What PoolBoss Says
Start in October, not January. Reconcile the year's invoices against payments, chase everything outstanding before the holidays when collection gets hard, decide what to write off, allocate chemical cost per account, and confirm what you paid contractors - so January is a handover to your accountant rather than a reconstruction.
The year-end pass is a billing job before it is an accounting job, and its deadline is set by the calendar rather than by your accountant. Everything that makes January painful - an invoice nobody chased, a seasonal customer who stopped in September and never got a final bill, a payment that landed and was never recorded - is cheap to fix in October and expensive to fix in April.
What follows is a three-month sequence: what to reconcile, what to collect while people are still paying, what to write off rather than carry into a second year, and the one decision about next season that this pass is the natural moment to make.
At a glance
Key takeaways
- Start the year-end billing pass in the first week of October - four of its five jobs are easier in autumn and none of them are done well under a January deadline.
- Reconcile the year's invoices against payments first; the gaps are usually payments that were never recorded and visits that were serviced and never billed.
- Chase outstanding invoices before Thanksgiving, because December loses most of its collectible days to the holidays.
- Seasonal accounts that stopped service in September are where the uncollected money hides - they have no weekly visit to remind anyone they exist.
- Write off anything past 90 days with no contact and no dispute, deliberately and in November, so your outstanding balance stays a number you can trust.
- Ask your accountant how a write-off works on your basis - on cash basis there is usually nothing to deduct, because the income was never recorded.
- Set next season's rate in November so 30 days' notice lands the increase in January rather than February.
How do I get my pool service billing ready for year-end?
Work backward from December 31 in three passes, and start the first week of October rather than the first week of January. The billing side of a year-end close is five jobs, and four of them are easier in autumn than they will ever be again.
1. Reconcile what you invoiced against what you actually collected. Pull the year's invoices and the year's payments and match them. You are looking for three things: invoices still marked sent that were paid months ago and never recorded, payments that landed with no invoice attached, and visits that were serviced and never billed at all. On an 80-pool route this is an afternoon, and every item it turns up is either money or a correction.
2. Work the outstanding list while people are still paying. Whatever is left unpaid after the reconcile is your year-end receivable, and October is the month it collects best. Sort it oldest first, then separate the accounts still on the route from the ones that stopped service in the autumn. Those are two different conversations, and the second gets harder every week you wait.
3. Decide what you are writing off. Part of that list is not going to pay, and carrying it into a second year does nothing except make your receivable number a lie. Set a cutoff - 90 days past due with no contact and no dispute is the common line - and make an explicit decision on everything past it rather than letting it roll.
4. Allocate the year's chemical cost per account. This is the number that tells you which pools actually carried themselves, and it survives only if the doses were logged at the pool as they were added. Do it while the season is still fresh, because it is the input to the pricing decision you make in November.
5. Total what you paid anyone who is not an employee. Subcontracted repairs, a seasonal helper, whoever does your acid washes - add up what each was paid across the year and confirm you hold a signed W-9 for each of them. The totals are what your accountant needs in January, and chasing a W-9 in January is how a deadline gets missed.
Steps 1 and 2 collapse into a filter if the billing side was recorded as it happened rather than reconstructed now. PoolBoss keeps invoices, payments and what is still outstanding in one place and reports revenue invoiced against revenue collected, so the reconcile becomes a list you read instead of an afternoon of matching. That is also the argument for running this pass every October rather than every third year: it gets shorter each time.
October, November, December: what has to happen when
The order matters more than the effort. Each month can only do work the next one cannot, and running them out of sequence is what turns a short job into a January reconstruction.
October is for money that is still collectible. November is for decisions - what gets written off, what next season costs. December is for the clean cut: bill the month's work inside the month, stop the recurring charges that should not renew, and hand over a set of records rather than a shoebox.
Split across three months it is perhaps five or six hours of work in total. Compressed into the first week of January, with an accountant waiting on you, it is the same work done badly.
| Month | What you do | Why it has to happen then |
|---|---|---|
| October | Reconcile the year's invoices against payments; start working the outstanding list oldest first | Collection is easiest before the holidays, and a correction found now is one you are not making under a deadline |
| November | Make the write-off decisions; allocate chemical cost per account; set next season's rate and send notice | A January increase needs 30 days' written notice, and the write-off call needs the October chase to have finished |
| December | Bill December work in December; cancel recurring charges that should not renew; confirm contractor totals and W-9s | An invoice dated after December 31 lands in next year's books, and a recurring charge nobody stopped bills a cancelled customer in January |
Chase the receivables in October, because December collects badly
The calendar is the whole argument. December holds about 21 business days on paper, and the stretch from roughly the 20th is functionally three or four - people are away, offices are shut, and a property manager who owes you money is approving nothing until January. An invoice you start chasing on December 1 gets a fraction of the working days that the same invoice chased on October 6 would have had, and it competes with everyone else's year-end for attention.
Take a two-truck operator running 81 accounts across Tempe and Ahwatukee who starts the pass on October 6. Reconciling the year turns up $2,840 outstanding across nineteen invoices. Eleven of the nineteen belong to four seasonal accounts that stopped service in September and never had a final invoice chased - not disputes, just accounts that went quiet while nobody followed up. Nine of the nineteen clear before Thanksgiving, most on the first email, because the customer had simply never been asked a second time.
Those seasonal accounts are what this pass exists to catch. A customer still on the route gets a reminder every time you show up; a customer who stopped in September has no such trigger and drifts out of mind at exactly the rate their invoice ages.
Working the receivable list by aging bucket is the year-round habit, and the year-end pass is where you catch the accounts that habit missed because they stopped being visible. Most of what shows up here was preventable, and the fixes that stop late payments before they start are worth more than any chase. But the year you are closing is already spent: this pass is about collecting it, not preventing it.
Decide what is uncollectible and stop carrying it
Write off anything past 90 days with no contact and no dispute, and do it deliberately rather than by neglect. Carrying a dead invoice costs nothing in cash, but it corrupts the one number you judge collections by. If your outstanding balance includes $600 that was never going to arrive, every month you compare against it is measured off a false line.
In the Tempe example, two of the nineteen invoices - $190 between them - belong to a customer who sold the house in July. There is no forwarding address, the pool has a new owner who is not your customer, and the amount is smaller than the cost of pursuing it. That is a write-off, made once in November, rather than a line that quietly rides in the receivable ledger until next October.
The tax side is not what most operators assume, and it is worth asking about rather than guessing. If you report on a cash basis - as most single-truck and small multi-truck routes do - you never recorded that $190 as income, so there is nothing to deduct when it fails to arrive. The write-off is bookkeeping hygiene, not a deduction. On an accrual basis it works differently. Which one applies to you, and what a bad-debt write-off needs to be documented, is a question for your accountant rather than something to settle from a forum thread.
The monthly routine the year-end pass rests on is what keeps this decision small. When invoices and payments have been recorded as they happened, the uncollectible list in November is four or five lines you already recognise, not a discovery.
The year-end pass is where next year's price increase gets decided
November is the deadline for that decision, not January, because a rate change needs written notice before it takes effect and 30 days is the usual courtesy. Deciding in January means the new rate starts in February at the earliest, and you have given away a month of the increase on every account on the route.
The pass hands you the two inputs the decision needs. Chemical cost per account tells you which pools carried themselves and which did not, and on a route with a spread of pool sizes and sanitizer types that gap is usually wider than the owner expects. That number only exists if the doses were logged at the visit; PoolBoss totals it per pool from the visit records, and a full year of it is what turns a pricing hunch into a list of names.
The receivable work tells you which accounts are expensive in a different way. An account that pays at 75 days every single time costs you something real even at full price, and it belongs in the pricing conversation alongside the pools with high chemical demand.
That is a pricing decision with actual inputs, rather than the usual move of adding a few percent across the board because chemical prices went up. The January increase you decide in November is the same decision either way; the year-end pass just means you make it knowing which accounts can absorb it and which should have been repriced two seasons ago.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
When should I start closing out the year?
The first week of October, roughly twelve weeks before you actually need it finished. That sounds early until you work backward: collection gets materially harder once the holidays start, a price increase for January needs written notice sent in November, and December's own invoices cannot be issued until December. Only the last of those can happen late. Starting in October also spreads the work across three months in short sessions instead of compressing it into the first week of January, when your accountant is asking for numbers and you are reconstructing nine months of records from memory. If you have never run a structured year-end pass, start this year even if it is already November. A partial pass done late still catches the seasonal accounts that stopped service in the autumn, and that is where most of the recoverable money sits.
What do I do with invoices a customer will clearly never pay?
Write them off deliberately, at a cutoff you set in advance - 90 days past due with no contact and no dispute is the common line - rather than letting them ride into another year. The reason is not the money, which is already gone. It is that an outstanding balance padded with uncollectible invoices stops being useful: if you compare this month's receivables against last month's and both carry the same dead $600, you are measuring against a false baseline and will not notice a real problem forming. Make the calls as a batch in November, note the reason on each one, and keep that record. Whether the write-off does anything for you at tax time depends on whether you report on a cash or accrual basis, and that is a question for your accountant - on cash basis you generally never recorded the income, so there is nothing to deduct.
Do I need to send 1099s to my subcontractors?
Probably, if you paid anyone who is not an employee for services during the year - a subcontracted repair tech, a seasonal helper, whoever does your acid washes. The dollar threshold that triggers the requirement has moved in recent years, so confirm the current one with your accountant rather than working from a figure you remember. What is squarely yours to do, and what this pass is for, is the record: a running total of what each person was paid across the year, and a signed W-9 on file for each of them carrying their legal name and taxpayer ID. Chase the missing W-9s in November. The filing deadline falls at the end of January, and a subcontractor who has stopped working for you is far harder to reach in the third week of January than in the second week of November.
Should I invoice December work in December or January?
Invoice December work in December, dated in December, and send it before the 31st. The date on the invoice decides which year the revenue belongs to, and pushing a week of December service onto a January invoice quietly moves it into next year's books - which may or may not be what you want, and is a call your accountant should make rather than one that happens because you were busy. The practical risk is smaller and more irritating: an invoice for December work that goes out on January 8 arrives alongside the January recurring charge, the customer sees two bills in one week, and you spend twenty minutes proving you did not double-bill them. If your recurring invoices generate on a fixed day of the month, check what the December run actually produced before the year closes rather than after.
What records will my accountant actually ask for?
Four things, usually: total revenue invoiced and total actually collected for the year, a categorized list of expenses, bank and card statements to reconcile against, and totals for anyone you paid who is not an employee. Most of the pain in January comes from the first two being different numbers that nobody can explain - money collected with no invoice behind it, or invoices marked paid that no deposit matches. If your outstanding balance at December 31 is a figure you trust, the handover is a short conversation. Bring the list of write-offs and the reason for each, because your accountant will ask why the receivable dropped. If you use accounting software, the useful question to ask before January is not what to send but what format they want it in - most will tell you, and it takes one email in November.
How do I handle customers who prepaid for next season?
Keep that money separate in your head from money you have earned, because it is not the same thing. A customer who paid in November for service you will deliver in March has handed you cash for work you still owe them, and if they cancel in February most of it goes back. How prepayments are treated for tax and revenue-recognition purposes depends on your accounting basis and is genuinely a question for your accountant, not one to guess at. What you should do on the billing side is simple: record what the payment covers and which months it applies to, so the recurring charges for those months do not go out and bill the customer a second time. Double-billing a prepaid customer in March is the most common way this goes wrong, and it usually surfaces as a chargeback rather than a phone call.
