. A consistent process means every client gets the same treatment and nothing is left to memory under deadline pressure.
When to run it
Run end of financial year prep once the client’s 31 March balance date is reached, the point at which the year-end close period begins for most clients. Some entities have a non-standard balance date, so check each client before you start. The job is owned by the staff member responsible for the client’s file, with a reviewer or partner signing off before reports go to the tax agent.
How to run it in Tidyflow
Set this up as a reusable job template so every EOFY job runs the same way across your team. Each step becomes a subtask your staff check off in order, and you can make the job recurring so it generates automatically each year against your 31 March clients. Tidyflow’s workflow management keeps the work visible and tracks who is on what, while recurring tasks handle the annual cadence without anyone re-creating the job by hand.
The items your client needs to supply (missing statements, asset purchase and disposal details, confirmation of unclear transactions, and final report approval) go out as requests in the client portal and requests feature. Clients upload directly against each item, the files land on the job, and you can see at a glance what is still outstanding. When the books are closed, the supporting workpapers and finalised reports stay together on the job through document management, ready to hand to the tax agent for tax compliance.
Common pitfalls
- Leaving a GST period unfiled: confirm every period through to 31 March is filed before you reconcile the GST control accounts.
- PAYE, KiwiSaver, and ESCT balances that do not reconcile to what is owing to IRD, often because payday filing was not completed for the full year.
- Skipping shareholder current accounts, drawings, or trust distributions, which leaves the tax agent without the resolutions or minutes they need.
- A fixed asset register that still shows disposed assets or is missing new purchases, throwing out depreciation.
- Sending reports to the tax agent before the client has reviewed and approved them, then having to re-issue after a late correction.
- Assuming every client closes at 31 March: some entities have an IRD-approved non-standard balance date, so check each client’s year-end before reconciling or filing the 31 March GST return.