Saving Your Accountant Time, Saves You Money

This is just common sense, but something that many business owners overlook when preparing their books to send to their accountant for the preparation of year-end financial statements and tax filings. The more accurate and complete your accounting records are, the less time your accountant needs to spend on reconciling and correcting the details before beginning on the reports and taxes. The less time they spend on your books, the less it is going to cost you. Here are some tips to help make sure that your books are as easy to work with as possible. Read More »

Tags: Account Balances, Accountant, Accounting Records, Accuracy, Asset Purchases, Assets, Bank Accounts, Business Owners, Common Sense, Detailed Records, Financial Statements, Loan Accounts, Payroll Tax, Quarterly Tax Reports, Receipts, Reconciliation, Spreadsheet, Tax Filings, Tax Liabilities, Year End

Fixed Asset Records

Your fixed asset purchases are an important part of business for a number of reasons. They are capital investments, which show how you’ve invested profits back into the company. That is part of the reason why they are listed on your balance sheet and not as an expense. The other reason is because they have an expected life of more than one year. Because they will be providing benefits to the company over a longer period of time, the expensing of their value is spread out over the useful life of the asset. We do this by recording depreciation expense for each of your assets.
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Tags: Accountant, Asset Purchases, Asset Records, Assets, Audit Purposes, Balance Sheet, Capital Investments, Dell Inspiron, Depreciation Expense, Depreciation Guidelines, Detailed Records, Important Resources, Invoices, Laptop, Period Of Time, Profits, Purchase Receipt, Section 179, Spreadsheet, Storage Trailer

Transform Your Business With Spreadsheet Accounting – Part 3

In the first blog post in this series I introduced you to the 3 key spreadsheets that every business needs and I gave you a really quick-and-dirty way to set up the three spreadsheets in one Excel file. In the second blog post in this series, I talked about the relationship between all three spreadsheets.

I’m realistic enough to realize that financial statements can seem complex and unwieldy at the best of times, which I’ve been walking you slowly through the details that I felt you needed to know. And I was planning to show you how to build the three spreadsheets yourself. But I’ve got good news for you: In the last blog post of this series, I’m going to make it really easy for you! I’m going to link you to one free file that you can download that will GIVE you all three spreadsheets in a single Excel file. Here’s how to get it and use it:
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Tags: Balance Sheet Income Statement, Business Accounting, Business Guide, Business Owners, Cash Flow Statement, Consolidated Report, Decisions, Financial Spreadsheets, Financial Statements, Free File, Microsoft, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, Relationship, Report Template, Spreadsheet, Step 1, Template Section

Transform Your Business With Spreadsheet Accounting – Part 2

In a previous blog post I showed you a way to put together a single file consisting of your three most important financial reports – the reports that every business should have.

I’ll be talking to you over the next couple of blog posts about these spreadsheets and how to put them together but in this post I want to pause momentarily to talk to you about the all-important question of WHY.

Why do we need those three financial reports? When we answer that question, understanding HOW the spreadsheets work falls naturally into place.
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Transform Your Business With Spreadsheet Accounting – Part 1

When a new client approaches me to do their accounting for them, they often bring in their previous financial “system”… which usually consists of cardboard box overflowing with files, receipts, envelopes, and notebooks of spreadsheets. The first thing I do, before I start any official “help-them-save-money-and-make-more-money” accounting work, is to roll up my sleeves and systematize the avalanche of papers.

If your small and growing business doesn’t have an accountant yet, or if you want to make it really fast for your accountant to get through your records and start delivering the meaningful insight that you are hiring them to provide, you need to build and implement a spreadsheet-based accounting system as early as possible.

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Tags: Accountant, Accountants, Accounting System, Avalanche, Business Profitability, Cardboard Box, Cash Flow Statement, Envelopes, Google, Google Spreadsheets, Gross Profit, Income Statement And Balance Sheet, Meaningful Insight, Microsoft Excel, Profit And Loss, Profit And Loss Statement, Receipts, Spreadsheet, Step 2, Step 3