Question

Bookkeeping - monthly Bank, Credit Cards with different statement dates

  • 29 January 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 24 views
Jennifer Thompson
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I’m new to Karbon previously in my other software I had one monthly bookkeeping task for each month recurring yearly.

and in that would be broken down with statement dates for each additional account or credit card. I am having a hard time deciding on which way to set Karbon up.

keep all monthly bookkeeping in one task or setup separate credit card task with different start and end dates ei. Jan20-Feb 20 Capital One

Thanks

Jenn

3 replies

SamG
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Userlevel 7
Badge +15

Hi @Jennifer Thompson,

Good question 🙂

I would focus on two things:

  1. Grouping Tasks / Task Sections together in Work items based on when you will do them. (e.g. if you do them every month around the same week, you would have a monthly repeating work item grouping the tasks you’d usually be completing that week).
  2. Creating enough Work items to easily track what “chunks” of work (Tasks / Sections) you need to complete and when, but not so many that they are overwhelming. (e.g. too few Work items and the Work item due dates become unusable, too many Work items and the Work views become unusable).

This thread may also be relevant:

Does that help?

Rebecca Williams
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Userlevel 7
Badge +12

@Jennifer Thompson I think another thing to take into account is how much you want to customize each work item.

For example -

  • Your monthly bookkeeping template has one task that says “Reconcile all bank accounts and credit cards” (or maybe split between Bank and CC) and this is standard for all clients, no customization needed
    OR
  • Your template has placeholder tasks that say “Reconcile bank account XXXX” but for every new client you have to customize those tasks and then if you change your underlying template, you need to then go back and change all the existing work items. If the client added or removed an account you’d also have to change all open work items to add/remove the account from the checklist

We’ve somewhat found a middle ground where we have the first option above in Karbon, but then we have a Google Sheet for each client that lists out details like

  • all their bank/CC/loan/investment accounts (basically anything to reconcile)
  • approx. statement availability date
  • how we get the statement (Karbon task, delegate bank access etc.)
  • whether the direct bank feed connection works/can be setup to get transaction data

That Google Sheet is then linked in the Details tab of each work item - if we reset to the template, the details remain the same so the link to the sheet will still be there!

Continuous Improvement
LD7E
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Userlevel 6
Badge +7

HI @Jennifer Thompson, so many possibilities in Karbon. After years of trial, error, and more trial, I have our monthly bookkeeping setup as one work item which repeats each month starting on the 1st of the month and ending on the 10th of the following month. So yes, there will be two months open at all times.

The work is broken out into what we do each week for the client. So it is basically the same each week until we get to month end where there are two (2) separate sections; 1 for month-end close (reconciling, allocations, AJE’s, etc) and another section for month-end review (financial comparisons, trailing 12-month review, etc). Just found this to work best. Previously we’ve tried everything with multiple work items handling specific parts of the process and it was just too cumbersome. Now it is tidy. Will there be a stray account ending date that means there are un-reconciled items in that month? Of course. Not a big deal as it all gets worked out in the end. Only time the procedure changes would be year-end. Depending on the gap in those dates we would reconcile to the account balance on-line if needed.

Here is how we break out each work section:

 

 

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