CHECKLIST
Quarterly Routine Checklist
About an hour a quarter if you keep up during the months, and most of a day if you do not. Built around the Making Tax Digital deadlines of 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May. Even if you are not yet in scope, the rhythm is the one to get into.
- Five sections, nineteen checks, fifty five minutes
- What to do monthly, at the quarter end, and by the 7th
- The business questions a quarter is long enough to answer
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Who this checklist is for
Freelancers and sole traders who want one repeatable routine that covers the bookkeeping, the filing and the questions about their own business, rather than three separate habits that only two of them ever keep.
Your bookkeeping happens the week the deadline does
That is the expensive version. Recording and categorising as you go turns the quarter end into a reconciliation rather than a reconstruction, and under Making Tax Digital it is the requirement rather than the preference. The first section is the ten minutes a month that make the other fifty painless.
You know who owes you but not how long they have owed it
Those are different lists and only the second one gets paid. Age the unpaid invoices oldest first, chase on the day terms pass rather than three weeks after, and check the VAT threshold while you are in there. It is £90,000 across any rolling twelve months, so it can be crossed mid-year on last autumn’s work.
You set your rate once and have never checked the assumption
Every rate rests on a guess about how much of your week is billable. The last section measures it instead: utilisation for the quarter, fees over hours by client, and a decision on whether the rate changes. Once a year is a decision. Never is a pay cut taken slowly.
FACTS
The one figure worth the whole review
Fees divided by hours, per client, including the hours you did not bill: the calls, the revisions, the chasing. The biggest client is very often not the best one, and a quarter is the shortest period long enough to show it. A client well under your effective rate is being subsidised by everyone else you work for.
19 checks
Five sections
55 minutes
If you kept up during the months
FACTS
Add the days and divide once
Do not average the monthly percentages when you work out utilisation. Averaging weights a short month the same as a long one, and the answer can land either side of the truth. It is not reliably optimistic, which is worse than a bias you could correct for, so add the billable days, add the working days, and divide once.