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Tax and bookkeeping accounts made easier.
Taxes, accounts, paying out hard earned money, no matter how you look at it sorting it out takes time,effort and most importantly stops you from earning even more money.
As soon as you start in business, tax and accounts rear their head. Bookkeeping and accounts for small businesses has always been a time consuming chore. Fortunately I have at last found a way round it.
When I started my business in 1993 and I used the usual double entry hand written ledger. I laboriously entered all the details and added up the columns then had to check through them all, as the two sums didn’t tally, how could accountants of old manage without a calculator?
Always use a pencil?
I quickly learnt to do it all in pencil so that if the accounts were wrong I could easily correct them. Then along came vat (value added tax). More calculations to go wrong, even worse the vat inspector was not happy with me doing everything in pencil.
It is easy give up at this point and let an accountant sort out the muddle but the more they do the higher bigger their bill!
There is a way of making some of this work easy enough to do yourself. The spreadsheet package that is most probably already on your computer is the key. If you have plenty of time you can build a simple sheet to help you do it, however if you are short of the time needed to sort out 'the how', then the following may interest you.
Small business solution.
Over the last 10 or so years I have gradually developed and improved a simple spreadsheet accounts package. To start with it was just a means of printing out the final figures to satisfy the vat man, then I used it to put all the expenses in the correct column, and so on.
It is now at the level where I put in the minimum of data and wow all the accounts sort themselves out. The vat separates itself out from the sales, on purchases the figures appear in the right expenses column. My accounts are now simple, easy and (almost) fun to do.
What’s best is that all the figures add up correctly every time. Well except when I do a silly like putting in 990 instead of 9.90, but that is one of life’s little hazards. I am still working on getting my fingers to quality accounting standards.
Spreading the word.
I have come to realize that this package could be used by most small businesses almost anywhere in the world. So after a bit of thought I packaged it together and let a few friends and relatives try it out. That led to a few changes to simplify things and now it is at a stage where all sorts of people have started using it.
Great, it means more of us hard working small businesses can concentrate on making money rather than doing the accounts. If you are interested more details and samples are available on my web site.
Tax like death is unavoidable so the more of the accounts you can sort out easily for yourself the lower the accountants bill will be. Please feel free to have a look at how I do it. All revealed on my business tools web pages.
John Harriyott runs Quality Solutions (UK), developing business tools and quality improvements for small businesses. To find out more on easy bookkeeping and other business tools visit
http://www.quality-solutions.co.uk/accounts.htm
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These articles may be copied, reproduced, and/or published only if my byline and the resouce box with links to my web site(s) is included.
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