The monthly bookkeeping loop
Books in QuickBooks or similar, closed monthly by you, a bookkeeper, or your CPA’s firm. The month-end close produces the inputs; the deliverables are a P&L, balance sheet, and cash position you actually read. Practice-specific rules: record insurance revenue at collected amounts, not gross charges (contractual adjustments make charge-based books fiction), and keep entity books separate in multi-entity structures, one checkbook per entity, management fees actually invoiced. A clean bank layout makes this mostly automatic: account structure, with a tax reserve account funded monthly (25-30% of owner draw is a common starting rule).The dates
Two habits prevent most tax pain: fund the reserve account with every draw,
and meet your CPA in October or November, when there’s still time to act
(retirement plans, equipment, salary tuning), not in March.