By late September, most East Cobb businesses have nine months of transactions in their books and roughly three months left to act on what those books say. That window is the whole point of this check. A miscoded payroll run or an unreconciled credit card found now is a half-hour fix. The same problem found in February, when your return is being prepared, is a cleanup project billed at cleanup rates, and it arrives too late to change any decision for the year.
This is the check we run for owners along Johnson Ferry Road, Roswell Road and Shallowford Road before the fourth quarter starts. None of it requires new software. It requires someone to look.
Why the fourth quarter depends on September’s books
Every useful year-end decision starts from a year-to-date profit number you trust. Whether to buy equipment before December 31, how much to put into a retirement plan, whether an owner bonus makes sense, how large the January estimated payment should be: each of those is a calculation run on your books. If the books are three months behind or quietly wrong, the calculation is wrong too.
There is also a hard deadline waiting on the other side of the year. Contractor forms are due at the end of January, and the information behind them has to come from records you are keeping now. Finding a missing taxpayer ID in the last week of January is one of the most avoidable scrambles in small business accounting.
The five-part East Cobb bookkeeping check
1. Reconciliations that actually tie out
Every bank account, credit card, line of credit and loan should be reconciled through August 31, with the ending balance in your books matching the statement to the cent. A green checkmark in the software is not the same thing. Open the reconciliation report itself and look for:
- Uncleared items older than 60 days. An outstanding check from March is either void, lost or recorded twice.
- Merchant deposits recorded at the net amount. If your card processor deposits sales after deducting its fees, your revenue is understated and your fees are missing, unless the gross sale and the fee are recorded separately.
- Loan balances that never change. If each payment is booked entirely to interest expense, or entirely to the loan, the balance in your books drifts away from the lender’s statement.
- Transfers treated as income or expense. Moving money between your own accounts is neither.
2. The uncategorized and “ask my accountant” accounts
Most bookkeeping systems have a holding account for transactions nobody was sure about. By September it is common to find hundreds of entries sitting there, and together they can be the difference between a profitable year and a loss. Work the account down to zero while the transactions are recent enough that someone still remembers them.
While you are there, scan the largest expense categories for anything that belongs somewhere else. Equipment purchases coded to supplies, loan principal coded to expense and personal charges coded to meals are the three errors we find most often.
3. Payroll coding and the owner’s pay
Payroll usually lands in the books as a single lump from the payroll provider, which hides problems. Break it apart and confirm that gross wages, employer payroll taxes, benefits and reimbursements each land in their own accounts, and that the totals agree with the provider’s year-to-date reports.
Two points deserve extra attention this year:
- Georgia withholding. After HB 463 was signed on May 11, 2026, employers could begin withholding at the new 4.99% rate instead of 5.19%. Confirm your payroll system actually made the change. Our guide to Georgia estimated tax payments covers what the rate change means for owners on the individual side.
- S corporation owners. If your company is taxed as an S corporation and you work in the business, you need reasonable compensation paid as W-2 wages, not only distributions. September is the time to check whether wages paid so far are on track, because fixing it in the last payroll of December is harder and more visible. Health insurance premiums the company pays for a more-than-2% shareholder also need to be reported on that owner’s W-2, as explained in our post on the S corporation owner health insurance deduction.
4. Owner draws, personal expenses and money moving between you and the company
The equity section of the balance sheet is where small business books most often stop making sense. Check three things:
- The right account for your entity type. Sole proprietors and single-member LLCs take draws, S corporations make distributions, and partnerships track each partner’s capital separately. A single “owner” account used for everything will need to be unpicked at tax time.
- Personal expenses paid with the business card. Record them as draws or distributions, not as business expenses, and consider whether the card should be used that way at all.
- Money you lent the company, or took from it. Loans between an owner and the business should be documented with terms. Undocumented amounts are easily reclassified later in a way that costs you.
5. Contractor records for January
Start collecting Form W-9 now from every contractor you have paid this year and expect to keep paying. Three rules shape the list:
- The threshold changed. Beginning with payments made in 2026, the reporting threshold for Form 1099-NEC rose from $600 to $2,000 under the 2025 federal tax law. Fewer small payments will need a form, but the threshold is measured per payee across the whole year, so your records need running totals.
- Card payments are excluded. Payments made by credit card, debit card or through a third-party payment network that are reportable on Form 1099-K are reported by the payment settlement entity, not by you on Form 1099-NEC. Your books need to show how each contractor was paid.
- Missing tax IDs have a cost. If a contractor does not provide a taxpayer identification number, you generally must apply 24% backup withholding to reportable payments. That conversation is far easier in September than in January.
Forms 1099-NEC are due to recipients and the IRS by January 31. If you have employees, Georgia’s annual withholding reconciliation, Form G-1003, is also due January 31 when filed with W-2s and 1099-NECs. For 2026 forms, both deadlines move to February 1, 2027, because January 31 falls on a Sunday.
What a clean September close gives you
With the books reconciled and cleaned through August, the fourth quarter becomes a planning exercise instead of a guessing exercise. You can project the year with a reasonable margin of error, decide on equipment purchases and retirement contributions with real numbers, and size your final Georgia and federal estimated payments properly. Our 2026 year-end tax planning guide walks through the federal decisions that follow.
It also makes the tax return cheaper. Preparers price uncertainty. Books that tie out, with a clean equity section and a contractor list ready to go, are faster to work from than books that need to be rebuilt first.
When a check turns into a cleanup
Sometimes the check shows that the problem is bigger than a few adjustments. The usual signs:
- Accounts that have not been reconciled for three months or more.
- Opening balances that do not match last year’s tax return.
- Sales tax collected but not clearly tracked against what was remitted.
- More than one person entering transactions without a consistent approach.
- Inventory or job costs recorded only as purchases, with no count or allocation.
Any of these usually means the books need a structured catch-up before the year closes, followed by a monthly bookkeeping routine so the same work is not repeated next September.
Bookkeeping support for East Cobb businesses
Manay CPA’s Marietta office on Shallowford Road works with businesses across East Cobb, Marietta and Kennesaw. We run this review as a standalone project or as the starting point for ongoing accounting services, and we handle payroll and tax preparation alongside the books when it helps to have one team see the whole picture.
Frequently asked questions
How often should a small business reconcile its bank accounts?
Monthly, within a few weeks of each statement date. Reconciling only at year-end means an error from January is discovered twelve months later, when the supporting details are hardest to find.
Do I need to send a 1099 to a contractor I paid through PayPal or by credit card?
Generally no. Payments made by credit card, debit card or through a third-party payment network that are reportable on Form 1099-K are reported by the payment settlement entity on that form, not by you on Form 1099-NEC. You still need records showing how each contractor was paid, so the forms you do issue are complete.
What is the 1099-NEC threshold for 2026?
For payments made in 2026, a Form 1099-NEC is generally required when you pay a non-employee $2,000 or more during the year for services in your business, up from $600 in earlier years. The threshold is scheduled to be adjusted for inflation after 2026.
Is it too late in the year to fix messy books?
No. September leaves enough time to reconcile, clean up the equity accounts and correct payroll coding before December 31. What you lose by waiting until after year-end is the ability to act on what the corrected numbers show.
Talk to us
If your books have not had a proper look this year, we can review what you have and tell you what needs attention before the fourth quarter. Book a consultation with our Marietta team.
