September has a particular kind of quiet before the storm. The summer rush is winding down, kids are back in school, and year-end still feels far enough away to ignore. But this is actually the best window all year to catch the small bookkeeping gaps that have been quietly accumulating – before they turn into the frantic, expensive cleanup that so many Saskatchewan business owners find themselves doing in December.

Here’s a practical walkthrough of exactly what to check right now, while there’s still time to fix things calmly instead of under pressure.

Late Reconciliations: Close the Gap While It’s Still Small

If you haven’t reconciled your bank and credit card accounts every month, September is the moment to catch up before the gap becomes unmanageable. A one- or two-month backlog is a manageable afternoon. A ten- or eleven-month backlog, discovered in November, is a genuine crisis.

Reconciliation isn’t just a formality — it’s the process that catches errors, duplicate entries, missed transactions, and outright discrepancies while they’re still recent enough to remember and explain. The longer an unreconciled gap sits, the harder it becomes to reconstruct what actually happened in any given month.

The practical move: pull your bank and credit card statements from the last few months and confirm every transaction is accounted for in your books. If you find gaps, close them now while the details are still fresh.

Missing Receipts: The Habit That Compounds

Every business owner has some version of the same problem – a folder, a shoebox, or a phone camera roll full of receipts that never made it into the books. Individually, each missing receipt seems minor. Collectively, by year-end, they represent real deductions left unclaimed and real gaps in your expense records.

September is a good checkpoint to do a receipt audit:

• Go through the last few months of bank and credit card statements
• Flag any transactions without a corresponding receipt or invoice on file
• Chase down what you can while vendors and records are still easy to access
• For anything genuinely unrecoverable, at minimum note what it was, so your records aren’t just a blank gap

Waiting until year-end to do this means trying to remember a receipt from March. Doing it now means the trail is still warm.

Payroll Review: Catching Errors Before T4 Season

If you have employees, September is a good time to review payroll year-to-date, before T4 preparation becomes an active deadline. A few things worth checking:

• Are CPP, EI, and income tax deductions calculating correctly, especially if any employee’s status, hours, or pay rate changed mid-year?
• Have all remittances been made on time and in full?
• If you’ve had any new hires or departures this year, is their payroll record complete and accurate?
• Have any taxable benefits or bonuses been recorded correctly, since these are easy to miss mid-year and hard to reconstruct later?

Catching a payroll discrepancy in September gives you months to correct it before T4 slips are due. Catching the same error in January, after slips have already been issued, means amended filings and a more complicated correction process.

GST/PST Catch-Up: Reconciling What’s Owed Against What’s Been Set Aside

This is one of the most common places where small gaps become large problems. Throughout the year, GST/HST and PST collected on sales should be tracked separately from operating cash – but in practice, especially during busy or cash-tight periods, that separation sometimes slips.

September is the right moment to reconcile:

• What you’ve actually collected in GST/HST and PST so far this year
• What’s been remitted to date
• Whether the amount currently set aside actually matches what you’ll owe on your next filing

If there’s a shortfall, discovering it now gives you a full quarter to plan for it. Discovering it in December, right when cash flow is already tight from holiday-related expenses, is a much harder position to be in.

Q4 Planning: Setting Up the Last Stretch of the Year

Beyond fixing what’s behind, September is also the time to plan deliberately for the fourth quarter rather than just reacting to it as it happens. A few things worth setting up now:

• A remittance calendar for the rest of the year, so GST/HST, PST, and payroll deadlines are visible in advance, not discovered the week they’re due.
• A rough Q4 cash flow projection, especially if your business has seasonal patterns around the holidays, so you’re not caught short on a remittance or a payroll run.
• A plan for owner compensation decisions – salary versus dividends, bonus timing – that often make more sense to finalize before year-end than to reconstruct after the fact.
• A checklist of what your accountant or bookkeeper will need for year-end, so nothing is a surprise request in January.

Bringing It All Together

None of these individual fixes are large on their own. The value of doing this work in September is that it converts a handful of manageable tasks now into avoiding one overwhelming scramble in December. A simple order of operations:

1. Reconcile any unreconciled bank and credit card months.
2. Audit for missing receipts and chase down what’s recoverable.
3. Review payroll year-to-date for errors before T4 season begins.
4. Reconcile GST/PST collected against what’s been remitted and set aside.
5. Build a remittance calendar and rough cash flow plan for Q4.

Where to Start

We’ve put together a Q4 Readiness Checklist that walks through each of these steps, built for Saskatchewan businesses across every sector heading into the last quarter of the year.

If your books have drifted further than you’d like to admit, GoGet offers a free cleanup assessment – a straightforward look at where things stand and what it would take to get current before year-end pressure sets in.

[Download the Q4 Readiness Checklist] or [Book a Cleanup Assessment] with GoGet.