When it comes to taking care of your business finances, it’s all too easy to leave most of it. Until it’s time for a visit to the accountant, or tax time. Then you’re left in a mad panic as you try to get everything sorted at the last minute. And more likely than not, you’ll end up with mistakes, missing information and a whole lot of stress. On the other hand, if you regularly take a small amount of time to keep on top of your business finances, you’ll find it’s less daunting, more accurate and visits to the accountant become more productive and less fraught.
Here are 5 ideas to help you stay in control:
Do it straight away
Whenever you make a financial transaction, enter it into your accounting program, or record it in a central place so you’re not chasing around receipts, or trying to remember what a cost was for. The longer you leave it, the more likely it is that you will lose receipts and miss out invoicing disbursements or claiming tax deductions.
Schedule time to check in
Depending on how many transactions you have, put an hour or so every week or month to spend some time with your accounting system. Use the time to make sure everything is entered correctly, balance the accounts and look at some basic reports to make sure your business is tracking well financially.
Get professional help
Don’t think you have to do it all yourself. If you are really time poor. Or if numbers give you the heebie jeebies. Find a bookkeeper to take care of your finances. When you consider the cost of doing it yourself against the cost of a bookkeeper, it will be more than worth your while.
Don’t overcomplicate
There are a lot of accounting programs out there that do some pretty amazing things. However, if you’re a small business with simple incomings and outgoings you’ll probably find it easy to get in over your head. If you’re using a system that’s too complicated, you won’t use it. Or you’ll get confused and make mistakes and have to spend time sorting them out. So go for the simplest method that works for you. For the first couple of years of my business I used a very basic Excel spreadsheet. Even now, I just use a simple invoicing program that allows me to enter outgoings as well.
Use technology
There are a lot of programs available to help keep you on track. Not only the accounting packages like Xero or MYOB, there are programs such as Shoeboxed, Receipts that works with Evernote and even Google Drive as well as many more to help you with receipts. For apps that will allow you to keep track of expenses on the go, check out this list from American Express for some ideas.
So there you go, 5 things you can do that will help you keep on top of your business finances. None of them are difficult and none of them should take a huge amount of time. And if they do take a huge amount of time, go back and re-read the third item. It will probably be a great investment for you, regardless of the size of your business.
