Bookkeeping

“Without properly kept accounts it is impossible to maintain truth in its pristine purity” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Keeping your accounts up-to-date can be the most boring and time-consuming part of your business (unless you’re an Accountant). It takes you away from what you enjoy doing. Saying that, it’s essential. What are your options?

• Outsource them to a bookkeeper / virtual assistant.
• Use an Excel spreadsheet to log all your transactions.
• Use a simple accounting package like QuickBooks.

When you first start your business you may not be able to afford to outsource the bookkeeping, so you decide to use an Excel spreadsheet. You will need to manually produce your invoices, your profit and loss, and bank reconciliation. There are numerous bookkeeping courses available to a business owner including free workshops run by the HMRC.

If you don’t have enough knowledge of using Excel spreadsheets, then your best option would be to use QuickBooks. In QuickBooks you can raise an invoice simply and just with the press of a button email that invoice to your client. You can customise your invoices easily and add your own logo. Performing a bank reconciliation is also simple in QuickBooks. You enter your starting figure, any bank interest and select the transactions for that month. It will then show you an ending balance.

I have used QuickBooks SimpleStart for a client. I was able to work remotely with the aid of remote access tools and update her QuickBooks copy. This meant that she could also raise invoices and add customer information in when she had the time.

QuickBooks SimpleStart is extremely cheap. It may be all you need to start out. You can always upgrade later, when your business starts to grow, and migrate all your data over. Click below and find out how simple QuickBooks is to use and keep your finances on track.