Your Monthly Financial Review: The Dates Are Already Fixed

Most advice about a monthly financial review starts by telling you to pick a day. The first Monday, or the first week after close — something regular, on your calendar, protected from interruption.

That advice is not wrong so much as it is beside the point. If you run a contracting business in Florida, several of the dates that should govern your monthly rhythm are already fixed by someone else, and they are not on the first Monday. One of them is not even on the day everyone thinks it is.

A review scheduled without reference to those dates tends to land after the decisions it was supposed to inform. A review scheduled around them does double duty: you look at the numbers while you can still act on them, and you look at them while the filings that depend on them are still open.

Build the review around filing obligations

Three fixed points shape a Florida contractor's month:

• The federal payroll tax deposit — the 15th, or twice a week, depending on which schedule you are on.
• The Florida sales and use tax payment — effectively the business day before the 20th, at 5 p.m. Eastern.
• The month-end close itself, which has to finish before either of the above can be checked against anything.

None of these moves to suit you. The useful question is not "when should I review the numbers" but "what is the last moment a review can still change an outcome," and the answer is already on the calendar.

5 p.m. ET, the Business Day Before the 20th

This is the date most often gotten wrong, because the published deadline and the operative deadline are not the same day.

Florida sales and use tax returns and payments are due on the 1st and late after the 20th of the month following each reporting period (Florida Department of Revenue). Make a sale in January, and the return and payment are due February 1 and late after February 20.

But if you pay electronically — or file and pay electronically at the same time — you must initiate the payment and receive a confirmation number no later than 5 p.m. ET on the business day prior to the 20th. Not the 20th. The business day before it.

For most businesses that are required to pay electronically, the real deadline is therefore the 19th, and earlier when the 19th falls on a weekend.

The weekend rule compounds the confusion, because it runs in the direction people expect while applying to the cases they are not in:

• If you electronically file a return without, or separately from, a payment, and the 20th falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or state or federal holiday, the return is timely if you get the confirmation number on or before the first business day following the 20th.
• If you file paper returns, and the 20th falls on a weekend or holiday, the return and payment are timely if postmarked or hand-delivered on the first business day following the 20th.

Neither of those extends the electronic payment initiation deadline. So the rule of thumb "if it falls on a weekend it rolls to Monday" is true for the return and false for the money, which is the half that carries the penalty.

There is a small reward for getting it right. File and pay electronically and on time, and you may deduct a collection allowance of 2.5% of the first $1,200 of tax due, capped at $30. Fail to file or pay electronically when you are required to, and it is $10 for the filing and $10 for the payment, on top of anything else that applies.

Whether you are required to file monthly at all, and whether the electronic mandate has reached you, depends on volume thresholds we covered in the thresholds that mean a bookkeeping system has been outgrown. What gets taxed in the first place — the real property improvement rules that decide whether a contractor collects tax or pays it — is a separate subject with its own article.

The 15th — or Twice a Week

Federal employment tax deposits run on one of two schedules, and which one you are on was decided before the year started.

Monthly schedule depositors deposit employment taxes on wages paid during a month by the 15th day of the following month (IRS Publication 15, section 11).

Semiweekly schedule depositors work on a rolling two-day rhythm:

• Wages paid Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday → deposit by the following Wednesday
• Wages paid Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday → deposit by the following Friday

A semiweekly depositor does not have a monthly payroll deadline to build a review around, which is exactly why the review needs a deliberate date instead of a convenient one.

Missing a deposit is priced on a ladder, and it starts immediately:

• 2% — deposits 1 to 5 days late
• 5% — deposits 6 to 15 days late
• 10% — deposits 16 or more days late, or amounts paid directly to the IRS instead of deposited
• 15% — amounts still unpaid more than 10 days after the first IRS notice

Late deposit penalties run on calendar days from the due date of the liability, not business days. A deposit that slips over a long weekend is not free.

One more date has no schedule at all: accumulate $100,000 in employment taxes on any single day and it must be deposited the next business day regardless of which schedule you are on. That rule, and the lookback test that sets your schedule for the year, are covered in the thresholds article.

The Quarterly Layer: Form 941, RT-6, and FUTA

Four times a year, the monthly rhythm gets an additional layer. All three of these land in the same window:

• Form 941 (Employer's Quarterly Federal Tax Return) — due April 30, July 31, October 31, and January 31.
• Form RT-6 (Florida Employer's Quarterly Report, reemployment tax) — due by the end of the month following the quarter, so the same four dates (Florida Department of Revenue).
• FUTA deposit — required only if the undeposited amount is over $500 at quarter end. If your FUTA liability for a quarter is $500 or less, you do not deposit it; you carry it forward and add it to the next quarter's figure. FUTA stops accruing on an employee once their taxable wages reach $7,000 for the calendar year.

The FUTA carryforward is worth knowing precisely, because it is the one item on this list that legitimately does nothing in most quarters for a small crew — and then produces a deposit obligation in the quarter the accumulated figure finally crosses $500.

Note that the quarterly and annual federal calendar — the 1040, 1065, 1120-S, W-2 and 1099 dates — lives on our tax due dates page. This article is about the monthly cycle underneath it.

What Has to Be Closed Before You Can Review Anything

The draft version of every monthly-review article says "gather your reports." That sentence is doing an enormous amount of work, because the reports are only as good as the close behind them, and an unclosed month produces numbers that are confidently wrong rather than obviously missing.

Before a review is worth sitting down for:

• Bank and credit card accounts reconciled through month-end. Not "mostly." An unreconciled account means the cash figure is an estimate.
• Accounts receivable current, with invoices actually issued for work completed. Unbilled work makes a month look worse than it was; work billed and not recorded makes it look better.
• Accounts payable entered, including subcontractor invoices received but not yet paid. This is the single most common reason a P&L looks strong and the following month looks terrible.
• Payroll posted for the period, including employer taxes, not just net pay.
• Job costs coded to jobs — materials, labor, and subcontractor costs assigned to the right job rather than sitting in a general expense account.
• Sales tax collected reconciled to what the return will report, before the return is filed rather than after.

If any of these is routinely late, that is the thing to fix. A review process built on top of a close that does not finish is a meeting that generates opinions instead of decisions.

The Review Itself: Four Reports, Thirty Minutes

Once the close is done, the review is short, and each part of it has a deeper treatment elsewhere rather than a paragraph here.

• Profit and loss — revenue, gross margin, and the large expense categories, compared to the prior month and to the same month last year. Look for trend and exception, not line-by-line. On turning this into decisions rather than a record, see bookkeeping systems for better business decisions.
• Cash position and the next 30 days — the current balance against expected in and out. For contractors this is a discipline of its own, and the 13-week rolling version of it is in cash flow forecasting basics. What progress billing and retainage do to the timing is in retainage and progress payments.
• Active job profitability — which jobs are tracking and which are drifting. The reason "costs to date" is a poor answer to that question, and what to use instead, is the whole subject of job costing on in-progress work.
• Receivables and payables aging — who is slow, and what is about to come due. Aging receivables and a large payable landing in the same week is the usual explanation for a cash squeeze that the P&L gave no warning of.

Then write down one or two actions with names and dates attached. A review that ends without a decision was a reading exercise.

Put the Dates on the Calendar

A monthly financial review does not need to be long, and it does not need to be sophisticated. It needs to happen before the dates that are already fixed, on numbers from a month that is actually closed.

Put the deposit date, the sales tax date, and your own close deadline on the calendar first. Then put the review a few days ahead of the earliest of them, which is where it can still change something.

If you would like help building that cycle — or simply finding out which deposit schedule and filing frequency you are currently on — contact KDM Accounting Services.