Year-End for a Trades Business: A Complete Checklist

Year-end for a trades business is not the same job as year-end for a shop or an agency. Seven items do almost all the damage, and they are all trade-specific: work in progress (pågående arbeten, split into time-and-materials and fixed-price contracts), unbilled variations (ÄTA), stock sitting on the van, ROT claims you never filed, holiday pay owed to staff (semesterlöneskuld), tax allocation reserves (periodiseringsfond), and supplier invoices landing on the wrong side of 31 December. Work through those seven in that order, from your job records rather than from a pile of paper, and the rest of the close is housekeeping.

Why year-end for a trades business goes wrong

Your accounts are dominated by things that are half-finished on the balance sheet date. A job started on 14 December and finished on 9 January is real money, but it is not an invoice and it is not a cost line. Neither is 4,000 kr of cable in the back of a van. Neither is a variation the customer agreed verbally on site.

None of it shows on your bank statement, which is why it gets mis-stated. Two items in particular — pågående arbeten and unclaimed ROT — get looked at hardest, because both move taxable profit directly. Both are also reconstructable from job records: a timesheet, a material line, a signed quote and a completion date give you the number. A shoebox of receipts does not.

The checklist, in the order to do it

The order matters. Items 1–6 change the result. Item 7 is a decision you take on that result, so it goes last.

1. Pågående arbeten: time-and-materials versus fixed price

This is the item most often wrong, because the two contract types are handled differently and most firms run both.

Löpande räkning (time and materials)

You bill hours and materials as they happen, so at 31 December you have work done but not invoiced. Under the K2 rules (BFNAR 2016:10) there is a main rule, where income is recognised as the work is performed, and an alternative rule, where income follows what you have actually invoiced. K3 (BFNAR 2012:1) is stricter. Which you use is a policy decision, it must be applied consistently, and it is worth confirming with your accountant rather than changing it quietly year to year. Current wording is at bfn.se.

What your accountant needs is one line per open job: hours logged and not invoiced × your charge-out rate, plus materials issued and not invoiced. Twelve open jobs means twelve lines, not one guess.

Fast pris (fixed price)

Here you value cost, not revenue. A fixed-price job 60% done at year-end sits on the balance sheet at what it has cost you so far — labour, materials, subcontractors — with no profit taken, if you use the completed-contract approach. Percentage-of-completion instead takes a share of the contract value, and how you measure that share has to be defensible.

Two traps:

• A loss-making fixed-price job. If you already know a contract will lose money, the expected loss is recognised now, not when the job finishes. You do not get to defer bad news.
• Mixing methods within a category. You cannot value one fixed-price job one way and the next the other way because it suits the result.

Keep the two categories flagged on the job itself, not in your memory. At year-end you report them separately.

2. Unbilled ÄTA

ÄTA is the Swedish term for variations: ändrings-, tilläggs- och avgående arbeten. Under the standard construction contracts (AB 04, ABT 06) and, for consumer work, Hantverkarformuläret 17, they are supposed to be agreed before the work is done. On site they get agreed at 07:40 in a kitchen doorway, and then they evaporate.

Unbilled ÄTA is money you have earned. Two questions decide whether it goes in:

• Is it agreed? A written approval, an email, a signature on the change. If it is agreed, it is revenue or WIP.
• Is it disputed, or merely unpriced? Unpriced but accepted is still an asset. Genuinely disputed is not, until resolved.

The audit is uncomfortable: go through every open job and every job closed in the last quarter, and ask whether extra work was done that never reached an invoice. Most firms find several thousand kronor per open job. That is not a year-end trick, it is invoicing you forgot to do.

3. Stock on the van

Vans are warehouses nobody counts. Cable drums, fittings, consumables, that box of downlights bought for a cancelled job — all stock, all an asset at 31 December.

1. Count on 31 December, or as close as you can, and write down the date. If you count on the 28th, note the movements after.
2. One list per van and per store location, signed by whoever counted it.
3. Value at the lower of cost and net realisable value (lägsta värdets princip), FIFO. Cost means what you paid after supplier rebates, not the list price on the price file.
4. Write down what is dead. Obsolete stock is worth what you could actually get, which for a discontinued part is often zero. K2 also offers a standard obsolescence deduction as an alternative to itemising — check the current wording and be consistent.
5. Small totals. K2 has a threshold below which stock of minor value need not be recorded at all. It is low; check the current figure rather than assuming.

The rebate point matters. If your price file gives you 38% off list, valuing that stock at list overstates your assets and your profit, and you pay tax on the difference.

4. Outstanding ROT claims

For readers outside Sweden: ROT is a state subsidy for renovation work in private homes. The customer pays your invoice minus 30% of the labour cost, capped per person per year (the ceiling is shared with RUT, the household-services scheme, and the amount changes — check the current figure at Skatteverket). You then claim the deducted amount back yourself. Grön teknik, for solar, storage and EV charging, is a separate scheme with its own rates and claim.

• Every unclaimed deduction is a receivable. Invoice 40,000 kr net with a 12,000 kr ROT deduction and never file, and you are 12,000 kr short.
• The window closes. A begäran om utbetalning must reach Skatteverket by 31 January of the year after the customer paid. Miss it and the money is gone. Not delayed. Gone.

So the task is a reconciliation: list every invoice in the year carrying a ROT or grön teknik deduction, tick each against a filed and settled claim, and file the rest before 31 January. If Skatteverket paid less than you claimed, find out why now — it is usually a mis-typed personnummer or a property designation that does not match the register. Both fixable, but not in June.

5. Semesterlöneskuld

Under semesterlagen (1977:480) employees earn 25 days of holiday a year, and holiday pay is earned in one year and taken in the next. That earned-but-untaken pay is a debt on 31 December.

• The pay. Either the percentage rule (12% of qualifying pay in the earning year) or the same-pay rule, depending on your collective agreement and payroll setup. Payroll produces the number; your job is to check it has been posted.
• The contributions on top. Arbetsgivaravgifter fall due when holiday pay is paid out, so the accrual carries them too. Check the current rate at Skatteverket rather than reusing last year's.

If your staff sit under the Byggnads or Installatörsföretagen agreements, check whether the agreement adds anything above the statutory minimum. Several do.

6. Getting supplier invoices into the right year

A wholesaler delivers on 22 December and invoices on 4 January. The cost belongs to the old year, because that is when you took delivery. Book it by invoice date and you understate last year's costs, overstate last year's profit, and pay tax on the difference.

• Pull statements from every wholesaler and match each delivery note dated on or before 31 December to an invoice. Delivered but not invoiced goes in as an accrual.
• Check the other direction. An invoice dated 29 December for materials delivered in January belongs to the new year.
• Cash-basis bookkeepers still do this. Kontantmetoden is allowed below the turnover threshold, but bokföringslagen (1999:1078) requires all unpaid receivables and payables to be booked at the financial year end. The cash method saves you work in March, not in December.
• Reverse charge. Buying construction services from another construction business means omvänd skattskyldighet and no VAT on the invoice. Verify December's invoices were issued correctly, because fixing it later means a corrected VAT return.

7. Periodiseringsfond

A periodiseringsfond defers part of your taxable profit to a later year — useful with a lumpy order book, because a strong year can absorb a weak one. A limited company (aktiebolag) may set aside 25% of taxable profit; a sole trader or partnership 30% of the adjusted result. Each year's reserve reverses within six years, and companies pay a small standardised charge (schablonintäkt) on the opening balance, based on the government borrowing rate.

Two cautions: it is deferral, not a discount, and a reversal landing in a bad year on top of a bad year is how firms get squeezed. And it is a percentage of a number you do not have until items 1–6 are finished. Current rules are at skatteverket.se.

The dates you cannot move

• 31 January — ROT/RUT payment requests for work the customer paid for last year.
• 1 July / 1 August — income tax return for a company with a 31 December year-end, on paper or filed digitally.
• Seven months after year-end — annual report (årsredovisning) to Bolagsverket for a limited company.
• Seven years — how long you keep the underlying records under bokföringslagen, counted from the end of the calendar year the financial year ended in.

Reading this from outside Sweden

The structure holds anywhere; the labels change. Pågående arbeten is work in progress, and the fixed-price versus time-and-materials split exists under every framework. ÄTA is variations. ROT has no exact equivalent, but anyone working under CIS in the UK knows the pattern: money flowing through a tax authority, where unfiled paperwork means unrecovered cash against a hard deadline. Semesterlöneskuld is a holiday pay accrual. Periodiseringsfond is closest to a tax-smoothing reserve, which most countries do not offer — skip it and ask your accountant what year-end planning they do have.

Why job records beat paper

Every item above is a question about a specific job on a specific date. What was logged. What was agreed. What was delivered. What was claimed. If that lives in a system, the close is a set of reports. If it lives in notebooks and a WhatsApp thread, it is a reconstruction, and reconstructions are where the errors come from.

That is the honest case for running the job in one place. In OdinTask, an open job already carries its logged hours, material lines, signed quote and ÄTA, so the WIP list is a report rather than an archaeology project. And because ROT is calculated in the quote and the Skatteverket XML is generated from the invoice, the January claim reconciliation is a list you tick, not a hunt.

None of it replaces your accountant. It just means you hand them numbers instead of boxes.