Intro to Bookkeeping

What I want to do is help people with their bookkeeping. Perhaps you are a new business owner and trying to do your own bookkeeping to begin with and you don’t have many transactions yet. Or you are a receptionist and need to do some part of the bookkeeping. Or you are a project manager that needs to do invoicing on your projects. Or worse, you need to call clients about their past due balances. Perhaps you need to do accounts payable work and need to know more about it. Or maybe it’s accounts receivable work you need to know about. I can help you choose the best accounting software for your new business and tell you the best way to set it up. Bookkeeping isn’t hard to do, but it is so much easier if you set it up correctly from the start. Maybe you need help to decide when it is time to hire a bookkeeper instead of doing it yourself. Maybe you don’t know if you need bookkeeping at all. You may need advice on minimizing your taxes. While I am not a CPA or income tax professional, I can give you some advice on that, as a bookkeeper. I can help simplify bookkeeping for you. Yes, your CPA can do all of the bookkeeping for you, but they charge a lot for that work and may not give you the detail that you need to make business decisions. They will only come up with totals to plug in at the end of the year so your financial reports are correct and THEY can use them to do your returns.

Let me tell you a story of one client that hired me to do some consulting work. This couple had an air conditioning sales and service company and they worked from home and had a warehouse for all their supplies and equipment. The wife had taken on doing the bookkeeping with zero experience or knowledge of the subject. They had been in business for several years. Her first words to me were “I have never reconciled the checking account”. I almost walked out right then, but I put on my ‘big girl pants’ and proceeded to see how I could help. She had been diligently recording her transactions in the checking account, but all the debit card transactions were missing because she had set the debit card up as a credit card, since it said MasterCard on the actual card. All the debit card transactions were under that account when they should have been in the checking account. And, yes, she did know that the debit card was part of the checking account. There was no way to reconcile the checking account because of this. I spent about an hour trying to figure out if I could merge the two accounts together or somehow copy all the debit card transactions and paste them into the checking account, but it was not possible. I told her she was going to have to re-enter every debit card transaction into the checking account before we could try reconciling it. There were about 2 to 3 years of transactions and they used the heck out of that debit card, so we’re talking thousands of transactions she would have to re-enter. She had a part time helper that could do that for her and would let me know when it was done. I could not do what she hired me to do that day, which was reconcile her checking account.

Fast forward about a year later, and she wanted me to do that work after they had moved all those transactions. By this time, they had moved the business into an office/warehouse and looked more professional with logos on the trucks and uniforms. I finally met the husband. They had hired men to do the work and had a lady in the office to act as a receptionist. They appeared to be successful to any onlooker. Again, I attempt to reconcile the checking account starting with the first month after it was opened, which was years prior. They are still missing many thousands of transactions. I found out they had never tried to keep their personal and business expenses separate and didn’t know they should. The husband would pay for things with any card he had that would work and not be declined. This man would make 100 purchases a day. I’ve never seen anything like it. He rarely got a paper receipt to bring to the office and his wife had to enter them in the books when she would find out about them in her online banking or when she got a statement, which was some time later. They bounced checks, even payroll checks and were frequently overdrawn in the checking account and didn’t know why.

We did finally get it all straightened out in the bookkeeping but sadly, that is when they realized they didn’t have the funds to continue the business and they closed it. They were deeply in the hole. If they had gotten some guidance on the bookkeeping in the beginning, all of it might have been avoided. They could have known sooner what their financial condition was and could have made changes that would have salvaged the business before it was too late.

By now, you know why I told you that story…DON’T BE THAT GUY OR GAL! I have worked for quite a few companies and have seen something similar to this story a few times. You do not have to deal with this kind of headache and stress. It can be easy and simple and not take much time or money to take care of the bookkeeping from the start. I am going to make sure you have the information you need to do it right. And then if your company does go belly up, it won’t be because of the bookkeeping being incorrect or incomplete.

Just put on your ‘big girl or boy pants’ and let’s get you started out on the right foot.