How to Close the Year as a Property Manager (and What to Send Your CPA)

Your accountant doesn't want your software. They want a trial balance that ties, a general ledger they can import, and the receipts behind the expenses — before February, not after.

Every January the same email arrives: "Can you send me everything for last year?" What follows is usually a week of exports, spreadsheets and hunting for receipts. A year-end close is how you turn that week into an afternoon. Here is the sequence, and what a good hand-off to your CPA contains.

1. Before you close: make the books true

Closing a year freezes it. Anything wrong on the day you close stays wrong, so fix it first.

Reconcile every bank account through December 31st. Every bank line should match a ledger entry. Unmatched lines are either missing entries or entries that never happened.
Clear the suspense items. Payments that were never applied to an invoice, deposits sitting in the wrong account, duplicate charges.
Check receivables tenant by tenant. An open balance should be a real amount owed, not a timing artifact from a payment posted to the wrong month.
Security deposits held should equal your deposit liability. If they don't, find out why before an auditor or a tenant does.
Post the adjustments your accountant asked for last year — accruals, prepaid rent, depreciation if you book it.

2. Close and lock the period

A close is a promise: the numbers for this year will not change without someone deciding they should. In practice that means two things.

Lock the dates. No manual entry can be dated inside a closed year. If something must change, the year is reopened deliberately — by the owner of the account, with a written reason — and closed again.
Keep a snapshot. The trial balance and balance sheet as they were on the day you signed off. If a number ever moves, you can prove what it was.

One subtlety worth knowing: money still arrives late. A tenant's payment for December can settle in January. That payment should still be recorded — in the first open day, with its original date noted — rather than rejected or slipped back into the closed year.

3. What to send your CPA

A complete package is two files, not twenty.

The books

Chart of accounts
General ledger (every line, with opening and closing balances per account)
Journal (every entry, including reversals)
Trial balance: opening, movement for the year, closing
Balance sheet and income statement
Open receivables by tenant, open payables by vendor, security deposits held by tenant
Bank lines not yet reconciled (ideally none)
Payments by vendor — for 1099-NEC in the US ($600+), and for T4A / T5018 review in Canada ($500+)

The supporting documents

Every receipt and vendor invoice behind the year's expenses, each tied to the journal entry it supports
A list of the expenses with no receipt — the follow-up your accountant will ask for anyway

If your accountant works in QuickBooks or Xero, a journal import file saves them from re-keying a year of entries.

4. Canada: sales tax belongs on the balance sheet

For Canadian commercial leases, the GST/HST/QST you charge tenants is money you hold for the CRA or Revenu Québec. It belongs in a sales-tax-payable account, not in rental income — otherwise revenue is overstated by the tax and the return has to be rebuilt from invoices. A sales tax report by month and province makes the filing straightforward.

How Proprietio handles it

In Proprietio, Accounting → Fiscal year & close runs the pre-close checks (the year has ended, the previous year is closed, the ledger balances) and then locks the year and keeps the signed-off snapshot. Accounting → Export for accountant produces the two ZIPs above — the books, with QuickBooks Online and Xero import files, and the supporting documents indexed to the journal. It works for US and Canadian portfolios, in USD or CAD, with GST/HST/QST booked as a liability.

You can also invite your accountant as a teammate with the Accountant role, so they pull what they need themselves.

This article is general information, not tax or accounting advice. Your CPA decides how your year is closed and what is filed.