As a business owner you have hundreds of things on your mind day after day. For a lot of us bookkeeping is one of the last things that we want to deal with anything. I want to go over the top 5 things that you may be missing record keeping.1. Receipts -Make sure that you are keeping your receipts even the small ones. Some easy ways are it to keep them on an Excel spread sheet or in a note book. Keep them organized by date. Just because you enter them into QuickBooks or your software does not mean that you are backed up. It is important to have the back up with the receipts.2. Invoices -when paying invoices you should be saving the invoice and staple the check stub to the invoice. File these by one of two ways either by vendor or by date. I recommend by month. Doing this every month will make sure that you don’t fall behind and easy to look up.3. Personal expenses – when we are in the minutiae of the day to day of running a business it may be tempting to mix personal expenses with business. Even if you mark them as personal expenses it makes the audit more complicated and messy. It is best to pay yourself with a draw or a paycheck then pay your bill from your personal account.4. Sales – when it comes to keeping records on your sales. Keep our sales invoice or sales order with a copy of the check that you get from your customer or a copy of the credit card receipt. But do not keep any of the credit card information.5. Statements – you should also keep any statements that your bank has even if it on their website. Business change bank from time to time and after a certain time frame you will no longer be able to get them online and you may need to pay to get them I have seen up to $20 per statement. Also make sure that you are saving the credit card statements including PayPal, Square, Strip and so on.6. Reconciliations – This is a step that gets missed often. This need to be done every month for every checking, savings, credit card, investment and employee expense account. When performing the reconciliation make sure that you have documents to back up all the transactions.
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As you see record keeping can be a very time consuming task with many details. Don’t be afraid or pay a professional to help with these tasks. The time that you will save can will pay for the fees of a bookkeeper 10 fold.
At Three Pillars Bookkeeping we help clients with tasks like these. As a business owner for over 20 years myself I can relate to what you are going thru. We will help guide you to get you on track or help manage and understand your numbers. Please reach out with any questions.
Alex Bulmer – Three Pillars Bookkeeping and Business Services763-464-6408, [email protected]