5 Monthly Accounting Tips for Small Businesses
A lot goes into making your small business successful. Keeping up on your accounting tasks, while not among the most glamorous of duties, it a big part of it.
We’ve mentioned that one of the most important small business budgeting tips is to keep the numbers updated regularly and frequently. In fact, ideally, whoever is in charge of accounting should be doing a number of tasks on a monthly basis to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks and no big surprises await at the end of the fiscal year.
Not sure what exactly those duties entail? Here are a few monthly accounting tips for your small business:
Monthly Accounting Tips for Small Businesses
1. Check Accounts Payable and Receivable: In short, you need to make sure everything that needed to go out went out, and that everything that needed to come in came in. On the receivable side, that means making sure you sent out all necessary invoices and that all deposits and other received money have been recorded. On the payable side, that includes making sure all bills and vendors have been paid, and that those payments have been recorded.
2. Reconcile Your Cash Accounts: A lot can go wrong when it comes to credit card and other electronic transactions. That’s why, every month, you should reconcile the transactions you’ve posted in your accounting system against your bank and credit card statements. This can help you ferret out issues, such as problems with automatic recurring payments.
3. Look at Your Financials: Review your income statement, balance sheet and other financial statements. While you may find a mistake or two to rectify, the real importance of this step is that reviewing your financials can give you a good idea of where your business is, as well as where it’s coming from and where it’s going. You’ll do that in concert with step 4.
4. Review and Update Your Budget: Compare your financial statements with the budget you set at the beginning of the fiscal year. By keeping yourself familiar with your company’s income, debt, cash and other important metrics, and then comparing that to your goals, you should be able to identify trends – such as when you’re bleeding cash – giving you more time (and typically more ability) to do something about it before it reaches a critical level.
5. Keep in Touch With Us: Have you identified anything concerning, have questions about why certain numbers are the way they are, or maybe just want to decide what to do with a projected surplus? Talk to the accounting pros at McManamon & Co. We help small- and mid-size businesses at various levels, whether it’s helping you create financial statements or training your accounting team on best practices and the latest accounting software.
Don’t let any numbers go unaccounted for. Call us at 440.892.9088 or contact us online for custom accounting services – whether you need full support or just a helping hand.
Tags: McManamon, small business, small business accounting | Posted in accounting, McManamon & Co., small business