Running a business and managing the day-to-day operations is a full-time job in itself. As a small business owner, it’s easy to think you have a pulse on your financial status vs. how the business is actually doing financially. Having an understanding of your financial status is make-or-break to your business’ ability to be sustainable. If you want to know what’s working, what’s not, what trends to pay attention to, and which overhead expenses could be reduced, you need financial data. You’re probably thinking - but I don’t have time to add this to my schedule as well! Most business owners enjoy tracking income, so developing a system there is a bit easier. With these helpful expense tracking tips, you can set up automated systems to make your life easier and your finances more accurate.
Keep Your Business Finances Separate
If you follow @ASEGroupOffices on social media, you know we are big advocates of having a separate bank account for your business. It’s the 1st commandment of business…. Thou shall not mix business and personal (accounts). Commingling funds is a disaster waiting to happen. Even if you can't get a "business bank account" or "business credit card", you can still designate a personal account or credit card for business use only. It makes it much easier to determine what expenses during the year were related to your business.
Connect Your Bank Account to an Accounting Software
Connecting these accounts to your accounting software like QuickBooks Online will save you the time of importing transactions and even categorize them for you (with some setup)! A simple monthly review (or weekly if you really want to impress yourself) to make sure all transactions are accurate and categorized correctly can save you tons of time.
Digitize Your Receipts
You need a receipt in the event you’re ever audited and need to provide support for any expenses. Online shopping and subscriptions make it easy for you to keep track of your receipts because they’re emailed to you. Creating a separate folder in your email to house these receipts is just the click of a button. Paper receipts on the other hand can be a pain to keep track of. The easiest solution to this is to use your Accounting Software. QuickBooks Online comes with a free app where you can easily snap pictures of receipts that’ll be saved with the transaction, forever in the cloud. If you don’t use an accounting software, an easy solution is to scan all your paper receipts and store them in your email or a Google Drive folder. It eliminates the need to hold on to mounds of papers (that’ll eventually fade) and can be easily organized and accessed.
Bookkeeping and tracking expenses can be a time consuming and stressful job that can pile up if you don't stay on top of it. We can catch-up and cleanup your bookkeeping providing you more time to focus on your business. We’re happy to evaluate your business, its performance over the past year and the tax-saving strategies that would benefit you the most. Let us help you stay sane, and save your cents and sense.
