How to do bookkeeping for small businesses: A step-by-step guide

Look at the item in question and determine what account it belongs to. For example, when money comes from a sale, it will credit the sales revenue account. Making sure transactions are properly assigned to accounts gives you the best view of your business and helps you extract the most helpful reports from your bookkeeping software. Single-entry bookkeeping is simpler — you only have to record each transaction once. This can be sufficient for very small businesses that aren’t incorporated.

• A bookkeeper who can effectively set up and leverage various automations, such as software integrations, can help you minimize mistakes.
• If your business incorporates brick-and-mortar sales with online sales, payroll will be different between the two.
• Talk to businesses in your area to see what they are currently paying for bookkeeping services.
• By being proactive with your bookkeeping, you’ll save your small business time when it comes to taxes.
• Finally, subtract your total expenses from your total revenue to get your bottom line.
• With a cash account, you will track all of the business transactions and record cash payments, withdrawals, and deposits.

For every new small business, it might not make sense to hire a bookkeeper straight away. But as soon as you see growth in your company, it will soon be essential to have a highly detailed, consistent bookkeeping approach. While you might be able to do this yourself to start as a small business owner, it’s best to make the investment in a qualified, professional bookkeeper to ensure your success in the long term. The information you get from your receipts should go into some kind of ledger (usually a digital option). Create a detailed report that displays quarterly cash flow projections. This template allows you to track the variance between your projected and actual cash position for each month and calculates total cash payments and net cash change.

Cash Account & Recording Sales

The accrual accounting method records financial transactions when they occur rather than when cash exchanges hands. Accounting software eliminates a good deal of manual data entry, making it entirely possible to do your own bookkeeping. However, it can be difficult to catch up if you fall behind on reconciling transactions or tracking unpaid invoices.

• No matter what type of business you operate, an understanding of bookkeeping best practices is essential for keeping your business running smoothly, now and in the future.
• Debits are recorded on the left side of an accounting ledger, while credits are recorded on the right side of the ledger.
• The complexity of the bookkeeping process depends on the size of your business and the number of transactions conducted daily, weekly, and monthly.
• While accounting encompasses these data-gathering duties, this field also tends to involve analyzing the numbers and making profit and loss projections.
• As illustrated above, between the two basic methods of accounting (cash or accrual), you can best account for prepaid expenses using the accrual method.
• Other smaller firms may require reports only at the end of the year in preparation for doing taxes.
• This accounts payable template helps you track the money your business owes to vendors.

We recommend using one of the kinds of bookkeeping systems that we mentioned earlier to prepare these reports because of how much time it will save you. Bookkeeping is the process of recording all financial transactions made by a business. Bookkeepers are responsible for recording, classifying, and organizing every financial transaction that is made through the course of business operations. The accounting process uses the books kept by the bookkeeper to prepare the end of the year accounting statements and accounts. Maintaining bookkeeping tasks is essential for the stability and success of small businesses.

Why Outsource Your Monthly Bookkeeping Services

Once your business gets under way, you can make a monthly budget to track your cash inflows and outflows. You’ll also need to give some thought to how you plan to invoice your clients for your services. That includes choosing bookkeeping examples for small business when to send invoices, how quickly you expect them to be paid, and which payment methods you’ll accept. This excel bookkeeping template is a cash book specifically for tracking income and expenses off a credit card.

Finally, subtract your total expenses from your total revenue to get your bottom line. You’ll want to pay extra attention to your income statement (also known as a profit and loss statement). It helps you better understand what types of expenses and income are impacting your bottom line (aka your net income), and will be needed at tax time. Single-entry bookkeeping is simpler, and is usually used by businesses with few or no employees, minimal plans to scale, and no need for in-depth financial reporting.

Bookkeeping 101: Bookkeeping Basics for Small Businesses

Excel is a fantastic spread sheeting program and if you already have it on your computer, you already have the means to start your bookkeeping. You can also use a free version of Excel by opening a Microsoft account. These free Excel bookkeeping templates can be used by anyone and any small business.

Every financial transaction should have a line item in the general ledger, which tracks everything in one place. The general ledger notates the account number to which the debit or credit is applied. The best accounting software automates a lot of the process in journal entries for regular debits and credits to help eliminate possible errors in data entry. As a small-business owner, solid bookkeeping is the best way to ensure that you get the most out of your return. QuickBooks accounting software can help you ease into the accrual method of accounting by ensuring that your records are accurate, based on information from your credit card or payment apps. If you plan on growing your business in the future, you’ll probably want to get used to using this method.