What your accountant needs from a one-person business at year end

If you run a business by yourself or with a few people, January brings the same email every year: “Send me everything.” The accountant means it. Here is what everything is for a typical sole proprietor or single-member LLC in the United States, why each piece is on the list, and how to make next January short.

This is a checklist, not tax advice. Your accountant’s list may be longer, and theirs wins.

Income

• 1099-NEC and 1099-K forms from anyone who paid you $600 or more, and from the payment platforms that processed your sales. They arrive by the end of January. If a client paid you and no form arrives, your own invoices are the record.
• Your invoices or sales records for the year, totalled. The accountant reconciles what the forms say against what you say.
• Bank and payment-platform statements for every business account, December included. If you have one account for business and one for life, this is a download. If they are mixed, this is the weekend.

Expenses

• Receipts for anything you plan to deduct, grouped roughly by kind: supplies, software, equipment, travel, meals, professional services, insurance. The Schedule C has a line for each, and the grouping is what the accountant does with your pile anyway.
• Mileage, if you drive for the business: total miles and business miles, with a log or an app’s record.
• Home office measurements, if you take it: the square footage of the office and of the home.
• Big purchases: a computer, a vehicle, equipment. Each needs its invoice, because it may be written off over years rather than at once.
• Health insurance premiums you paid yourself, and any retirement contributions. Both go on the return in their own places.

The business itself

• Estimated tax payments you made during the year, with dates and amounts. These are the ones most often forgotten and the easiest to prove with a bank statement.
• Payroll reports and W-2s, if you have employees, and 1099s you sent to contractors you paid $600 or more. If you paid a contractor and never collected a W-9, that is the January scramble.
• Last year’s return. The accountant wants to see what was carried forward.
• Formation documents and the EIN letter, only the first year with a new accountant.
• State filings. In Texas that means the franchise tax report, due May 15 even when no tax is owed; other states have their own annual report and fee.

How to make next year short

The weekend goes into three things: finding the documents, sorting them into piles, and working out which pile a receipt belongs in. All three are avoidable.

Give the documents one place to land, and let them land there through the year. An email address for the e-receipts and the forms that arrive by email, a photo for the paper ones, a folder the bank’s PDFs go into. Then the “send me everything” email is answered with one export, sorted by category and year, with the totals alongside.

That is the Business plan in Thaw: receipts filed by Schedule C line as they arrive, W-9s collected from contractors and turned into a 1099 list, the year-end package built for the accountant with a page where they can drop the finished return back. The business is kept apart from the household in the same account, with its own checkup that knows what a business should have on file.