When you do your own bookkeeping for your own business, it can be a pain and it can also just be a huge stressor in your business.
But there are still ways that you can reduce the amount of time you waste on your bookkeeping.
How can you stop wasting time on your bookkeeping?
Have separate personal and business bank accounts
Whether you are working on your bookkeeping or not, you should always have separate bank accounts for your business and your personal money needs.
When it comes to your bookkeeping, having separate accounts will always make things so much easier. When all of your personal and business transactions are mixed together, it’s definitely going to take a lot more time to sort through the transactions. You have to make sure that you are getting all of the business transactions into your bookkeeping correctly.
But at the same time, you also have to make sure that none of your personal transactions accidentally end up as business transactions.
Then you have to do a bank reconciliation to get the balances between the bank and your bookkeeping software to match.
This is just going to make a process you don’t enjoy take that much longer and be more tedious.
Having separate accounts will make the process much easier and it will even make your bookkeeping easier for you and/or your bookkeeper.
Keep your bookkeeping paperwork paperless
There is a lot of paperwork that you have to keep for your bookkeeping. But it’s much easier to keep these documents in a paperless storage process, than to print out every single piece of paper and store it in a filing cabinet.
You have to keep copies of your financial documents for 3-7 years. So why not make it much easier on yourself and your business to keep copies of everything electronically?
Plus when you already have it in electronic format (the majority of your receipts already end up in your inbox in electronic format anyway), it makes it much easier to send a copy of the document to your accountant, to your bookkeeper, to someone else on your team; instead of having to scan that document into your computer just because someone needs a copy of it.
Create a system for yourself for storing your paperwork in electronic format and just keep it all organized that way.
Many of your bookkeeping programs will even let you attach your receipts to the transaction in your bookkeeping software.
Review your transactions regularly
Many online entrepreneurs look at their bank balance on an almost daily basis, but they also base their business decisions on what that bank balance says.
Unfortunately that bank balance doesn’t show you what clients have outstanding bills with you. It doesn’t show you what upcoming payments you have. It doesn’t show you what your recurring transactions are that you don’t even use.
When you look at your transactions and what is actually happening in your business, you’ll have a much better financial outlook on your business than just what your bank balance says.
Use a bookkeeping software
When you use bookkeeping software (like Quickbooks or Freshbooks), you can easily link up your bank account to your bookkeeping software.
The bookkeeping software will then automatically pull in the transactions that have gone through your bank account for you. This will make your bookkeeping process so much quicker and easier.
It will save you so much time by having your bank feed automatically populated in your software so that you can categorize the transactions and then do your regular review process.
Hire a professional
This is obviously the easiest thing you can do, but when you hire a professional, you’ll still need to follow the tips in this article anyway or your professional will be wasting a lot of time and probably charging you more money for this as well.
Plus when you hire a professional, the time you used to spend on doing your bookkeeping can actually be spent making more money in your business.
Or maybe you still want to do the bookkeeping yourself for your business, but just have questions when the tricky stuff comes up. You can hire a professional for quick consultations to ask your questions to, as well.
Stop Wasting Time on your Bookkeeping
It’s no secret that the bookkeeping for your business needs to be done regularly and that it really can be a time suck. But there really are ways that you can reduce the amount of time that is wasted on doing your bookkeeping.
Whether you do your bookkeeping yourself or you hire someone else to do it for you, you need to have separate bank accounts and really should make all of your documents electronic. Just these two items will save everyone involved a lot of time when it comes to your bookkeeping.
When you use a bookkeeping software and regularly look at your transactions, you’ll know exactly how your business is performing, too.
Wasting time that could be spent actually making you more money in your business is one of the smartest business decisions that you can make.
