Every year, your external accountant asks for the same reconciliations and the same adjusting-entry support. This short course covers how to have that file ready before the request lands, without changing who reviews or signs anything.
Key takeaways
An external accountant's year-end request list barely changes: reconciliations for every bank and credit card account, an AP and AR aging with any unusual items explained, accrual and prepaid schedules, and a fixed asset continuity schedule. Knowing that list in advance means it doesn't have to be assembled from scratch once the request arrives.
This lesson covers what a typical Canadian mid-market request list looks like, and why treating it as a known, recurring deliverable rather than a one-off project each year changes how much of it can be prepared ahead of time.
Bank and credit card reconciliations, once done monthly, are already most of the way to year-end ready. AI can pull the twelve months of completed reconciliations, aging detail and accrual schedules from your general ledger, whether that's QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct or NetSuite, into the format your accountant's request typically follows.
This lesson walks through setting up that assembly against a template built from last year's actual request, so the file matches what genuinely gets asked for instead of what seems generically useful.
Intercompany balances that need to net to zero, prepaid schedules that need to amortize on a consistent basis, and accrual roll-forwards are exactly the kind of detail that's easy to reconstruct incorrectly under year-end pressure. AI can draft these on a consistent monthly basis so the year-end version is a continuation, not a rebuild.
This lesson covers keeping those schedules current monthly rather than annually, which is what makes the year-end version accurate instead of a best guess assembled in a hurry.
Nothing in this process changes who reviews the file before it leaves the building. A controller or senior bookkeeper still checks every schedule, resolves anything that doesn't reconcile, and approves what goes to the external accountant.
By the end, the goal is a year-end request that gets answered in days with a file that was already mostly built, instead of a scramble that starts the day the request lands, with the same person's review standing behind it either way.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
