Free Monthly Books Cleanup Checklist (CSV)
A 10-step checklist for cleaning up a month of bank and card transactions before handing them to a bookkeeper or accountant — free, no email required, no catch.
Download the checklist (.csv) →
What's inside
- Step / Task / Why it matters / Done? columns — usable directly as a working checklist, not just a reference.
- Steps cover gathering statements, reconciling balances, removing duplicates, categorising consistently, and separately flagging refunds, capitalisation calls, and anything you're not sure about — instead of guessing and hoping it's close enough.
Why "flag, don't guess" matters here
The single biggest source of bad books isn't a missing transaction — it's a transaction that got silently guessed at instead of flagged. A refund booked as a fresh expense, an equipment purchase expensed instead of capitalised, an ambiguous vendor name resolved by assumption — each one looks fine until an accountant finds it later. This checklist's last two steps exist specifically to stop that: resolve every flagged item in one batch, then hand off what was uncertain, not a file that hides it.
Pair it with a category list
Step 4 ("assign every transaction a category from a fixed list") is much faster with an actual list on hand. Engineer Tsai Studio's free categorisation guide and 31-category Chart of Accounts Starter Pack (CSV/JSON, $7) cover exactly that.
When this checklist is enough on its own
If you're doing this by hand for one account, one month at a time, working through this list manually is genuinely fine — that's what it's built for.
When it isn't
Working through months of backlog, or several accounts at once, by hand doesn't scale — that's where an AI-assisted categorisation pass earns its keep: consistent category assignment plus the same flag-don't-guess discipline this checklist describes, applied at volume instead of one row at a time. Email hello@tsaielectro.com with a rough sense of your backlog (how many months, how many accounts) for a scope and quote.
Scope
This is a process checklist, not tax or accounting advice — several steps explicitly flag judgment calls that need a licensed accountant rather than resolving them.
Other Engineer Tsai Studio services: PDF tables to Excel, product image background removal. Questions: hello@tsaielectro.com.