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Guide

Year-end document collection: getting everything to your accountant in one go.

Most New Zealand businesses have a 31 March balance date, which means April and May bring the same scramble every year: bank statements, loan statements, stocktake sheets, asset purchases and a pile of questions from the accountant. Accounting practices face the same scramble in reverse, multiplied across every client.

This guide covers what is usually needed and a calmer way to collect it, from either side of the desk.

What an accountant usually asks for at year end

Even with bank feeds and cloud accounting, some things never arrive automatically. A typical year-end request covers:

  • Closing bank, credit card and loan statements at balance date.
  • Stocktake sheets and the method used to value stock.
  • Invoices for assets bought and details of assets sold or scrapped.
  • Debtors and creditors lists at balance date, and any bad debts to write off.
  • Hire purchase and lease agreements entered during the year.
  • Payroll summaries and any staff changes.
  • Shareholder drawings, personal expenses paid by the business and private use of vehicles.
  • Correspondence from Inland Revenue received during the year.
  • Details of any new contracts, disputes or one-off events the accountant should know about.

Inland Revenue generally expects business records to be kept for seven years, so whatever you collect this year may be needed again later. Keeping it organised now pays off.

Running year end from a room

  1. 1

    Use the same list every year

    Load the year-end checklist as a document request list in the client's room. Next year, the same structure is ready to reuse.

  2. 2

    Assign each item

    Assign statements to the bookkeeper, stocktake to the operations manager and drawings to the owner, so each person sees what is theirs.

  3. 3

    Upload against the item

    Files arrive against the request they answer, in the right folder, through the room or a public request-a-file link.

  4. 4

    Answer questions in place

    The accountant's questions about a large asset purchase or an unusual payment are asked and answered inside the room.

Small details that save hours

Statements arrive as PDFs, phone photos and scans. ShareAndGo reads text from all of them, so search finds a supplier, an invoice number or an amount inside a document with highlighted snippets. AI tags and categorises documents as they arrive, and can suggest a folder structure and sort uploads into it.

When a client sends a corrected stocktake, it can be uploaded as a new version. The accountant sees the current one, and the earlier one stays in the version history, which avoids the familiar question of which spreadsheet is the final one.

For a practice, keeping each client's years in one room means that when Inland Revenue asks a question about a return from three years ago, the documents and the questions asked at the time are in one place. The audit log records what was uploaded and when.

Every upload is scanned for viruses, and nothing can be opened until the scan is clean.

Practices can connect Claude or ChatGPT to their workspace to help work through a client's documents, with each room deciding separately whether an AI assistant may read it.

Frequently asked questions

Can the client see what is still outstanding?
Yes. Invited readers see the items assigned to their email address and their status, so a client knows exactly what is left to send.
Do clients need to create an account?
No. They confirm their email with a six-digit code each time they come in.
Can we export a client's year when the work is finished?
Yes. Export the room as a ZIP that keeps its folder structure, with an index of every document as PDF and CSV.

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The first year with a client.

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When the lender wants the year-end figures.

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