Small Business Financial Software

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Starting a small business out of your home, offering products or services like business consulting, photography, selling on the web or a MLM? You are now faced with tracking all your expenses and revenues for your business and you certainly don’t have the money yet to engage a bookkeeper or accountant. If your business is a sole proprietorship, whether it be a Canadian Proprietorship or a US-based Proprietorship, you do not require an accountant to submit your company financials (books) to the IRS (USA) or Revenue Canada). Your business revenue and losses are reported as part of your annual personal income tax. For this small business start-up, you won’t need to buy fancy accounting software, like Quick Books or AccPac to track your business.

Only as part of incorporating Bizfare Enterprise Inc in 2005 was it a requirement to engage an accountant. My accountant did insist on using Quick Books software for my business accounting. Up until then using a simple spreadsheet template served my business accounting needs for over ten years. This simple spreadsheet accounting stood the test of multiple audits by Revenue Canada (CRA and Revenue Canada Goods and Services Tax. Both the hardcopy columnar pad and an electronic spreadsheet version of my financial books were accepted by Revenue Canada. (BTW the audits disclosed more ways for me to claim back additional taxes for the previous three years! Now that’s my type of audit!)

In your new start-up business venture, you likely will generate somewhere between 10 to 30 accounting transactions per month. These transactions would be items like Expense, Revenue (sales), Liability (Loan) type transactions and Sales Tax (Federal + State/Provincial) Collection/Deductions. These transactions are further broken down into various Business Accounts. All the Accounts you set up for your business is called a Chart of Accounts. Recording your business financial transactions (Journal Entries) can be executed with pen and ink on an accounting columnar pad or electronically with your computer using a spreadsheet program (MS Excel, Open Office, Star Office).

Whether you employ electronic or hardcopy media, you need to develop a simple Journal template to create your Business Synoptic Journal. This Synoptic Journal format has the advantage of allowing you a complete view of all your individual journal entry transactions against all your various Business Accounts. Creating this Synoptic Journal is easier to do than you think and requires no prior accounting or bookkeeping knowledge.

TIP #1: You could further reduce the accounting line items (Journal Entries) by consolidating like items such as ‘all the Sales for the month’ and ‘all parking receipts for the month’ into one totaled line item for the month.

Where do you start to identify the various Business Accounts required for your Synoptic Journal?

If you currently work for a company or government, secure of one of their employee expense forms. Look at each of the areas identified as expenses – meals, mileage, hotel accommodations, taxi, car rental, telephone & cell phone, air fare, office supplies, etc. This is an excellent place to identify the various Business Expense Accounts you need to set up for your business accounting books. To complete your business Chart of Accounts, include a Business Bank Account, Sales, COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), Sales Tax Collection, Marketing Expense and others as required. Each of these Accounts will be a listed as a title across the top of each column of your Synoptic Journal. Each row (line item) will be the individual journal transactions entered by you. The journal transactions are grouped and summarized for each business month; usually, January through December.

So your Synoptic Journal would look something like this Sample Synoptic Journal at http://picasaweb.google.com/carl.chesal/BookkeepingTemplate.

The column headings might be in this order (from left to right):

DATE | DESCRIPTION | BANK DEPOSITS | BANK WITHDRAWALS | SALES REVENUE | COGS | SALES TAX COLLECTED & REMITTED | OFFICE SUPPLIES EXPENSE | EXPENSE #2 | EXPENSE #3 | ETC

TIP #2: Unless your business is Incorporated or an LLC, you don’t need to go through the expense of opening a business account with your bank. Usually Business accounts charge a higher monthly fee, charge for printing checks (cheques) and don’t offer any interest on your monthly account balance. Instead, open a separate personal bank account (maybe savings). This will show the ‘taxman’ that you are keeping the business separate from your personal banking. Remember you are a sole proprietor and all your business income (and losses) are to be applied directly to your personal income tax submission ( a s per IRS and CRA).

To save you time and make is very simple, I have already created a simple spreadsheet Synoptic Journal template that performs all the calculations for each month and rolls up the 12 business months so it can easily be included in your annual personal income tax preparation. This Synoptic Journal template has Debit/Credit checks and balances, tracks sales taxes, mileage and totals each account for your entire fiscal year. If you want this FREE Bookkeeping template, you can get it at Communicate Innovate. With a few key strokes, which will help identify yourself, I will gladly send you this FREE Synoptic Journal Template and also any future Small Business Tips.

TIP #3: One Rule of Accounting is that every time you record a journal entry (line item which applies the transaction against the appropriate business accounts) the Debits and Credits MUST REMAIN EQUAL at ALL Times. This Debit Equals Credit calculator is built into this FREE Bookkeeping Template. When you have completed entering a line item (journal transaction), check to ensure that the amount the the Debit cell equals the amount in the Credit cell. If they are not equal, you have not entered the amounts properly in your journal transaction. Correct the problem before entering your next journal entry.

You are now equipped to capture your business financial books with some simple accounting software. Happy bookkeeping! And Happy Selling!

For the present time bookkeeping is essential part for each and every business industry like small business, mid and large scale businesses. Every business owner desires perfect keeping record for all the business financial transactions so bookkeeping is better option to keeping all the financial transactions records appropriate for your business. If you run your small business smoothly so, bookkeeping is useful to keeping your business financial transactions include sales, purchase, income and payment by an individual or organization.

If you want to increase your small business with bookkeeping, the first thing you should do is to create a list of all the tasks that are related to accounting like sales, purchase, income and payment. Small business bookkeeping should be simple for you if when the work is already divided into small tasks you can decide to perform each week or every day or every month. It is proper that most of it has to do with keeping financial transactions record track of what comes in and what goes out of the business. When you focus on the long term trends, bookkeeping becomes more helpful and attractive. It informs you what happens every day, it highlights the problems, but it can also assist you to explain those problems.

Each and every business needs a professional bookkeeping services and also bookkeeper. So, generally bookkeeping is performed by a bookkeeper. However, people prefer professional and experienced chartered accountants, who act as tax advisers, and provide audit and bookkeeping service. The experts also take care of business problems as well as handle the flow of the money. Also all the experienced bookkeepers generally use bookkeeping software like: QuickBooks, Peachtree, Sage Line 50, Quicken, MYOB, IRIS, EXACT, Property Ware, Rent Manager, Net Suite, LaCerte all the software gives you competitive advantages for your small business also mid and large.

Additionally, bookkeeping would assist you to know the transactions which are all beneficial and the unwanted operating expenses. You can avoid those expenditures and set up an effective budget to optimize your business economically.

In the organization, huge amount of transaction found to maintain in daily task. Now Bookkeeping services offers the efficient bookkeeping accounting software development in the way bookkeeping working as simple as possible to handle number of activity in this field. With many accounts work include account receivable, account payable, payroll services and billing, financial reports with financial statements preparation. Bookkeeping Accounting Software has enables to do these tasks in very less effective time and save your precious time and effort.

Today Bookkeeper uses many bookkeeping software available in the market at very wide range of rates. The followings are various bookkeeping financial and accounting software features are described:

NetSuite

The NetSuite Bookkeeping Accounting is one of the single, integrated suites with advance accounting bookkeeping, ERP, CRM and e-commerce abilities. Using NetSuite Bookkeeping Accounting software we can handle all types of accounting services like account receivable, account payable and general ledgers within others advance tools. The NetSuite bookkeeping Accounting software includes many facilities like productivity management, e-commerce, financial management and statement and employment resources. It is useful for easy to use with real time decision making problem so we can find out more easily way to solve the problem.

QuickBooks

One of the simplest ways to manage the bookkeeping financial software is Quickbooks Bookkeeping Software. The Quickbooks software is segmented to different part, same as to help segment, customer segment and vendor segment. It is simple to use navigation bars, windows interface, different toolbars and user-friendly menu option. Whenever any confusion in mind of the user so that he or she can find FAQ or help button in header of the every page of Quickbooks Bookkeeping Software so quick solution also provided in this financial accounting software. Thought, user can find out very easy functionality of this software and offers flexibility on a variety of way of task about to accounting services such as banking task, account payable, account receivable, payroll and inventory. There are many other features available in it like general ledger and job casting tools.

Quicken

In the latest version of Quicken provides you to advance benefits make it the bookkeeping accounting software preferred among bookkeeper and accountants. User can see more effective workspaces and various reports at the same time in this latest version of Quicken software. And User can easily find out Financial Accounting Data as quick as more accuracy. The Quicken enable users to access the tabs in different functionality at the same time. And more easily way user can see financial flow, cash flow center, investment flow and Quicken account bar, so it is the best.

Peachtree

In Peachtree advanced option and responsible for to keep accurate records perfectly. Bookkeeping Accounting Software can easily produce reporting and introduce input and output data. An Accountant can synchronize all data with setup this bookkeeping software without and difficulty. It is favorable among bookkeepers.

Thus now Business Owner will enable to operate and manage the entire process flaw of Bookkeeping needed. Also it is save your time and efforts of manpower. Software provides you error reduction accurate data to minimize the labor work of the bookkeeper in the organization.

Any financial accounting or bookkeeping software will perform the core accounting functions related to general ledger, accounts receivables, accounts payables and other cash functions. But often the business owner wants and needs more, depending on the industry he is in. So, the best investment one can make while picking bookkeeping soft wares is to define, in the first place, all your needs and demands. You will also be able to keep up with the relevant financial information at any time. Small business bookkeeping software is designed in such a way that it is a powerful tool that helps you watch your payroll so that you will get the payrolls done quickly in addition to job cost records. Move up from a manual system of doing the bookkeeping all by yourself and have it done outside. Sometimes you might be looking to set up a bookkeeping business yourself. In any of the cases mentioned above, financial bookkeeping software you choose can help your business grow vertically. You should know some tips for choosing one wisely, but you should know what you want. Spend enough time to define your demands and requirements.

 

The price is usually more than what it costs and this tells that “free” software is not actually a free one. Learning a soft ware can result in a bigger cost in terms of time and effort than the initial expenses or cost incurred to buy it. Do not overlook the training costs if you have financial accounting and bookkeeping staff.  If you pick the wrong software you may have to go through all that again with more difficulty. You are going to need some help to learn the accounting software and you are likely to need on-going support also. Now hopefully, somebody must work through whatever problems that can arise. Often times, local accounting firms have experts that work on some of the major software products. Plan ahead well in order to tackle unforeseen problems that may arise in between.

 

As your business keeps growing, you may need more of an accounting and financial bookkeeping power. Choose good brands of financial software; you can very well upgrade to more powerful and efficient ones smoothly. If you intend to switch bookkeeping soft wares, you will have to pay for the start-up training costs all over again. Consider different options and see whether you can upgrade so that you can make the most of what you have. Generating tax compliance forms and other government and income related documents is one of the main goals of a bookkeeping software package. This simply means you can stay out of trouble. These accounting soft wares are more powerful than anything else, and they will help you stay out of trouble. The right and apt software can help you produce or generate financial reports that help you make wise and informed decisions. Better and valid information can lead to more sales, profits and a better control over different cost factors. Bookkeeping software can be said to be a powerful tool for managing a business.

 

 

Managing today’s businesses has been remarkably different. Everything, including in the business world, now happens in a wink of an eye or simply, with the click of the mouse. Outsourcing is a common thing in the business environment nowadays. It has now become a trend even of small businesses.

How Do You Make Outsourcing Work for You?

- Evaluate your expertise. Focus on what you do best and outsource the rest. Outsourcing small business bookkeeping is more cost-effective to have someone who would do the work for you, outside of the company. This gives you more time look after the activities that also need time and concentration.

- Be a supervisor. Not because you have entrusted a part of the business’s activities to somebody else, you leave them everything. It is important that you still keep a watchful eye on the quality and timeliness of the outsourced functions. A regular accountability and reporting should be considered for a guaranteed and effective service.

What Should You Outsource?

Ideally, outsourcing bookkeeping functions work for small businesses. Because the bulk of transaction is minimal, you tend to move fixed costs to variable costs through outsourcing your financial transactions. It is like hiring a part-time worker for your company, at times that you need them. Instead of paying for a fixed overhead cost for salaries and wages, with outsourcing small business bookkeeping, you either pay an hourly rate, or a one-time fee as the service is required.

It is the best solution to the entrepreneur’s myriad of concerns. Instead of struggling with the tremendous paper works of bookkeeping, the work becomes trouble-free and simple.

Advantages of Outsourcing Bookkeeping

It is equally effective to outsource the bookkeeping function than to have one permanently in the office. No more worries of high costs charged by bookkeepers as well as costs for software installation, and those associated with upgrading the program. With outsource small business bookkeeping, your data is secure and leaves you no worry of providing a back-up data.

Being a small business that is, running and sorting your accounts becomes an unwanted task. As business owner and manager, you would want to focus on other equally important tasks, and that is running the entire business. Through outsourcing small business bookkeeping, entrepreneur’s efforts are more focused on the non-core functions of leading the business into the more profitable and more productive way.

By outsourcing small business bookkeeping, you let the experts do the dirty work for your business and choose between the risk versus the reward, time spent versus the peace of mind and confidence versus the imprecision. It is relevant that even for small businesses, financial data is well taken-cared of, because the business relies on this set of information for future decision-making process. The business is at stake here. Be a smart entrepreneur and make the switch, for outsourcing small business bookkeeping is your business’s life saver.

Bookkeeping is the recording of monetary transactions. Transactions include sales, purchases, income, and payments by an individual or organization. Bookkeeping is generally performed by a bookkeeper. Bookkeeping should not be confused with accounting. The accounting procedure is generally performed by an accountant. The accountant generates reports from the recorded monetary transactions recorded by the bookkeeper. All the procedure is very important to all type of business so generally bookkeeping software specifically designed for the required of accountants, lawyers and business professional.

Get the accurate small business bookkeeping software and you will save time, money and stress. Which type of software generally use bookkeeper and accounts check following all the bookkeeping software.

IRIS:

Comprising of five modules the Tax Software, IRIS extensively automates and handles all the difficulty of pleasing customers’ tax commitment.

LaCerte:

Lacerte Tax, the generally used tax preparation software, provides comprehensive, high-performance tax return preparation, e-filing and practice management for single-user or networked environments.

MYOB:

This biggest bookkeeping and accounting benefits is particularly marketed and appeals to various small businesses and bookkeepers. MYOB works straightforwardly with accounting practices to make more efficient their procedures and maximize their productivity.

Peachtree:

Peachtree Accounting is brilliant business management bookkeeping software. The most recent version Peachtree accounting 2006 has new features including invoicing, bill paying, and access to powerful reporting, basic inventory, and analysis elements. Peachtree has the capability to automatically alert you if a duplicate reference number is used on a quote, invoice, credit memo, or purchase order.

QuickBooks:

Intended for small businesses, QuickBooks is a powerful and most generally used small business accounting and management software in the US. It is used to track expenses, prepare and send invoices, prepare financial statements, track inventory levels, and many other tasks.

Quicken:

Quicken is an admired personal and home business financial tool, with a wide range of features. These easy-to-use tools assist you to stay on top of your spending, download your bank and credit card transactions, optimize your portfolio and decrease debt.

Sage Line 50:

This Bookkeeping software is intended to make more efficient your entire accounting schedules. It covers all your accounting requirements from VAT returns to credit control, and provides immediate management information, perfect reports, complete data storage and full security.

All the above bookkeeping accounting software generally used certified professionals chartered accounts and also bookkeepers. So get maximum advantages with all the above bookkeeping accounting software for your core business.

There is a major difference between sophisticated accounting software used by larger businesses for financial control purposes than is required for small business where a simple bookkeeping spreadsheet is sufficient.

An accountant needs to not only ensure the financial records are accurate but also retrieve any part of the accounting records to answer accounting questions on the accounts, provide a legal basis for the transactions and report the financial statements at regular periodic intervals.

Accounting is a term that embodies a whole raft of financial activities while bookkeeping is specifically literally the keeping of books of account. For non limited companies that do not need to produce a balance sheet then a simple income and expenditure account can be produced much simpler using single entry bookkeeping principles.

Less financial control is often required from small business accounting software as the bookkeeper is often the owner manager who already has an intimate knowledge of each transaction. Books are still required for tax purposes and a solid requirement of preparing a set of financial books for tax purposes is that each entry is supported by third party evidence.

The prime accounting documents providing back up are sales and purchase invoices or receipts and bank statments. Financial transactions where no receipt exists can still be entered in the business books although all transactions not carrying third party evidence could subsequently be disallowed for tax purposes and certainly would be if the amounts entered indicated unusual income or expenditure.

Producing an income and expenditure statement using single entry bookkeeping is little more than making two lists of financial transactions. Those lists being one of sales income received from sales invoices or receipts issued to customers and the other of purchase expenditure being from purchase invoices received from suppliers.

To record sales income it would not normally be sufficient to simply add up the total of the invoices as such a summation does not leave an audit trail of the items which have been included. A written list of sales invoices does provide an audit trail.

Sales accounting for a small business accounting purposes can be either a manual list of the sales invoices or by using a spreadsheet package a list can be made on a bookkeeping spreadsheet. Basic formulae canh be used to add up totals in a bookkeeping spreadsheet.

The essential information to enter for a sales invoice would be the date of the sale, name of the customer, sales invoice number if applicable and optional a brief description of the item sold. In the next column would be the total sales invoice amount. Additional columns might be required to account for taxes on sales such as vat in the uk or sales taxes.

A further small complication might be if at the discretion of the small business owner additional information was required from the bookkeeping records to indicate the totals of the different types of products and services then additional columns could be incorporated to enter the net sales figures in these columns.

There it is then, a simple list of sales invoices to satisfy the sales accounting requirements for a small business where a balance sheet is not required.

On the expenditure side of the business the bookkeeping can also be a simple list of the purchase invoices and receipts showing the amount spent. The list should also produce an audit trail by showing the date of the purchase invoice, name of the supplier, purchase invoice for identification purposes and the total amount spent.

Usually tax returns are the main purpose of producing small business accounts and invariably some analysis is required to show what the expenses have been spent on. The small business owner can insert additional standard columns to the bookkeeping spreadsheet.

The expenditure analysis columns do not need to be a different column for each type of expenditure. It is better to set up and group the analysis columns in general headings which can accommodate all the expenses.

These bookkeeping analysis columns would include stock, other direct costs, premises costs, general administrative costs, transport and delivery costs, repairs and maintenance, travelling and hotel costs, motor costs, bank and legal costs and other expenses. It is better not to enter too many items under a general heading of other expenses as this is more likely to be investigated as the type of expense has not been precisely identified.

One important column to also include is for asset purchases as fixed assets usually have different tax rules applying to the claim of the expense against tax and should be separated from other expenditure.

Having set up two bookkeeping spreadsheets the task is then to produce the income and expenditure account by collecting the totals of each of the analysis columns. The sales total is the sales turnover from which is deducted the totals of each of the expenditure classification totals with the result being the net profit and loss of the business.

Where stock is bought and sold a further adjustment may be required to account for the difference between opening and closing stock. This is done by taking a physical stock check and valuing the stock at the start and end of the financial period.

On the income and expenditure account adjust the stock purchases figure by adding the value of the opening stock and deducting the value of the closing stock. The result is not the stock purchases total as shown in the bookkeeping spreadsheets but the cost of the goods which have been sold to produce the sales turnover being reported.

Simple bookkeeping for a small business accounting purposes can be two lists of sales and purchases supported with sales invoices and purchases invoices.

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Bookkeeping Software Spreadsheets Are Essential Small Business Accounting Tools
By Terry Cartwright

Businesses generally make extensive use of spreadsheets both in accounting and all other business fields. Being a numerically based system of analysing information spreadsheets are used throughout every accounting function as the technique presents an ideal basis to maintain accuracy and automate the collection of financial information.

Every small business needs to keep records of sales invoices and income received and purchase invoices in respect of expenses. It is not sufficient for accounting and taxation purposes for these receipts and payments to be left in the office or the back of a van in a carrier bag. At some stage these prime bookkeeping documents need to be processed.

Processing the financial documents related to a business enterprise basically means they need to be listed. For taxation and financial control purposes the invoices also need to be added up and analysed. The most basic method would be to simply make a list of the sales income and a second list of the purchase expenses.

Using a manual method of listing the information falls short of the analysis required and is more time consuming that using a little technology to both ensure the summation is accurate and the analysis simplified. Listing the sales and expenses of a small business on spreadsheets is no more difficult then a manual paper system and has tremendous advantages in automating and ensuring accuracy.

Hence the use of bookkeeping spreadsheets to prepare the accounting information required.
Instead of listing the items on a paper list the items can be just as easily listed on a spreadsheet which will add up the items as required without the requirement to double check the adding up is accurate. Such a list has a history in accounting term as a sales daybook and a purchase daybook

To achieve the required analysis of sales and purchases all that is required is to write into the top of each of the spreadsheet columns the titles of the analysis headings required. Then repeat the value of each transaction in the total column into the analysis columns. Use the spreadsheet technology to add up each column and you have an effective bookkeeping spreadsheet.

Preparing such a bookkeeping spreadsheet might and often does suffice the needs of the smallest business enterprise and is a close step towards achieving a valuable tool for this purpose, bookkeeping software. Bookkeeping software can be as simple as a home produced spreadsheet but with additional facets that can have significant financial benefits to the business.

Bookkeeping software produced on spreadsheets would normally be a series of spreadsheets with the columns preset and titled and formulae written into the sheet to automatically add up each column. In addition the columns used would normally be restricted to general headings to include a full analysis of all items.

Small businesses that might produce their own spreadsheet would often do this on an annual basis. Bookkeeping software is much more likely to provide these bookkeeping spreadsheet templates on a monthly basis to enable a degree of financial control to be exercised by the small business.

That is the second real value of bookkeeping spreadsheets, the ability to provide the business with financial information and through that data financial control over the business activities. The first value is of course the simplicity of listing with automated summation of the figures.

Small businesses can also benefit from professionally produced bookkeeping spreadsheets that have been specifically arranged not just to produce a list of income and expenses but also in a way that analyses that information in the way the small business requires it. There are two main requirements of the way the financial records are analysed being to produce a financial profit and loss account for the business on a periodic basis but also to provide the totals of the categories required for taxation purposes.

Buying a piece of bookkeeping software written on spreadsheets can thus become an essential tool for the business. The essential element being to both make the accounting simple and easy as listing items, automated analysis and summation assisting the financial control and improved financial performance while also producing the benefits of being analysed to make the completion of annual tax return forms easier.

Everyone in business wants to make a profit making financial control important. Everyone in business has to fill in tax forms and submit accounts in the tax authority format. Bookkeeping spreadsheets provide an essential accounting tool for every business to achieve these objectives.

Terry Cartwright a qualified accountant at DIY Accounting in the UK designs Accounting Software on excel spreadsheets providing complete Small Business Accounting Software solutions with single and double entry Bookkeeping Software for both limited companies and self employed business

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