Shopify Year-End Closing in Moneybird: Step-by-Step Guide

If you run a Shopify store, you are probably familiar with the quarterly close: checking invoices, processing VAT, reconciling accounts. But year-end closing in Moneybird is a different matter. It is not simply doing the fourth quarter one more time. On top of all the standard steps you take every quarter, you also need to review the entire financial year, clear outstanding items, and bring your bookkeeping into the right state for your annual accounts and tax return.

Year-End Closing Is More Than a Quarterly Close

At year end, everything that was slightly off during the year comes together. A return from March that was not booked correctly, an invoice from October that was never marked as paid, a small recurring cost booked in the wrong period: all of those need to be found and corrected before you can close the year. With a quarterly close you can push minor discrepancies into the next quarter. At year end, there is no next quarter.

For Shopify store owners, this challenge is especially complex. Shopify generates a continuous stream of orders, returns, gift cards, discount codes, and payment data. All of that information needs to land correctly in Moneybird. The more months that pass without structured reconciliation, the more work the year-end close will be. A solid quarterly routine lays the foundation for a smooth year-end. For a structured quarterly approach, see our article on the Shopify quarterly closing checklist for Moneybird.

Verify All Shopify Orders for the Full Year

The first step in your year-end closing is to verify that all Shopify orders for the entire year are reflected as invoices in Moneybird. In Shopify, you can export a complete sales report with all orders for the year via Analytics. In Moneybird, export all sales invoices for the same period. The total net revenue in both exports should match.

In practice, there is often a small discrepancy. This can be caused by test orders, orders that were cancelled after the invoice was created, or gift card purchases that were processed differently from regular orders. Work through the discrepancies methodically and correct them one by one. With hundreds or thousands of orders per year, even a small percentage difference can represent a meaningful amount, and it is far better to discover it now than when your accountant reviews the annual accounts.

Also verify that returns are correctly processed. Every return recorded as a credit note in Moneybird should correspond to a refund or credited order in Shopify. A return that exists in Shopify but not in Moneybird distorts both your revenue and your VAT liability for the full year.

Full-Year VAT Reconciliation

Once you have confirmed that all orders are in Moneybird, do a complete VAT reconciliation for the year. Add up your four quarterly VAT returns and compare the total with the sum of all VAT in Moneybird over the same period. If there is a difference, one of three things happened: a VAT amount was booked incorrectly, a correction was made in Moneybird after a return was already submitted, or a transaction was booked in the wrong period.

If you sell to EU consumers outside the Netherlands and use the OSS scheme, also check that your annual OSS total is reconcilable. Each quarterly OSS return contains sales by country and by VAT rate, and the total should match the OSS-coded transactions in Moneybird. The same systematic approach that works for a single quarter also works at the full-year level. The methods we covered in the article on the VAT return for Shopify stores in Moneybird apply equally to the annual reconciliation.

Open Invoices and Bad Debt Write-Offs

Year end is the right time to go through your open invoice list. Any invoice that has been outstanding for more than ninety days and has not been paid is probably not going to be paid. You have two options: send a final demand and hope for payment, or write off the invoice as a bad debt. In Moneybird, you write off a bad debt by creating a credit note. This removes the outstanding amount from your debtors list and records it as an expense.

Do not skip this step. Open invoices that never get resolved inflate your debtors balance and give a misleading picture of your liquidity. Your accountant will ask about large or old outstanding items, so it is better to deal with them yourself before the year-end review. A clean debtors list as of December 31 is also necessary for an accurate balance sheet in your annual accounts.

Check Your Ledger Accounts Before the Annual Accounts

Before handing your books to an accountant, do a systematic review of your chart of accounts in Moneybird. Every account that should have a zero balance at year end should indeed be zero. Clearing accounts used during the year for payments in transit, prepaid expenses, or accruals need to be cleared. If a clearing account still carries a balance, find out why and book the necessary correction entries.

Also check your bank accounts in Moneybird: does the balance as of December 31 exactly match the actual bank balance on that date? If there is a difference, identify and correct it before exporting. A correct bank reconciliation is the foundation of reliable annual accounts. If you have used an automated connection between Shopify and Moneybird throughout the year, many of these checks will be much simpler because transactions are booked consistently without manual errors. For more on setting up that automated workflow, see our article on automating Shopify accounting with Moneybird.

What Your Accountant Needs from Moneybird

Once your bookkeeping is clean and reconciled, you can export the data your accountant needs. Most accountants start with a trial balance as their entry point. In Moneybird, you generate this via Reports. Export the balance sheet and profit and loss account as of December 31, along with the open items lists for debtors and creditors.

In addition, most accountants want to see bank statements and the corresponding cash book exports so they can verify the completeness of the bookkeeping. If you hold inventory, you also need to provide the year-end inventory valuation as a journal entry. Most Shopify stores that sell physical goods use FIFO or weighted average as their valuation method. Moneybird does not manage inventory itself, so this calculation is done in a separate report.

Finally, once you have completed the year-end close and the exports are ready, lock the financial year in Moneybird to prevent any new entries from landing in the closed period. This ensures that invoices or corrections that arrive afterward are not accidentally posted to the wrong year.