small business accounting help

We tackle looking at small business accounting for your business. As with all businesses whether they are large and small, unfortunately you have to undertake some form of accounting.

This means accounting for your sales and purchase invoices and reconciling your bank statements to your own cashflow to see who has paid you so you can chase those outstanding invoices and which people you have paid so you can decide or not to pay your suppliers.

Of course if you are above the current threshold you’ll also need to account for your VAT - and if you are big enough to account for the PAYE for your staff. In addition to writing all of your numbers down somewhere you have various forms to complete from your VAT return each quarter to PAYE slips that you should send off each month with any tax or national insurance you may owe.

And unfortunately there is no getting away from doing some form of accounts either. Even if you keep your records up to date and complete your books on a weekly basis you’ll also going to need to complete annual accounts to show your profits for your business.

Most new small business owners start by undertaking their book keeping themselves (which is basic accounting) and this means doing all of the above items and simply enter the items into a simple spreadsheet.

But although this is all well and good you may lose track of what is going on. Additionally if you ever get an inspection from the VAT man or anyone else from revenue and customs it may take longer to convince them what you have been doing with your business.

One method of keeping your books manually is to employ a book keeper. If you don’t have a complex business this is a good way of completing your accounting records - but it may mean that you don’t actually have a handle on your business overall if you just hand over everything to someone else each week. You shouldn’t need someone else to tell you that you haven’t collected XYZ’s invoice or a supplier is chasing you (unless you employ your book keeper as your finance manager of course - then it doesn’t matter) 

So the next step is to look at buying some bookkeeping software. These range from some of the best at Microsoft (Microsoft make Microsoft Money) which is an excellent program - it’s just that not many accountants have heard of it or integrate with it. Most accountants will integrate with Sage Accounting Software which is perhaps the most well known.

There are other software packages so just check with google to see who else is out there.

It’s best if you can do your own small business accounting because then you have a handle on what is going on. Most accounting software is easy to use - just check with your accountant first to see what they would recommend first for your small business accounting.