If you run a business, the act of bookkeeping is essential. Let’s start by defining bookkeeping. What exactly is “Bookkeeping?”
Bookkeeping is the process of recording the financial transactions of your company. Bookkeeping categorizes the money coming into your business as income. Expenses refer to money that your business spends in order to operate. The act of bookkeeping organizes your expenses into categories that are used to file your taxes.
Now let’s talk about why this matters.
File Your Taxes
As a business owner, you will likely hire a CPA to file your taxes. You will need to provide the CPA with your income and your expenses. Your taxes cannot be filed without this information. This leads to the next important reason for keeping an accurate set of books.
Pay Fewer Taxes
This is probably the most attractive reason to have a bookkeeping system in place. Bookkeeping identifies all of your transactions so that nothing slips through the cracks. You must categorize each and every transaction that goes through your bank account. By keeping an accurate set of books, you will know exactly what you spend on gas or office supplies, or advertising. When you are gathering your data at the end of the year, you aren’t trying to remember how much you spent on that new computer or which client you took to lunch in May. Without a clear bookkeeping system, you will invariably miss out on deductions. You must have a plan and a process to ensure that deductions are captured.
Your expenses must be organized into categories approved by the IRS in order to be considered “deductions”. Without deductions, you will pay taxes on the entire income of your business. With deductions, you will rightfully cut this tax bill thereby saving you and your business money. For example, if your business brings in $100,000 without deductions, you might pay the IRS upwards of $25,000. But, if you can clearly show business expenses of $60,000, you might pay $10,000. This is a tax savings of $15K — not just nickels and dimes!
Track Your Profit
Profit is a key indicator of your business’s success. You can only determine your profitability if you are tracking your income and expenses.
Make Decisions About Your Business
Bookkeeping can help you make decisions about your business. Is it a good time to hire? Should you be increasing your prices? Are you spending too much on utilities? These decisions are guided by your business’s financial health.
Financing
In order to get financing for your business, you will need to provide the lender a set of books showing your income and expenses. Banks will require you to show your expenses vs. your revenue, otherwise known as your Income Statement or Profit and Loss. Bookkeeping will provide this report.
Catch Mistakes
Were you overcharged or charged twice for a service? Are you paying for a subscription that you are no longer using? You will catch these transactions through your bookkeeping because you are looking closely at every transaction.
Where Is Your Money Going?
Through bookkeeping, you will understand where your money is going. This will help you budget and plan cash flow for the development of your business.
Bookkeeping will save you money by saving on taxes, cutting down on mistakes, guiding you through financial decisions, and improving your cash flow. Business owners often want to do this on their own. Sometimes this works. But often the books are the piece of the business that well-intentioned owners plan to do and just don’t have enough time in the day.
Bookkeeping is essential but it does take time, pulling you away from your actual business and preventing you from focusing on your clients. As a business owner, you wear so many hats. This is one that you can easily outsource with confidence. Reach out for a complementary consultation to see if our services would be a good fit for your business.
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