Florida Investment Network


Recent Blogs


Pitching Help Desk


Testimonials

"This platform is the best I have come across. The response has been consistently superlative, in both quantity and quality. Thank you for everything! "
Anthony L.


 BLOG >> Recent

Monthly Bookkeeping and Accounting [Management
Posted on January 30, 2015 @ 07:47:00 AM by Paul Meagher

For many small businesses and startups this is a critical time of the year to establish good bookkeeping habits. The end of the first month of the year is when you should make sure that your books for the first month of 2015 are up to date. Your "books" don't have to be entered into a professional accounting package although that would be nice if you can manage it. As long as you are keeping track of all your business related income and expenses for the month, filing all of your receipts by month and/or by bill type, recording the beginning mileage for your vehicle, etc... so that when tax time comes next year you are not scrambling through a disorganized mass of receipts, statements, invoices, and emails to figure out your income and expenses for 2015. You can also have multiple folders per month to organize things a bit more.

The end of each month is a natural time to take stock of what you've done business wise that month. You can record your income and expenses in a scribbler, in a text file, in a spreadsheet, in a database, in an online book keeping service, or in an accounting program. It doesn't matter at this point, the important thing is to create a record of some form that journals all the important business transactions from January 2015. If you wait until next month, your memory for what you did in January 2015 will begin fade, your pile of receipts will build up more, and the task of bookkeeping will become increasingly uninviting. I'm talking from experience here and this advice is as much to myself as it is to you.

Getting into a monthly habit of making sure your business bookkeeping is up to date, even if your transactions are recorded in a scribbler, sets the stage for making ongoing improvements to your bookkeeping systems as each month goes by this year. It is also not too late to register a business to make filing your income taxes more logical next year.

The simplest thing you can do to get started is to create a folder (or folders) for all your statements and receipts that is titled "January 2015" (add extra labelling if you have multiple folders). Put a copy of all relevant transactions, statements, invoices, receipts and so on for January in this folder. You can arrange your system differently later on but at least this is a start. I'm no guru on accounting but there are guru's online who can give you ideas about how to setup various expense and income accounts that you might to record your transactions under. There is no single right way to do your accounting, whatever works for you and makes tracking your business expenses and income over the year possible and also makes doing your taxes in 2016 less painful. You don't have to set the bar too high for yourself because you can keep improving your bookkeeping and accounting systems each year, however, the foundation for all of it is getting into a habit of spending some time trying to get your books are up to date at the end of each month. Fail this task now and you are setting yourself up for another year of financial chaos that only gets straightened out when income tax season rolls around again next year.

So enjoy the Superbowl this weekend, but make sure that you also put aside some time to get your books for January 2015 in some type of order, even if that just means putting all your transactions in a folder, figuring out your starting mileage for 2015, and perhaps printing off some bank statements and bills if you ultimately end up printing these off for your records or when doing your income taxes for the 2015 tax year. Get on top of it now, and get into the habit of doing your bookkeeping and accounting at the end of each month, and you will master a critical business skill that will reward you with a better sense of your ongoing financial situation throughout the year and will make doing your income taxes next year relatively pain free. You will also be in a better position to optimize the taxes you pay out each year if you know where you are financially, what expenses you have to claim so far, what sales taxes you currently owe to the government, what sales taxes you can claim, and so on. Better bookkeeping is power when it comes to figuring out how to optimize your tax situation.

In conclusion, if your resolution for 2015 was to improve your bookkeeping and accounting systems, the end of January 2015 is the critical time to set yourself up to accomplish that by doing some month end bookkeeping and accounting (the latter implies that you have some income and expense categories setup to record transactions under).

Permalink 

 Archive 
 

Archive


 November 2023 [1]
 June 2023 [1]
 May 2023 [1]
 April 2023 [1]
 March 2023 [6]
 February 2023 [1]
 November 2022 [2]
 October 2022 [2]
 August 2022 [2]
 May 2022 [2]
 April 2022 [4]
 March 2022 [1]
 February 2022 [1]
 January 2022 [2]
 December 2021 [1]
 November 2021 [2]
 October 2021 [1]
 July 2021 [1]
 June 2021 [1]
 May 2021 [3]
 April 2021 [3]
 March 2021 [4]
 February 2021 [1]
 January 2021 [1]
 December 2020 [2]
 November 2020 [1]
 August 2020 [1]
 June 2020 [4]
 May 2020 [1]
 April 2020 [2]
 March 2020 [2]
 February 2020 [1]
 January 2020 [2]
 December 2019 [1]
 November 2019 [2]
 October 2019 [2]
 September 2019 [1]
 July 2019 [1]
 June 2019 [2]
 May 2019 [3]
 April 2019 [5]
 March 2019 [4]
 February 2019 [3]
 January 2019 [3]
 December 2018 [4]
 November 2018 [2]
 September 2018 [2]
 August 2018 [1]
 July 2018 [1]
 June 2018 [1]
 May 2018 [5]
 April 2018 [4]
 March 2018 [2]
 February 2018 [4]
 January 2018 [4]
 December 2017 [2]
 November 2017 [6]
 October 2017 [6]
 September 2017 [6]
 August 2017 [2]
 July 2017 [2]
 June 2017 [5]
 May 2017 [7]
 April 2017 [6]
 March 2017 [8]
 February 2017 [7]
 January 2017 [9]
 December 2016 [7]
 November 2016 [7]
 October 2016 [5]
 September 2016 [5]
 August 2016 [4]
 July 2016 [6]
 June 2016 [5]
 May 2016 [10]
 April 2016 [12]
 March 2016 [10]
 February 2016 [11]
 January 2016 [12]
 December 2015 [6]
 November 2015 [8]
 October 2015 [12]
 September 2015 [10]
 August 2015 [14]
 July 2015 [9]
 June 2015 [9]
 May 2015 [10]
 April 2015 [9]
 March 2015 [8]
 February 2015 [8]
 January 2015 [5]
 December 2014 [11]
 November 2014 [10]
 October 2014 [10]
 September 2014 [8]
 August 2014 [7]
 July 2014 [5]
 June 2014 [7]
 May 2014 [6]
 April 2014 [3]
 March 2014 [8]
 February 2014 [6]
 January 2014 [5]
 December 2013 [5]
 November 2013 [3]
 October 2013 [4]
 September 2013 [11]
 August 2013 [4]
 July 2013 [8]
 June 2013 [10]
 May 2013 [14]
 April 2013 [12]
 March 2013 [11]
 February 2013 [19]
 January 2013 [20]
 December 2012 [5]
 November 2012 [1]
 October 2012 [3]
 September 2012 [1]
 August 2012 [1]
 July 2012 [1]
 June 2012 [2]


Categories


 Agriculture [77]
 Bayesian Inference [14]
 Books [18]
 Business Models [24]
 Causal Inference [2]
 Creativity [7]
 Decision Making [17]
 Decision Trees [8]
 Definitions [1]
 Design [38]
 Eco-Green [4]
 Economics [14]
 Education [10]
 Energy [0]
 Entrepreneurship [74]
 Events [7]
 Farming [21]
 Finance [30]
 Future [15]
 Growth [19]
 Investing [25]
 Lean Startup [10]
 Leisure [5]
 Lens Model [9]
 Making [1]
 Management [12]
 Motivation [3]
 Nature [22]
 Patents & Trademarks [1]
 Permaculture [36]
 Psychology [2]
 Real Estate [5]
 Robots [1]
 Selling [12]
 Site News [17]
 Startups [12]
 Statistics [3]
 Systems Thinking [3]
 Trends [11]
 Useful Links [3]
 Valuation [1]
 Venture Capital [5]
 Video [2]
 Writing [2]