What to give your accountant for a Schedule C or 1065 return

Accountants don’t want your receipts. They want your totals, with the receipts behind them in case anyone asks. The packet that makes an accountant happy in January is short, and most of it can be ready before the year ends.

This is what goes in it, for a single-member LLC (Schedule C on your personal return) and for a multi-member LLC taxed as a partnership (Form 1065, with a K-1 for each member). Your accountant may ask for more; this is the floor.

For every business

A profit and loss for the year. Income and expenses by category, with the categories mapped to the lines on the form. If your categories already follow Schedule C, this is the single most useful page you’ll send. If they don’t, the accountant has to re-sort every line, and you’ll pay for the hours.

Every transaction, as a spreadsheet. Date, description, amount, category, which account it came from. The accountant uses it to check the totals and to spot what’s been filed somewhere odd.

Bank and card statements for the year. The accountant reconciles the books against them. If you import statements as you go, your transactions will already match; if you don’t, expect questions about the lines that have no entry.

Receipts, available but not emailed. Keep them filed by year; send them if asked. For meals, the note about who and why should already be on each one.

Year-end balances. What each business account held on December 31, and any loans outstanding. This is also where you say what you still owe and what’s still owed to you, if you report on an accrual basis (most small businesses don’t).

Equipment bought or sold. Anything that lasts more than a year: the laptop, the camera, the van. The receipt with the date and cost, and whether it’s used partly for personal things. The accountant decides between depreciating it and deducting it at once.

Estimated tax payments. The dates and amounts of each quarterly payment you made, federal and state. Without these the return will either overstate what you owe or claim a payment that wasn’t made.

Forms that arrived in the mail. 1099-NEC and 1099-K from people and platforms that paid you; 1099-INT from the bank. The accountant matches them to your income; a 1099 that doesn’t match what you reported is the commonest reason for an IRS letter.

Owner money. How much you put into the business and how much you took out. Draws aren’t expenses and contributions aren’t income, but the accountant tracks them, and for a partnership they’re essential (next section).

Vehicle use. If you drive for the business: total miles for the year, business miles, and either the mileage log or the actual costs.

Home office. The square footage of the office and of the home, and the year’s rent or mortgage interest, utilities and insurance, if you plan to claim it.

For a partnership too

The members and their shares. Who the members are, their ownership percentages, and whether anything changed during the year. The K-1s depend on it.

Each member’s contributions and draws. Money in and money out, per member, dated. This builds each member’s capital account, which Form 1065 now requires on a tax basis.

Guaranteed payments. Fixed amounts paid to a member for services, regardless of profit. These are deductible by the partnership and taxed to the member, so they must be separated from draws.

The operating agreement, if the accountant doesn’t have it already, and last year’s return if they’re new.

The deadline is earlier. Partnership returns are due March 15 (or the next business day), a month before personal returns, because the members need their K-1s to file.

Questions you’ll be asked

Did anything change about the business this year: a new line of work, a second business, a member joining or leaving?
Were any personal expenses paid from the business account, or business expenses from a personal card?
Did you buy, sell or stop using any equipment or vehicle?
Did you pay anyone $600 or more who wasn’t an employee? (Then a 1099-NEC was due from you by January 31.)
Any money received that doesn’t appear in the bank statements: cash, a platform payout to another account, a refund?

Having the answers written down with the packet saves a round of email.

Sending it as one folder

The practical problem isn’t knowing the list; it’s that the pieces live in six places. A folder per business per year, built once at year end, solves it: the profit and loss, the transaction spreadsheet, the statements and 1099s, the equipment receipts, the estimated-payment record, and the receipts in a subfolder if the accountant wants them.

Plainbooks builds that folder from Settings › Export: a business for a year, or every book for every year, as a zip in the Files app. It holds a README explaining the layout, the profit and loss as a PDF, the transactions and categories as CSV with each category’s Schedule C line, every document you’ve attached to the business (formation papers, the EIN letter, 1099s, statements), and, if you turn it on, every receipt photo named by date, shop and amount. For a partnership the partners’ capital report comes along. You share the zip the way you’d share anything from an iPhone; the accountant needs no login and nothing to install.

The list above is still yours to complete. The folder just means the parts the app knows about are already in it.