Year-end is easy if every month was done properly. Year-end is a crisis if twelve months of guesswork gets handed to the accountant in April.
The is the discipline that separates the artist clients whose affairs are orderly from those who generate a reconstruction exercise each spring. It is not a complex process, but it needs to happen every month, on a predictable rhythm, with the same sequence of steps.
For a working musician, a month is rarely simple. Income arrives from several sources on different schedules: the pays in the middle of the month, pays quarterly, live fees arrive whenever the gets around to it, and a might land at any time with no warning. Costs are similarly uneven, studio sessions, commission invoices, travel, equipment. Letting it all pile up is the error. Catching it every month means nothing is lost, nothing is double-counted, and the accountant gets a clean file rather than a bag of receipts.
This episode works through the monthly close step by step, what to do, in what order, and why each step matters.