For businesses of any size, accounting plays a significant role in terms of keeping everything in check. An effective accounting department will not only ease your work in the long run but will also aid your business during times of tax returns.
But, on the contrary, if your business doesn’t keep track of all the inflow and outflow, this will affect the business, big time. For example, not having proper records of everything will put you in trouble in times of an audit.
And effective expense reporting requires the study of every type of expense you make and how each expense will help you at the end of the financial year. Many businesses skip this part as it’s very tedious and a time-consuming job. But, keeping yourself up to date with all the new tax laws will require you to have good record management to help you relax during times of tax returns.
Here are different ways by which you can ace the field of record management for your business.
Using Spreadsheets
Having physical records is still practised in many parts of the world. But there are so many disadvantages to it. It takes up too much space and time. There’s no assurance that it will always be safe. With time, the records will deteriorate.
Using a virtual spreadsheet, on the other hand, will benefit you in so many ways. You can find the perfect template for your business on the internet. Once you are all set, all the data you use can be fed into cloud storage as well.
Many templates come with calculation methods that will give you the required numbers by the end of the day or week or month. You can analyze everything for a month at once. Using a virtual spreadsheet will help you in a lot of ways regardless of how big or small your business is.
Keep Your Business And Personal Expenses Separate
Once you initialize your business, it’s very crucial to start a separate bank account for itself. This is a very important yet simple thing to be done. Doing this will give you proper analytics about the expenditures and the income of the business separately.
You can transfer money from one account to another, but keeping that separation between one and the other is mandatory. Because doing so will help you immensely during times of tax returns.
Also, tracking how much money you are spending for yourself and your business is very easy now as both accounts are separated. So, make sure you start an account exclusively for your business immediately!
Download An Expense Tracker
After you are done with creating a new account, recording your expenses will help you in many other ways too. This can also be a tiring job to do if you are a busy person and don’t know where your money went at the end of the month.
Application developments have come such a long way that so many remarkably amazing expense trackers are available in the app store. Downloading one will not only take you less time to note your expenses but will also let you know many other important notes.
With an expense tracker, you will also gradually leave the habit of spending money for nothing. These statistics are very substantial in many reports and researches undertaken in the community. You can also find yourself with an idea of how much money you can invest back in your business and which part you can keep for your savings.
Get yourself a trustworthy expense checker right now and record it down to improve your money management skills.
Pay Attention To Receivables
Small businesses mostly concern about the amount of money they spent and don’t give much importance to the amount of money they receive as income. It is equally important to make sure that you record the invoices of every product you sold and the information of every customer you sold it to.
You may never know when it will come handy. Customers who owe you money should also be written down. If you don’t give this more time now, you’ll end up wasting time on this at the end of every financial year. Keep track of all these transactions then and there, to save time while invoicing and at the time of tax returns.
Using An Accounting Software
Every business requires an accountant or software to manage their business effectively. Software development companies have enrichingly introduced simple accounting software with information about GST ready feature to help businesses in accurately completing their tax obligations successfully.
It completes the bookkeeping process of the business, generates reports, and manages calculations and can give information updates according to the GST slabs.
Normal accounting software can do wonders in showing you what your business-level is or what can be improved in which sector of the business. It allows users to store all the information that gives a clear picture of the business’s financial health. The software can easily manage bookkeeping and allows the monitoring of costs and revenues to maximize profit margins.
There are many free source software on the internet as well as paid ones. It’s recommended to buy a subscription based on your business size and work on that software. It is incredibly easy to set up and work upon. For the work you put into it, the returns are tremendous.
But, whenever you use a third-party application for jotting down the receipts and invoices, make sure you have another copy that is either physically or digitally written down. Doing this can help you re-check the entries with your version anytime you want and will clear out any kind of confusion.
Conclusion
These five small changes are the most important keys to taking your business to the next level. It is a given bonus if you are a small business owner. But, regardless of the size of your business, these actions either take no expenditure or less expenditure but will help you tremendously in the long run.
