Year-end checklist
Year-end closing checklist for Estonian companies: reconcile the bank, run depreciation, record dividends and review reports before the annual report.
The annual report is generated straight from your books, so its accuracy is decided long before you open the Annual Reports section. An hour of tidying now saves a puzzling validation error later — and the earlier a mistake is found, the smaller it tends to be.
Work through the list below once your financial year has ended. None of it is exotic; it's the ordinary bookkeeping, finished properly.
The checklist
Reconcile every bank transaction
The cash on your balance sheet comes from the ledger, not from your bank — so the two need to agree. Go through reconciliation and clear anything still unmatched at the year end. A few stray transactions during the year is normal; leaving them stray at year end is how a balance sheet parts company with reality.
Settle or chase open invoices
Sales invoices unpaid at year end appear as receivables, unpaid purchase invoices as payables. Both are fine — that's what those lines are for — but a receivable nobody expects to collect doesn't belong on the report. Review what's outstanding and chase what's collectable.
Run depreciation on fixed assets
Depreciation is recorded month by month, and the year is only complete once every month up to your year end has been run. Check fixed assets for any months still missing — without them, your assets look newer and your profit larger than they really are.
Record dividends paid during the year
If money left the company as dividends, the books need to say so. Dividend payments change your equity and carry corporate income tax, so an unrecorded one quietly distorts both. The dividends page covers how they're recorded.
Review the P&L and balance sheet
Finally, read the profit and loss and the balance sheet as a stranger would. Is revenue roughly what you expected? Does any line have a sign that makes no sense — negative cash, a balance for a loan you repaid? Odd numbers here become odd numbers in the annual report, where they're harder to chase down.
When the list is done
That's the heavy lifting. From here, preparing the annual report is mostly Arvello's job: it assembles the statements from the books you've just tidied. And if something wrong surfaces later, the fix still happens here — correct the records, then recalculate the report.
Key Takeaways
- 1The annual report is generated from your books — clean books in, clean report out
- 2Reconcile the bank, run depreciation, and record dividends before preparing the report
- 3Review the P&L and balance sheet for anything odd — fixing it now beats fixing it after generation
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