Continuing political committees: How to close out the year

Continuing political committees "close out" at the end of every calendar year. In preparation for the end of year C-4 report due on Jan. 10, 2019, there are a few steps that you can take in order to clean up your campaign for the year.

• Check for any outstanding checks. You may have written contribution checks to candidates or other PACs earlier in the year that were not cashed or were lost in the mail. You will need to review the specific circumstances for each expenditure to see if you are able to reissue the check.
• Check your ending balance for the year. Look at the total appearing on Line 18 of your December 2018 C-4 and compare it to your actual bank balance. If there is a significant difference you may need to make some corrections to your earlier reports and file amendments. Un-cashed checks, duplicate entries, missing bank interest or fees could all be to blame for the discrepancy. Additionally, negative balances on Line 18 are not appropriate and usually indicate that something has not been reported accurately at some point in the campaign. Since you must use the ending balance from 2018 as the carry forward amount for 2019, your December C-4 will need to be accurate.
• If you are using ORCA to electronically file, clean up your contact list to prepare for importing. You can import your list(s) of contacts from the 2018 ORCA data into your newly created 2019 ORCA campaign so you don't have to re-type them. The import process will go smoothly if you don't have any errors in your current list. Use the "browse" button found in the bottom right corner of ACCOUNTS>CONTACTS>INDIVIDUALS (or the appropriate choice) to review your list. Delete any empty lines you find in your list. Be sure all your "couple" contacts have both an appropriate "couple name" and separate unique contact entries.
• File your last C-4 for the calendar year. This report is due no later than Thursday, January 10th. It is important to complete this final task for the calendar year carefully as you will be using the cash on hand balance from Line 18 of this C-4 as your beginning balance in 2019.
• Last, if you are an ORCA user, make a backup of your 2018 campaign. Save this backup in a location other than the computer that you are using to file. Remember that if something should happen to your computer everything on it will be jeopardized including your campaign information. If you will be passing the task of filing on to someone else you should provide this backup to them.