Ten Essential Ways To Starting off A Bookkeeping Practice

Systematize Your Bookkeeping, Filing And Financial Planning™

Organizing the business side of your business is just as important as planning out your marketing schedule or production schedule. In this post, let’s get everything organized into a system that you keep running all year long!

DAILY:

-Keep your desk organized! Have an inbox, filing box, and projects files to keep your main work area cleaned up by the end of every day. I find it so important for my creativity to have mental AND physical “white space”.

-If tracking time…keep the timesheet up to date daily. It sure is hard to remember what happened at the end of the week!

-Entry into your accounting software (QuickBooks) depends on the volume of transactions you do on a daily basis. I assume that you’ll have an assistant if you’ve got enough transactions that you need to enter sales receipts, invoices, bills, credit card receipts, etc. on a daily basis. (see WEEKLY entry below)

-As needed-enter sales receipts and invoice information to give to clients and customers for sales made that day.

-As needed-receive inventory, ship products, place inventory orders

-If you have a cash register: daily reconciliation of sales and paid outs is highly recommended.

-Deposit cash receipts daily especially if you have a large amount of transactions.

Weekly:

Set aside a few hours once a week to do all of the bookkeeping stuff (which isn’t done daily):

This sequence is the sequence I suggest for QuickBooks users

-Update timesheets if tracking time

-Pay employees if applicable

-Create and send invoices (some will be using the time entered on the timesheet)

-If you have inventory, receive inventory against bills

-Enter bills that came in during the week

-Pay bills and send checks

-Enter credit card receipts

-Receive payments against your accounts receivable

-Enter deposits in QuickBooks and on deposit slip

-FILE all of the weekly paperwork. Don’t let the filing overtake your office!

-Purge unneeded paperwork at least on a weekly basis.

Monthly:

-Make sure all deposits, invoices, bills, credit card receipts, and checks are recorded in QuickBooks for the month.

-Reconcile the following with the monthly statement: Checking accounts, savings accounts, Paypal accounts

-Print out the following reports: Profit and Loss BY CLASS for the month, Cash Flow, Budget vs Actual report, Balance Sheet, Sales by item/customer

-BONUS report: check out your time report (if you’re tracking your time).

MONTHLY: How did you do?

Now, look at the reports and review the month’s performance. This is soooo important! Over time you’ll see where you can cut things out, or should be spending more time on certain products or services since they make up the largest part of your revenue. Remember to ask yourself the following questions:

-Where is the budget way off? Why?

-How were sales compared to expected?

-Are there any areas of sales you’d like to concentrate more on? What needs to be done to bring those sales up?

-Are there any areas of sales you should drop?

-Look at the time you’ve spent on certain customers or areas of your business this month. How did that time translate to sales? Where should you change your time budget for next month?

-Can you hand off some of the things you’ve been doing to an assistant?

-Look at the cash flow report and the projections for the next month.

-Change your projections for next month based on the information you’ve gained off of this month’s reports

-Look at your savings and debt paydown goals. How are you doing? Do your goals still look reasonable?

-If you have employees, get those monthly reports and tax payments out.

-If you have sales taxes due, send out the report and payment.

Quarterly:

-Setup a meeting with More helpful hints a tax advisor or CPA. Someone who can look at your business from a different perspective and give you feedback about what’s working, and what you can do to change what’s not working.

-For those with employees, get the quarterly tax reports out.

Yearly:

-Process all of the yearly reports for employees, subcontractors, sales taxes, and other state reporting requirements.

-Meet with your tax planner plenty early so you can gather your information together in a timely manner

-Reconcile all bank accounts, credit cards, and loan accounts to the year end statements

-Count your inventory

-Make sure your accounts receivable number is right. Are all the customer invoices outstanding listed properly?

-Make sure your accounts payable number is right. Are all unpaid vendor invoices listed properly?

-Print out all of the same reports you do monthly. This has now become easy!

Do you have a system you follow for your bookkeeping, filing, and financial planning?

Rebecca Tervo, CPA is a Certified QuickBooks Proadvisor who helps small biz owners run the money side of their business. Get her free video lesson: “The Top 10 Bookkeeping Mistakes Businesses make and How You Can Avoid Them” at http://products.tervofinancialfitness.com/10-bookkeeping-mistakes