Cohesio
Resource · Free checklist

Monthly document checklist

What to ask every recurring client for, every month — reusable as-is, no signup required.

Practical guidance for bookkeeping firms. Not tax, legal or accounting advice — adapt thresholds and items to each client's actual accounts.

  1. Bank statements — every account, every month. Even 'nothing happened' accounts need a statement; a gap month is harder to explain later than an extra file now.
  2. Credit card statements. Business cards only, but ask explicitly — clients often have a card they don't think of as 'the business card.'
  3. Payment processor reports. Square, Stripe, PayPal, or whichever processor they actually use — the summary or settlement report for the month, not just the deposit total.
  4. Loan or line-of-credit statements. If applicable — interest and principal need to be split correctly, and a missing statement is a common source of a misclassified entry.
  5. Payroll summary (for classification, not administration). A summary report is often needed to classify payroll expense correctly, even though Cohesio does not run payroll itself.
  6. Large or unusual transactions explained. Anything over a threshold your firm sets — a one-line explanation from the client prevents a guess later.
  7. Business changes this month. New locations, new owners, new bank accounts, or anything that changes how this month should be classified.
  8. Prior month's open questions, closed out. If last month had an unresolved item, this month's pack should confirm it's resolved — don't let exceptions silently roll forward.

Sending this list by email every month, and re-explaining it to clients who missed something, is exactly the recurring friction Cohesio's document collection workflow is built to remove.

See this checklist as a real workspace

Cohesio is pre-beta. Join the preview waitlist to follow progress on the monthly document-collection workflow.