Essential Bookkeeping Services

5 Accounting Principles

Do you know and understand the 5 essential bookkeeping services you must be on top of as a business owner? When you're getting your business off the gound, bookkeeping seems like a task that can easily be shifted to the side, waiting for a rainy day to catch back up. 

However, not keeping your businesses books updated means you don't have a clear financial picture of how your company is doing and what areas of your business need attention. 

Here are five essential bookkeeping services that you should stay on top of, whether it's on your own or using a professional bookkeeping service:

Essential Bookkeeping Services

1. General Bookkeeping Services.

Do you know what your business' financial health looks like? What bills do you have and how much are you owed by clients? 

When a good opportunity present itself you need to know if you have the financial capacity to take advantage of it. Are you financially stable and strong enough to move fast, to lock out your competition…? 

If you do not have a full picture of your business's financial health, it would be to your benefit to either invest more time into understanding your financial situation or to talk to a bookkeeper such as those at Bookkeeping Basics who renders essential bookkeeping services. We focus on helping business owners to understand and keep track of their business' finances.

2.   Bank Reconciliation

One of the very first things taught in many accounting classes is how to balance a checkbook. But a business often has much more activity to track than the average consumer, making it difficult and time intensive to keep up with your businesses financial activities, specifically when you're focused on getting the next big contract, selling your products, and rendering your services.

And, as if this is not enough, bank fees from overdrafts and automatic transfers from other accounts can pile up quickly and eat away at your profits if you're not keeping your bank accounts reconciled.

3.    Generating Reports

Do you know how to create a chart of accounts, profit and loss statement, balance sheet or other reports that are often required for loans, grants or leases? Are you aware of the differences between this year's profit and loss reports versus last year's reports? 

Using the services of an experienced bookkeeper or bookkeeping services provider can help you to easily generate these reports from your existing financial data, allowing you to get the proper financial information that you need to interpret your financial situation and make critical decisions regarding your business.

4.    Accounts Receivable

Do you know how many of your accounts receivable are over 30, 60, or 90 days and may need the services of a debt collector? Good clients will pay you on time, but struggling clients may need a bit more persuasion to pay what you're owed.

To be able to take legal recourse on bad debts, you'll not only need to know how much you're owed, but also when it becomes past due, at what points you need to take a particular legal action or similar issues that can impact when or if you are paid for your work.

Your bookkeeping services provider can help to take this problem off your plate and ensure that invoices go out on a regular basis and collections are done on time. This again allows you to focus on running your business.

5.   Accounts Payable

Have you experienced the penalties involved in a late payment or going over your overdraft facility? These are the real financial challenges that many business owners face on a regular basis. Knowing how much you're paying for utilities, when your credit card payments are due or what that last batch of supplies will cost are essential financial information that business owners need on a regular basis to make informed financial decisions.

Having an up to date picture of your accounts payable help you to determine your businesses profitability and whether you need to make changes in your overhead or prices to create a realistic and sustainable profit margin.

Using the services of an experienced bookkeeper can help you stay on top of your accounts payable so that you know exactly how much is owed to which vendor at what time. This also helps you stay on top of your cash flow management.

Summary

If you're having problems keeping up with your businesses essential bookkeeping services, you may want to evaluate all the benefits you will receive from hiring a professional bookkeeper to help with the backlog. And, if you are a business operating in the Santa Rosa, Petaluma, and Sonoma areas, we would love for you to consider Horne Financial services to help you work out a real-world solution to your bookkeeping problems. Please feel free to contact us at (707) 795-1320 or complete this contact form and we’ll contact you as soon as possible.

Author

Stephanie Horne is an experienced bookkeeper and Enrolled Agent. She is the owner and founder of Tax Avail, Inc. in Rohnert Park, California along with this website and has over 20 years of in person, virtual and outsourced bookkeeping/accounting and tax preparation experience with businesses of all sizes.

Her love and passion is to work individually with business owners and families to help alleviate any financial stress or concerns by helping them to understand and have better control of their income, expenses, cash flow, and tax liabilities.  

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