The Accounting Cycle: 8 Steps You Need To Know

The accounting cycle consists of the steps from recording business transactions to generating financial statements for an accounting period. The operating cycle is a measure of time between purchasing inventory, selling the inventory as a product, and collecting cash from the sales transaction. The accounting cycle is a comprehensive accounting process that begins and ends in an accounting period. It involves eight steps that ensure the proper recording and reporting of financial transactions. Once a company’s books are closed and the accounting cycle for a period ends, it begins anew with the next accounting period and financial transactions.

Also, if you have been using cash accounting but want to create a financial statement that meets IFRS or GAAP standards, you will need to post adjusting entries to bring your general ledger in line with accrual accounting. A shorter internal accounting cycle can make bookkeeping more manageable, especially when the company’s finances are complicated. However, businesses with internal accounting cycles also follow the external accounting cycle of the fiscal year. Disorganized books can lead to bad decisions, failure to fulfill various obligations and sometimes even legal problems. That’s why today we will discuss the eight accounting cycle steps you can follow to ensure accuracy.

Following the eight-step accounting cycle can help you accurately record all financial transactions, catch and correct errors and balance your books at the end of each fiscal year before you close them. The accounting cycle is an eight-step process that accountants and business owners use to manage a company’s books throughout a particular accounting period—typically throughout the fiscal year (FY). The federal government’s fiscal year spans 12 months, beginning on October 1 of one calendar year and ending on September 30 of the next. Even if accounting software is working behind the scenes to perform critical accounting cycle tasks, it’s still essential for business owners and bookkeepers to understand the process and comply with deadlines.

What Is the Accounting Cycle?

Once transactions are recorded in journals, they are also posted to the general ledger. A general ledger is a critical aspect of accounting, serving as a master record of all financial transactions. In case you’re wondering whether to use cash or accrual accounting, cash accounting is suitable for freelancers, small businesses and sole proprietorships. But all businesses with inventories or revenues exceeding $1 million must follow the accrual method. Here’s an in-depth look at the accounting cycle, including the eight primary steps involved and how the best accounting software can automate this process. Stakeholders, including management, the Board of Directors, lenders, shareholders, and creditors, can analyze the financial statement results for the accounting cycle period.

• The cycle repeats itself every fiscal year as long as a company remains in business.
• Typically, companies integrate their accounting software with their payment processor and point-of-sale (POS) software to capture revenue.
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• CPA firms can review or audit the financial statements and drill down to the underlying financial transactions and accounting records to test account balances.
• The objective of the trial balance is to help you catch mistakes in your accounting.

It also helps to generate financial information to perform financial statement analysis and manage the business. The key steps in the eight-step accounting cycle include recording journal entries, posting to the general ledger, calculating trial balances, making adjusting entries, and creating financial statements. The next step is to record the details of all financial transactions, in chronological order, as journal entries, whether in an actual book or in an accounting program.

The accounting cycle is the actions taken to identify and record an entity’s transactions. These transactions are then aggregated at the end of each reporting period into financial statements. The accounting cycle is essentially the core recordation activities that an accounting department engages in on an ongoing basis. The general ledger serves as the eyes and ears of bookkeepers and accountants and shows all financial transactions within a business.

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Once you check off all the steps, you can move to the next accounting period. For example, if you want to see the changes in cash levels over the course of the business and all their relevant transactions, you would look at the general ledger, which shows all the debits and credits of cash. Use of a checklist with deadlines in the accounting cycle improves accountability and process management.

The use of software introduces a high degree of control over the accounting cycle, so that transactions can only be recorded if they are made in accordance with the rules set up within the software. This approach is also more efficient than a manual accounting system, requiring significantly less labor per transaction. The balance sheet and income statement depict business events over the last accounting cycle. Most businesses produce a cash flow statement; while it’s not mandatory, it helps project and track your business’s cash flow. Once the company has made all the adjusting entries, it creates financial statements. Most companies create balance sheets, income statements and cash flow statements.

Modifying the accounting cycle

When the accounting period ends, you’ll adjust journal entries to fix any mistakes and anomalies found during the worksheet analysis. Since this is the final step before creating financial statements, you should double-check everything with the help of a new adjusted trial balance. The core elements of the financial statements are the balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows, statement of retained earnings, and accompanying disclosures (also known as footnotes). When the financials are only being reported internally, the income statement and balance sheet may be the only documents issued.

Interpreting financial statements helps you stay on top of your finances and devise growth strategies. One of the accounting cycle’s main objectives is to ensure all the finances during the accounting period are accurately recorded and reflected in the statements. Prepare an adjusted trial balance, which incorporates the preliminary trial balance and all adjusting entries.

Creating an unadjusted trial balance is crucial for a business, as it helps ensure that total debits equal total credits in your financial records. This step generally identifies anomalies, such as payments you may have thought were collected and invoices you thought were cleared but actually weren’t. A business starts its accounting cycle by identifying and gathering details about the transactions during the accounting period. Transactions include expenses, asset acquisition, borrowing, debt payments, debts acquired and sales revenues. Double-entry accounting is ideal for companies that create all the major accounting reports, including the balance sheet, cash flow statement and income statement.

• One of the major modifications is made according to the type of accounting method a business uses.
• One surefire way to achieve that is by using automated accounting software that can be customized to handle the cycle in any way that works best for any given company.
• Typically, the domain of an accounting team or bookkeeper, the accounting cycle begins with a business event, or transaction.
• It starts with recording all financial transactions throughout that accounting period and ends with posting closing entries to close the books and prepare for the next accounting period.
• You post an entry to the general ledger by adding it to the relevant account.

If an error was made, it has to be corrected and recorded as an adjusting journal entry that reflects a change to a previously recorded journal entry. Once journal entries are recorded and approved, they are posted to the general ledger. The GL is the master record and summary of all financial transactions, broken down by account. Making two entries for each transaction means you can compare them later. All popular accounting apps are designed for double-entry accounting and automatically create credit and debit entries.

The following discussion breaks the accounting cycle into the treatment of individual transactions, and then closing the books at the end of the reporting period. The accounting cycle incorporates all the accounts, journal entries, T accounts, debits, and credits, adjusting entries over a full cycle. However, errors are frequently made when recording entries, leading to an incorrect trial balance that needs to be adjusted so that debits and credits match. It’s important because it can help ensure that the financial transactions that occur throughout an accounting period are accurately and properly recorded and reported. This can provide businesses with a clear understanding of their financial health and ensure compliance with federal regulations.

The accounting cycle’s 8 steps

The general ledger is a central database that stores the complete record of your accounts and all transactions recorded in those accounts. Meanwhile, the remaining five steps are the bookkeeping tasks you do at the end of the fiscal year. Fortunately, nowadays, you can automate these tasks with accounting software, so doing all this isn’t as time-consuming as it might seem at first glance.

If the numbers don’t balance, a bookkeeper or accountant will need to review the transaction data entered into the journal and adjust entries accordingly. The total credit and debit balance should be equal—if they don’t match, there’s an error somewhere. The unadjusted trial balance is the initial version of the trial balance that hasn’t been analyzed for accuracy and adjusted as needed.

While earlier accounting cycle steps happen during the accounting period, you’ll calculate the unadjusted trial balance after the period ends and you’ve identified, recorded and posted all transactions. The trial balance gives you an idea of each account’s unadjusted balance. Such balances are then carried forward to the next step for testing and analysis. The accounting cycle is used by businesses and organizations to record transactions and prepare financial statements. The standardized accounting cycle process (supported by accounting systems) is important because it helps business owners, small businesses, and established companies close their books for the accounting period.

The accounting cycle applies to transactions that have already occurred, from the moment they take place until financial statements are generated and the books are closed. The budget cycle looks at a business’s future expenses to determine how to allocate its funds and not spend more than it has available. The first step in the accounting cycle is to identify and analyze all transactions made during the accounting period, including expenses, debt payments, sales revenue and cash received from customers. The accounting cycle is critical because it helps to ensure accurate bookkeeping. Skipping steps in this eight-step process will likely lead to an accumulation of errors. If these errors aren’t caught and corrected, they can give you and your employees an inaccurate view of your company’s financial situation.

With double-entry accounting, each transaction is recorded as a debit and corresponding credit in two or more subledger accounts. Exactly when the transaction is recorded depends on whether the business prefers the accrual accounting method (as most do) or the cash accounting method. The next step is to record your financial transactions as journal entries in your accounting software or ledger. Some companies use point-of-sale technology linked with their books, combining steps one and two. The accounting cycle vs operating cycle are entirely different financial terms.

The accounting cycle is a comprehensive process designed to make a company’s financial responsibilities easier for its owner, accountant or bookkeeper. The accounting cycle breaks down a bookkeeper’s responsibilities into eight essential steps to identify, analyze and record financial information. It serves as a clear guideline for accurately completing bookkeeping tasks. When preparing financial statements, businesses perform a series of meticulous steps designed to convert basic financial data into cohesive, complete and accurate reports. This systematic process is called the accounting cycle, and it helps make financial reporting easier and more straightforward for business owners. The accounting cycle is a standard, 8-step process that tracks, records, and analyzes all financial activity and transactions within a business.

Identify Transactions

This automation saves accounting teams and bookkeepers time, reduces business costs and ensures more accurate financial reporting. The accounting cycle is a multistep process used by businesses to create an accurate record of their financial position, as summarized on their financial statements. The accounting cycle is a holistic process that records a business’s transactions from start to finish, helping businesses stay organized and efficient. The cycle incorporates all the company’s accounts, including T-accounts, credits, debits, journal entries, financial statements and book closing. The accounting cycle comprises eight steps businesses follow to ensure that their books are balanced so they can be closed and reset for the next accounting period, when the cycle begins again. Typically, the domain of an accounting team or bookkeeper, the accounting cycle begins with a business event, or transaction.