Templates

These are the working documents we use ourselves and the ones our customers ask for most often. Each one is written for a real close cycle rather than as a marketing download, so there is no email wall, no watermark, and no upsell in the middle of the page. Copy what you need into your own spreadsheet or document system and adapt it to your business.

• Pay In and Pay Out Report Template
  A monthly money in, money out and net movement layout with fee, tax and transfer handling, matching the CSV Karchu exports.
• Expense Report Template
  A clean employee expense report that maps to standard tax categories. Includes mileage, per diem, and receipt attachment guidance.
• Monthly Bookkeeping Checklist
  The ten-minute monthly close routine for solo operators and small teams: statements, categorization, reconciliation, reporting.
• Tax Preparation Checklist
  Year-round tax prep checklist for US freelancers and small businesses, with the exact records to keep and quarterly estimate math.
• Bank Reconciliation Guide
  The complete bank reconciliation workflow with a worked example, exception patterns, and the sign-off sheet auditors expect.
• Financial Statement Examples
  Filled-in profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash-flow statements for a service business and a product business, side by side.

How to choose the right template

Start with the problem you are trying to solve rather than the document you think you need. If money is leaving the business and nobody can say what it was for, the expense report template is the first fix, because it forces a category, a date, a payer, and a receipt reference at the moment of spend instead of six weeks later. If the numbers exist but nobody checks them, the bank reconciliation guide is the right starting point, since reconciliation is the control that proves your records match reality. If the work happens but it happens inconsistently, use the monthly bookkeeping checklist to turn an ad hoc scramble into a repeatable routine. And if you are being asked for figures you cannot produce, the financial statement examples show what a finished profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statement look like when they are filled in properly.

A simple monthly rhythm

Most small teams do not need a complicated finance function. They need the same five steps, done in the same order, every month. Collect the statements for every account, including credit cards and payment processors. Turn each statement into rows you can filter and total. Assign a category to every row, leaving nothing in a catch-all bucket. Reconcile the closing balance on the statement against the total your records produce. Then write down the two or three numbers you care about, usually income, spend by category, and net cash movement, and compare them against the previous month.

The templates on this page map onto those steps directly. The bookkeeping checklist covers the sequence, the reconciliation guide covers step four, and the financial statement examples show what step five should produce. Done properly the whole cycle takes well under an hour for a business with a few accounts, and the first month is always the slowest because you are setting up categories that then apply automatically afterwards.

Categories are the part people get wrong

The single biggest source of pain at tax time is inconsistent categorization. The same coffee shop appears as meals in January, entertainment in March, and uncategorized in July, and by the time an accountant looks at it nobody remembers which was correct. Fix this by deciding your category list once, keeping it short, and writing down a one-line rule for each category so the decision is not made from memory every month. Ten to twenty categories is plenty for most businesses. Anything more granular is better handled with a tag or a note than with a new category.

When a transaction genuinely does not fit, resist the urge to invent a category on the spot. Put it in the closest existing bucket, add a note explaining the reasoning, and review those notes at quarter end. If the same note keeps appearing, that is your signal to add a category deliberately rather than reactively.

Keeping records that survive a review

A tax authority, a lender, or an acquirer will eventually ask you to support a number. What they want is boring and specific: the original statement, the transaction line, the category you assigned, and a receipt or invoice where one exists. Keep the source files, not just the summary. Name them consistently, usually by account and period, so that finding a document takes seconds instead of an afternoon. Retain everything for at least the period your jurisdiction requires, which is commonly six or seven years, and store it somewhere that is not a single laptop.

When to stop doing this by hand

Templates are the right tool while your volume is low and your accounts are few. The point at which manual work stops paying is usually somewhere around two hundred transactions a month, or the moment you are handling more than two or three accounts, or the first time a categorization mistake costs you real money at tax time. At that point the sensible move is to keep the same structure you built with these templates and let software do the mechanical part: reading the statement, extracting the rows, and applying your category rules consistently every single time.

That is exactly what Karchu does. You upload the statement, it produces the transaction rows, and your rules assign the categories. The templates here stay useful because they define the structure the software fills in. Read how the parsing works, or browse the learning centre for the background on OCR and automatic categorization.

Every template is written to be usable on day one. Paste into a spreadsheet, print it, or copy it into your own system. If you spot an error or want a template we do not yet publish, tell us.