A monthly QuickBooks Online (QBO) review keeps your books clean, your financials meaningful, and your corporation audit ready. Accurate financials depend on a consistent system: clean your books first, then review standardized reports, and finally analyze performance.
This checklist covers monthly workflows, quarterly deep dives, year end adjustments, corporate compliance considerations, and answers to the most common questions business owners ask about QBO.
Your financial reports are only as accurate as the underlying bookkeeping. QBO makes it easier with bank feeds and smart features, but the accuracy still depends on disciplined review.
Confirm that all bank accounts, credit cards, payment processors, and loans are fully reconciled. Reconciliation is the core control that ensures your financial transactions match real activity. If a reconciliation is missing or out of date, stop here.
Verify the bank register matches your statements. Look for duplicates, unmatched bank feed items, and incorrect dates. Even with smart features, manual bookkeeping mistakes still occur.
Use this report as your accuracy check. It exposes miscoded entries and helps validate cash flow statements and revenue movement.
Always validate accuracy before interpreting results.
Quarterly reviews provide strategic insight that monthly snapshots cannot show.
Assess revenue, margins, and operating expenses across the year. Identify patterns that impact cash flow statements and upcoming obligations.
Compare planned spending with real activity. This helps identify overspending early.
Estimate corporate tax liability and revisit salary versus dividend strategy. This prevents surprises at T2 filing.
Create dashboards in QBO that you can access through any web browser. Recommended widgets include:
Your year end checklist ensures your numbers align with CRA expectations.
Record accruals, prepaids, deferred revenue, and corrections to prior errors.
Use the correct 2025 CCA limits:
Reconcile physical inventory with QBO and adjust discrepancies.
If you transferred assets during incorporation, confirm elected values, opening balances, and share consideration.
These errors appear often when owners rely too heavily on bank feeds and smart features without proper review.
Incorrect tracking may trigger taxable benefits or Section 15(2) inclusions.
Incorrect postings distort retained earnings and cause T5 filing issues.
Monitor CPP, EI, source deductions, and T4 accuracy.
Capital assets require specific coding. Incorrect ITCs often come from misclassification.
CCA limits and class designations must be reviewed annually.
As your corporation grows, your reporting must grow with it.
Holdco and Opco structures require:
Review:
Growing businesses benefit from:
There is no single comprehensive manual for QBO. Intuit provides help articles, video tutorials, and searchable guidance inside the platform. Since features vary by setup, the most reliable way to master QBO is by following structured workflows like the ones in this checklist.
Yes! You can learn daily tasks such as categorizing transactions, tracking income and expenses, sending invoices, and doing bank reconciliation. More complex areas such as shareholder loans, GST or HST, capital assets, payroll, and adjusting entries typically require CPA guidance. Many owners use a hybrid approach: self learning plus professional oversight.
Reviewing performance before verifying that the books are accurate. Other common mistakes include:
This happens often when owners rely on smart features without validating their data.
A disciplined QBO workflow keeps your data clean, your reports accurate, and your corporation compliant. Monthly reviews protect accuracy, quarterly reviews support planning, and year end adjustments prepare your business for T2 filings. As your corporation grows, this checklist becomes even more valuable.
If you want reliable QBO books every month, Mesa CPA can build your reporting system, clean up your workflows, and help you understand your numbers with confidence.
Book a consultation to get started.