Accounting Calendars & How Do I Create One?

• How much does it cost for you to acquire a customer? 
• How much, on average, does a customer spend with you in any given period?
• How much does it cost to manufacture your product or deliver your service?

Being in the know on this allows you to leverage the data to make decisions. Decisions on marketing strategies, financing strategies, growth strategies. The list goes on. 

One of our go-to solutions to always being on top of your numbers is to leverage an accounting calendar and stick to the cadence it requires. What it does, is summarizes accounting periods and material dates throughout the fiscal year by fiscal week, within your financial value stream. For instance, some material dates are:

• Credit card closing dates
• Dates of your monthly financial reviews
• Tax filing deadlines
• Board meetings
• Investor reports due dates

Now, you probably know these subconsciously and can easily rattle them off, but putting them together in a visual way turns this into a communication and accountability tool. You can communicate those dates to stakeholders which keeps you (and them) accountable for hitting the due dates and keeping the meetings on cadence. 

It’s not up to you remembering these dates at the last minute. After all… you wouldn’t want your employees to forget part of their responsibilities. Staying organized may be the number one thing to success in financial planning, if not business as a whole. When we first start a relationship with a customer, one of the first few things we often do is create this.

Here’s the 6 Steps To Creating Your Accounting Calendar:



1. Download the template 
2. Don’t recreate the wheel. Leverage existing tools out there to get a baseline of what you’re trying to accomplish. Our template uses an average fiscal calendar and shows you the key points you should add based on your financial period.
3. Understand tax deadlines 
4. What type of entity are you? Do you need to pay sales tax, and if so, when? Get these tax deadlines out of your subconscious mind and be prepared for that cash to leave your bank account. Knowing the number of weeks before a deadline will help you better plan for the future. We all know we have to pay taxes... it's just a question of when.
5. Understand bank/ credit card statement dates 
6. This may be one of the most tricky things when closing your books on a monthly basis. We suggest companies with credit cards to move their closing date to the first week of every month. This allows you enough time to reconcile the cards while getting the books closed in a timely manner. 
7. Reflect on month end close dates
8. Set a day every month on which your books need to be closed? When is your meeting with the accounting & finance team? When is your meeting with your functional leads?  We recommend you set it towards the beginning or middle of the month, rather than the end of the month.
9. Put it all together 
10. Once you’ve gathered the dates for your calendar, bring them all together onto the template for the full 12-month calendar. Clean it up so you can digest it and move on to step 6. 
11. Reflect/ Adjust 
12. One of the most important steps within this list… does it all make sense? Do the dates tie to one another. Do you have enough time between dates to make the proper decisions and changes? Consider if you have enough time between when the books are closed and when you are sending reports out to make changes and updates? Do you overlap on credit card payment dates and debt payments? Maybe you want to adjust to not have so much cash going out at once. 

The point in all of this is to organize so that you set yourself up to understand your numbers. Because, once again, business owners with a solid understanding of their numbers have a massive advantage over those who don’t. 

Let me ask one more question, in closing: “Are you and your team organized and accountable to knowing your numbers?” That depends on whether you have an accounting calendar.