Most small businesses find out something's wrong with their numbers at the worst possible time — during a VAT return, or when a customer disputes a charge from six weeks ago. A short weekly check catches almost all of it early, before it compounds into something bigger. This isn't full bookkeeping; it's five minutes that make full bookkeeping easier later.
01Bank balance vs sales platform
Open your bank balance and your sales platform (Shopify, Stripe, whatever you actually sell through) side by side. They won't match exactly — payout timing lags sales — but the gap should be explainable. If it isn't, that's this week's thing to chase, while it's still one week's worth of transactions instead of a month's.
02Refunds and failed payments
Scan for refunds that were issued on your sales platform but haven't actually left your bank account yet, and payments marked "successful" that never settled. Both are common, both are easy to miss, and both get much harder to trace the longer they sit.
03Duplicate or unexplained charges
A quick scroll through the week's transactions for anything that appears twice, or anything you can't immediately attribute to a specific order or bill. Catching a duplicate charge in week one is a two-minute fix; catching it during a VAT reconciliation three months later is a much longer conversation with your accountant.
04What's due in the next two weeks
A quick look at upcoming bills and any tax payment dates. Not because you need to act yet — just so nothing lands as a surprise the day it's due.
05Set aside your tax portion
If you're VAT-registered or set money aside for tax, move that week's portion into a separate account as part of the review, rather than leaving it mixed in with operating cash. It's a small habit that prevents a much bigger problem: discovering at filing time that the money isn't actually there.
→When five minutes stops being enough
This checklist scales to maybe a few dozen transactions a week. Past that, or once you're running multiple sales channels and currencies, the manual version starts taking real hours instead of five minutes — which is usually the point where continuous, automated reconciliation (rather than a weekly batch) starts paying for itself.