How much time out of your week or month do you and your staff spend on keeping up with the books? So many small business owners wear many hats, but their true strengths need to be spent on making the business operate and grow, rather than tracking and reconciling.
Make your bookkeeping process more efficient so you can spend less time on it:
Assess
How many transactions are actually going through your accounts?
- You can’t change this reality: More transactions = More time.
- How complex are your transactions? Make sure you understand how to apply each transaction to the correct chart of accounts. See a sample chart of accounts here.
Buckle Down
Save money by doing the books yourself
- If you have less than 50 transactions, maybe this is a task you keep on your list.
- You can minimize the pain by automating your bookkeeping efforts.
- Remember, it is very expensive to clean up mistakes, so even if you save money up front, make sure you get solid training.
Automate!
We highly recommend using software to maintain your books and reconciling monthly. There are several options, and we see many small businesses using QuickBooks to streamline the processes and save time.
Here are the first steps to setting up QuickBooks:
- Use Bank Feeds to match transactions in QuickBooks and your bank.
- Use Rules for common transactions so you only review and add transactions without having to add additional information.
- Keep a “cheat sheet” that lists vendors and the correct account to be used to save time in determining the correct account to use.
Delegate!
- If you have over 100 or even up to 500 transactions, this can take hours to reconcile monthly.
- Consider delegating to a part-time employee or hiring a virtual bookkeeper because these extra hours will take you away from growing the business.
We hope you see the value in your time and the ways you can make your life easier with these tips. If you need help setting up or cleaning up your bookkeeping, we are here to help! I am Kathy Dise with BudgetEase.
