Year-end checklist for service businesses: paperwork, customer list and January marketing

What belongs on a year-end checklist?

For a service company, the end of the year is when three kinds of loose ends come due at once. The tax paperwork for anyone you paid. The customer records that drifted all season while everyone was busy. And the marketing setup for January, which decides how fast the phone wakes up after the holidays. This checklist covers all three, from November through January, with the dates that matter.

It's general information, not tax or legal advice. Tax rules and deadlines change, and your situation may differ, so confirm the details with your accountant or tax preparer. Every IRS date below was read on IRS.gov in October 2026 and is linked so you can check it yourself.

Which IRS dates matter at year end?

These are the deadlines most small service companies with helpers, subcontractors or employees run into. They're for forms covering tax year 2026, filed in early 2027.

Some notes on the table:

• 1099-NEC timing. The IRS instructions say Form 1099-NEC must be filed on or before January 31, and that when a due date falls on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday, it moves to the next business day. January 31, 2027 is a Sunday.
• The $2,000 threshold is new. The same instructions say that for tax years beginning after 2025, the minimum reporting threshold for certain payments increased to $2,000 and may be adjusted for inflation beginning in 2027. If you remember the old $600 figure, that was the rule for earlier years.
• W-2s. The 2026 W-2 instructions give February 1, 2027 for both furnishing employee copies and filing with the Social Security Administration.
• Estimated tax. The IRS estimated tax FAQ lists the fourth payment period, September 1 to December 31, as due January 15.

Whether a helper is an employee or an independent contractor changes which form applies. That question has real consequences; ask your accountant rather than guessing.

November: get the paperwork moving

• Collect W-9s. The IRS describes Form W-9 as the form a payee uses to give their correct taxpayer identification number to the person who has to file an information return. Ask every subcontractor and non-employee helper you paid this year for one now. Chasing a former helper for a tax ID in late January is a miserable job.
• Total payments by payee. From your books or bank records, list what you paid each non-employee this year, so you know who crosses the threshold.
• Invoice everything. Close out finished jobs and send every unbilled invoice. Follow up on anything overdue. Cash collected in December is cash you have in January, the leanest month for many trades.
• Set holiday hours. Update your Google Business Profile, website and phone greeting for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. Google's special hours help page explains the settings.

December: close the books on the year's marketing

Pull the year's numbers

Before memories fade, pull these from your CRM and books: leads by source, jobs booked by source, revenue by source, close rate on quotes, average ticket by service, and how many customers booked more than once. If you track missed calls, add those. Each one is defined in our guide to the numbers worth tracking. You'll use them in next year's plan.

Clean the customer list

• Merge duplicates, fix bounced emails and dead phone numbers, and add missing addresses.
• Tag each customer with the services they bought this year and when, so next year's reminders can go to the right people.
• Check consent. Record each customer's text opt-in status, and honor every opt-out from this year. Our texting rules guide explains why this matters.
• Export a full backup of the customer list and job history and store it somewhere you control.

Audit account ownership

Make a list of every account your marketing depends on: domain registrar, website hosting, Google Business Profile, Google Analytics or Search Console if you use them, phone numbers and the phone provider, email provider, CRM, payment processor, social pages. For each, write down who the owner is and whether you can log in. If a former employee, relative or agency owns any of them, get ownership moved to the company now. Renew the domain for more than one year if your registrar allows it, and turn on auto-renew.

Cancel what didn't pay

List every marketing and software charge on the year's statements: ad platforms, lead subscriptions, directory listings, phone add-ons, apps nobody opened since spring. Next to each, write the jobs it booked, using the source numbers you just pulled. Anything that booked nothing, or cost more per booked job than your other sources, goes on a cancel-or-renegotiate list. Many of these renew automatically in January, so decide in December.

Reviews and photos

• Reply to any review from this year that never got a response.
• Save the year's best job photos, sorted by service and town, for next year's website pages and emails.

The holiday thank-you email

A short thank-you to this year's customers is one of the few emails nearly everyone opens kindly. Make it do three things: say thanks, list the dates the office is closed, and explain how to get on next season's schedule. If you're raising prices, this can be a fair place to say so, briefly and with the date. Keep it plain and personal, from the owner, with a photo of the crew if you have one.

If you sell gift certificates or prepaid seasons, mention them once. Don't turn the thank-you into a sale. For list setup and sending rules, see our email marketing guide.

January: the first two weeks

• Taxes: make the fourth-quarter estimated payment if you owe one. Send 1099-NEC and W-2 forms on time, with copies to the people who get them.
• Website: change the home page from the holiday message to what customers can book now. Update the copyright year in the footer; a stale year makes a site look abandoned.
• Business Profile: remove holiday hours if they were set as regular hours by mistake, and post a first job photo of the year.
• Phones: restore the normal greeting and routing.
• Prebooking: start the first campaign of the year. In the Sun Belt that can be spring work already; in the snow belt it's often storm service and early spring sign-ups. The winter checklist covers January in detail.

The one-page version

1. W-9s collected; contractor payments totaled.
2. Every finished job invoiced; overdue invoices chased.
3. Holiday hours set on the profile, site and phones.
4. Year's numbers pulled by lead source.
5. Customer list cleaned, tagged and backed up; consent recorded.
6. Every account owned by the company; domain renewed.
7. Reviews answered; best photos saved.
8. Thank-you email sent with next year's booking details.
9. Estimated tax, 1099s and W-2s handled by their dates.

If your customer list lives in several places and pulling the year's numbers takes a weekend, that's a sign the system is costing you. We build CRMs for service businesses where these reports take a minute.

Frequently asked questions