Simple Book-Keeping

Why make book-keeping hard for yourself? There are lots of ways to make it simple.

• Keep your business and private finances completely separate. Set up separate bank and credit card accounts that you use only for business in’s and out’s and don’t use a personal bank account for banking business income nor paying business expenses.
• Use online accounting software that has built in bank feeds, so your business bank account transactions feed through automatically into your software, leaving you just to “explain” the transactions, i.e. into different categories.
• Don’t pay suppliers in round figure lump sums as that makes it hard to allocate the payments to multiple different invoices – just choose the invoices you want to pay and make payment for those only – that makes your book-keeping and your suppliers’ book-keeping a lot easier!
• Encourage your customers to do the same, i.e. pay exact bills rather than give you round sums against invoices they owe you!
• If you sell and buy from the same business, i.e. they’re both a supplier and a customer, never “contra” off sales invoices against purchase invoices – that’s notoriously hard to account for in some software, so instead agree to make payments to each other of the full amounts of the invoices owed.
• Use all the functionality of your software, i.e. take scans/photos of receipts/invoices, etc and link them to the transaction in the software so you don’t need to worry about keeping the paper records for the usual 6 years. Some software now “reads” the receipt if you scan using your phone and will automatically enter it into the software, some even remembering which allocation account to use.
• Keep it all up to date – nothing worse than coming to the quarter or year end to find you’ve not done it for months and you’re going to have to spend a few days catching up!
• If you don’t have time or aren’t interested in doing your own book-keeping, engage an accountant or book-keeper to do it for you!