How to Prepare Your Records Before Sending Them to Your Accountant

Sending your accountant a share link or a folder of receipts feels like the finish line. It isn’t, not quite. What actually determines how smoothly your return goes is whether the records behind that link are in decent shape before they land in your accountant’s hands. A tidy handover and a messy one can look identical from the outside, same number of expenses, same total spend, but one takes your accountant twenty minutes to review, and the other turns into three follow-up emails asking what half the entries actually are.

The good news is that getting records into shape doesn’t take long if you do it as a final pass rather than a rebuild. Here’s what actually needs checking.

Nothing should be sitting in Other

Every expense tracker has a catch-all category, and every business ends up using it more than it should. The problem is that Other tells your accountant nothing. They can’t map it to an HMRC category, can’t tell if it’s deductible, and can’t include it confidently in your return without asking you what it was. If you’ve got expenses logged this way, this is the point to go back through them and assign a real category: rent, software, travel, whatever they actually are. It takes a few minutes per entry, and it saves your accountant from having to ask about every single one.

Every expense should have a receipt or a reason it doesn’t

Not every legitimate expense has a receipt sitting neatly attached to it. Bank transfers sometimes don’t generate one, older purchases occasionally lose theirs, and some transactions are genuinely receipt-free by nature. That’s fine, but it needs to be visible rather than silent. An expense with no attachment and no note looks identical to one your accountant should be flagging as unsupported. A short note explaining why there’s nothing attached turns a question mark into a settled entry.

Personal and business spending need a clear line between them.

If you’ve ever paid for something business-related on a personal card, or the other way round, now’s the time to make sure it’s logged correctly rather than left ambiguous. Mixing the two isn’t unusual, especially early on before a dedicated business account is fully in use, but your accountant needs to know which is which. An expense that’s actually personal sitting in your business records either gets rejected outright or, worse, gets missed and claimed incorrectly. Go through anything that feels borderline and decide, properly, which side of the line it’s on.

VAT needs to be consistent, not just present

If you’re VAT registered, check that the rate applied to each expense actually matches what it should be, rather than defaulting to whatever was selected last time out of habit. Standard rate, reduced rate, and zero rate items get mixed up more often than people expect, especially with mixed purchases where only part of a receipt is VATable. An inconsistent VAT rate across similar expenses is one of the first things an accountant notices, and it’s one of the easiest things to fix before they see it rather than after.

Look for duplicates before your accountant does

Logging the same expense twice happens more than people admit, usually from re-entering something after a receipt upload failed the first time, or forgetting an entry was already added last week. A quick scroll through the month catches most of these. Two identical amounts on the same date for the same category are worth a second look before you send anything off.

Do this monthly, not once a year.

Everything above takes a few minutes if you’re doing it against a month’s worth of expenses. It takes considerably longer if you’re doing it against twelve months at once in December, trying to remember what an unlabelled receipt from March actually was. The habit that actually works is a short review at the end of each month, going through what you’ve logged, filling in anything missing, and fixing anything that’s drifted into the wrong category. By the time your accountant needs the full year, there’s almost nothing left to clean up.

Then, and only then, send the link.

Once records are actually in shape, this is where the share link approach we’ve written about before does its job properly. A tidy set of records sent through one link gets reviewed once. A messy one, however it’s sent, gets reviewed, questioned, corrected, and reviewed again.

Built For Small Business is free forever, and every expense you log carries a category, a receipt, and a VAT rate from the start, so there’s less tidying to do later. Get in the habit of logging as you go, and the prep work described here becomes something you’ve mostly already done by the time it matters.

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