There is a cycle that repeats every month at many SMEs: the company sends documents, the accountant sends back questions, someone goes looking, finds half of it, and the close drags on. Nobody is doing their job badly — what's missing is a shared method.
One structure, always the same
The exact structure matters less than the consistency. One that works well:
- Sales — invoices issued, credit notes.
- Purchases — supplier invoices, split by month.
- Bank — statements for every account, in digital format.
- Payroll — payslips, holiday and absence schedules.
- Employee expenses — identifying who and which project.
- Other — contracts, insurance, leases, anything with a multi-year impact.
File naming matters more than it seems. A simple convention — date, supplier, amount — lets you find any document in seconds, and heads off most questions before they're asked.
Employee expenses are the main leak
This is the line item that most often turns up two or three months late, and the one that most distorts management numbers. A lunch paid for in May that only gets entered in August means three months of figures are wrong.
It is fixed with one rule, known to everyone: expenses submitted by the 25th, or they go into next month. No exceptions — because the first exception destroys the rule.
Scanning is not organising
Having everything as a PDF in a shared folder solves nothing if the files are called "scan_0034.pdf". Digitising only creates value when it comes with structure and naming attached.
It is worth using what already exists: in Portugal, purchase invoices issued against the company's tax number show up on the Finance Portal (Portal das Finanças). Cross-checking that list against what was handed to the accountant is the fastest way to find out what's missing, and it usually turns up quite a bit.
What changes once this works
The most visible effect is not the time saved, although that is real. It is that the conversation with the accountant changes subject: it stops being about missing documents and starts being about decisions — whether it's worth bringing an investment forward, what the tax impact of an option is, how to prepare a financing application.
It is the same principle as what is and isn't in the accountant's scope: hand over well, get back better.