There's a familiar pattern in bookkeeping: you open a client's Xero file two days before a BAS is due and discover forty unreconciled transactions, a bank feed that stopped three weeks ago, and an unposted pay run. None of that was urgent last month. All of it is urgent now. A proper health check habit is the difference between finding these things on your schedule versus the ATO's.
What a real health check actually covers
- Bank feed status — is it actually connected and current, not silently stalled?
- Unreconciled transactions — how many, and how old is the oldest one?
- Overdue invoices and unpaid bills — a cash-flow signal as much as a bookkeeping one
- Unposted pay runs — these compound if left, and are easy to miss until STP lodgement
The problem with doing this manually
Checking all of this by hand means logging into each client's file, clicking through several screens, and doing it again next month. For a practice with even a dozen clients, that's a real chunk of a week — which is exactly why it tends to get skipped until a deadline forces it.
A simple cadence that actually holds up
The practices that stay ahead of this don't check more often out of discipline — they check less often but automatically. A traffic-light view across every client (green, amber, red) that you glance at weekly catches problems while they're still small, without needing to open every file every time.
How the Health Check feature handles this
Bookkeeper Dashboard pulls live data from each client's Xero or QuickBooks file and scores it green, amber, or red automatically — unreconciled transactions, overdue invoices, unpaid bills, bank feed status, unposted pay runs, all in one view across your whole client list. Sage writes a plain-English summary of what needs attention, so you know before you open the file whether today is a five-minute check or a real job.