Small Business Books Organizing

Video Transcript

"Here's a couple of tips that may help you keep your books more up to date and more organized. The first one is, don't wait to process receipts, invoices, incoming checks and things. I suggest no more than two or three days. If you let it go for a week, "I'll do it all on Saturday", what happens? Saturday comes, you end up having to do something else because something always happens, and now you've got stuff two weeks ago, you forget what it is, you lose the receipts. Get them processed at a really quick relative manner, a couple of days tops. Just set up an hour and boom go through them, your done, go on to the next thing. Second tip. You should as an owner review your trial balance. Now this is a report within most computerized bookkeeping systems, and it's just a list of each account and all the transactions in that account. You could just bring up the report on the screen and go through it and look for names, vendors or customer names that look out of place. Look for amount that look out of place. You'll catch a huge amount of mistakes very quickly that way and can fix them before you forget what you did. A third one. Periodically review your accounts payable and accounts receivable. I mean, one of the big things that happens with small businesses is that all of a sudden we discover that people owe us ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand dollars because we haven't been keeping up with it. We don't want to go after it. We don't want to bother them. It's a pain to pick up the phone and call them. It's your money. It's your money. Pick up the phone and tell the people that you want it. The same thing with payables. Often times you've got too much going on trying to run a business to, you know, has the phone bill been paid, hasn't it been paid? Most computerized book keeping systems allow you to set up due dates and alarm systems. Rely on those. Set them up so that you can say, "wait a minute, I just got an alarm in my book keeping system. It says the phone bill needs to be paid by Friday." Stay on top of it. You don't want to get a bad credit rating, and you don't want to be paying all kinds of late fees. Finally, just don't be afraid of the books. The more you deal with them, the more you try to understand them, the more you look at them kind of as your tool in running the business, the more efficiently and the more profitably your business is going to be."