Want just the Checklists – Download the essential checklists here: 

Download the Checklists on their own – Click here.

This page – Includes the download to the simple PDF, The full page  PDF, the video explaining each section, and the text for each section so you can choose your path to completion based on your personal preferences. And a button to speak to one of our friendly experts for a personal consultation – free.

• Introduction to this Bookkeeping Assessment
• Common Bookkeeping Weaknesses
• Which of these essentials are you missing?
• Our Favourite Tools, Apps and Software
• Bookkeeping – Bringing this together

Introduction to this Bookkeeping Assessment

Watch the Video or read the text below, as you prefer…

It’s hard to know whether you are on the right track with your bookkeeping.

You are paying for your bookkeeping in time or money or both.

So why not get the most value from it?

This page / document will help you assess your current situation and processes.

It will point you in the right direction, if you would like to maximise your return on investment from your time and bookkeeping costs (and your business).

This document is designed to help you score your current bookkeeping system, and spot weaknesses and opportunities within your current processes.

This document is for you if you understand that :

• “Numbers” are the language of business.
• You don’t know if you’re winning or losing if you don’t check the (accurate) score.
• You want your business to run as efficiently as possible.
• You do not want to miss out on opportunities, and
• You do not want to let losses go unchecked.

and

• You do your own bookkeeping personally (a biggie)!

Here is how it is organised. If you want the checklist, download it here. Sections coming up:

• Bookkeeping Weaknesses
• Critical Bookkeeping Reports
• Our Favourite Tools and Apps
• Bringing it together
• Conclusion

If this is you, then in the next five minutes you will have a good understanding of how you can improve your processes.

We have put together a special offer of a free bookkeeping review session with an experienced accountant/ digital bookkeeper.

If you are in a hurry, and would rather just talk to a specialist on the subject, simply click the button below, for an “advice only” online meeting.

Common Bookkeeping Weaknesses

Watch the video or read the text below it, as your prefer…

This section is all about identifying common weaknesses that we see in business owner bookkeeping systems.

Answer the questions yes or no. If it is not a resounding no, please give it a yes.

It is for your benefit, so be brutally honest.

Which, or how many of these weaknesses do you recognize?

• Still using a spreadsheet for bookkeeping.
• Typing in bank and card transactions manually rather than importing them (automatically).
• Using Word or Excel to create sales invoices (or anything other than your accounting software). Typing in expense invoices manually, (Rather than importing them).
• Filing sales and expense invoices manually in paper format.
• Capturing small expenses like lunch, travel or stationary manually (rather than with your smartphone).
• You do your own bookkeeping personally (a biggie)!

Your score ___ / 6

I would suggest any of these weaknesses indicate efficiencies are available to you.

2 hours saved a week at £25 per hour could add up to £2,600 a year – or a family holiday. Better information in time could save bad debts (Alen got caught for £80,000 – what have you been caught for in the past? Do you need more reasons to take action now? Getting short of cash could threaten your business and … At the very least – cause stress and anxiety! Cost – Untold Fix your weaknesses now, please.

If you are in a hurry, and would rather just talk to a specialist on the subject, simply click the button below, for an “advice only” online meeting.

Which of these essentials are you missing?

Watch the video or read the text below, as you prefer…

This section is all about identifying common weaknesses that we see in business owner bookkeeping systems.

Answer the questions yes or no. This time If it is not a resounding Yes, please give it a No.

It is for your benefit, so be brutally honest.

Which or how many of these reports do you have on time and understand?

• Do you know who owes you money as of the close of business yesterday/last week/last month?
• Do you know who you owe money to, and how much, as of last week/last month?
• Do you have a reasonable estimate of your tax bill as at the end of last month?
• Do you know how much profit you made last week (roughly)/last month (good accuracy)?
• Do you know how well your business did against budgets or targets (impossible without budgets or targets :-)).
• You can break this question down into several areas including:
  • sales
  • cost of sales
  • margins
  • marketing costs
  • selling costs
  • overheads
  • profitability
  • debts
  • liabilities
  • cash cushion
• Is all of this information available on your mobile phone?

I would suggest any of these missing reports indicate you may be missing key data that could result in you losing 15% of your profits or not making an additional 15% profits.

The trouble is, without these data pieces, you would not know whether or how much! If you are ok not knowing (ignorance is bliss) stop reading now. This is useless to you. If your profits are £100,000 per year, you could make £15,000 just by taking the right action on a timely basis  That could pay off your mortgage 5 years earlier… or Buy a new car every 3 years… Worthwhile? Let’s get to it…

If you are in a hurry, and would rather just talk to a specialist on the subject, simply click the button below, for an “advice only” online meeting.

Our Favourite Tools, Apps and Software

Watch the video or read the text below, as you prefer…

Accounting software  (not exhaustive).

Accounting software must be hosted online so that it is secure, automatically backed up, and accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection, and the correct access details.

The following list is not exhaustive, but it does have the most reliable, secure and easy-to-use platforms available today:

• Xero (£22-40 pm)
• QuickBooks (£20-40 pm)
• Fresh books (£25-40 pm)
• Sage (£20 – 40 pm)

Free (functional but not as easy or developed)

• Wave

Data platforms (not exhaustive).

If you are storing your data in paper form, you are not only wasting time filing it, but also wasting time retrieving it, and wasting space and money storing it.

Every efficient business today will be hosting their data in a secure cloud platform, that easy to store, virtually free, and fast to find and access.

The data platforms below have the ability to meet all the criteria, on varying budgets.

On these, you can store not only your accounting data, but all other correspondence, for example legal documents, quotes, agreements and much more (everything else)

Most of the accounting software I have mentioned above have the ability to store the relevant paperwork for the accounting data within it, thereby putting it exactly where you need it.

• Google Docs (£5 pm)
• Dropbox (£130 pa)
• Sharefile (£700 pa)
• Datamulino (£50 pm)
• Box (£100 pa)

Equipment necessary, and useful

I have broken this down into two categories, because there is some equipment you really cannot do without, and you probably already have…

And there is other equipment that would be useful depending on the quantities of data you want to process, with greater convenience.

Let’s start with necessary:

• A personal computer or laptop, either Windows-based or Mac.
• A smartphone with a camera for storing temporary data.

Let’s look at the computer first

This can be any PC(or Mac) or laptop you currently own. Chances are you already own one. You may even be able to use a tablet of some sort, if that is what you prefer.

This will be used to operate the software, as it is easier to do so on this, rather than on a personal smartphone. Especially if you have more than 20 pieces of data per week.

You will install the software onto your chosen piece of equipment, and use the functionality within it, to move the data around, find it, maybe print it, and review reports on it.

Next, let’s look at the smartphone.

While the smartphone could be used for virtually everything, at my age, and my dexterity, I prefer entering data on a larger piece of equipment like a laptop or PC.

However, it is possible to do virtually everything from a smartphone these days.

What I particularly use my smartphone for is to scan documents using the camera and a free app, and

To review my reports and analysis.

Although I am a qualified accountant, and understand bookkeeping better than most, I have not done my own bookkeeping for over 35 years!

I understand the value of my time (over £300 per hour), and as such have a team processing it for me and my clients.

I recommend the same for you.

Your job is to create the systems, and the checks and balances, but not to process the data.

Useful equipment for Bookkeeping.

There are two pieces of equipment you might find useful depending on the volume you put through them.

1. The first is a scanner.

If you’re scanning a lot of paper, a sheetfed scanner is going to make your life easier and more streamlined. You just load 20 to 50 documents in the hopper, and the scanned PDFs are magically created within minutes.

Sheetfed Scanners can be very cost-effective at under £250 / $350.

They can have a tiny footprint, as small as a standard sheet of paper

For smaller volumes, and small bits of paper like receipts from petrol stations and coffee shops, for example, I use my smartphone, connected to the relevant apps.

I have put links to my preferred equipment in the appendices.

2. The second piece of useful equipment is a printer.

I’m not a big fan of printing documents, for two reasons…

• It takes up a lot of space and is cumbersome… And
• It is not friendly to the planet (a personal reason that I would recommend you consider).

The reason I put it as useful and not necessary, is that you can usually access printing stations in hotels, print shops, libraries and other locations if you have low volume important printing.

I really value my time (and so should you), so I have a small wireless printer that I can use when necessary. It is relatively inexpensive, but it does take up space, that you may not have (or choose not to have).

If you are in a hurry, and would rather just talk to a specialist on the subject, simply click the button below, for an “advice only” online meeting.

Bookkeeping – Bringing this together

Watch the video or read the text below, as you prefer…

The truth is, today, most accounting information is already electronic.

Invoices are normally sent by email, which makes them an electronic document already.

These include both sales and expense invoices.

These can be easily assimilated into the accounting software I have listed above. Please be aware that when I refer to accounting software, the free one, is more cumbersome to use, and does not have as much functionality…

But it’s free (not recommended unless you are a startup with a very tight budget – Time is money…).

Any accounting documentation that is not already electronic, can be scanned using your scanner, or smartphone. Our training is available for smartphones scanning on our website.

All bank data can be imported or automatically “sucked in” with agreement from your bank and the software. It is a one-way trip (bank to software) so your bank account remains secure.

This one element makes the data more accurate, and reduces errors and therefore the time it would normally take to input all the transactions from your bank into accounting software.

When the data is all in the software, a good bookkeeper will:

• Code it
• Allocate it
• Reconcile it
• Test it
• Report on it

All anomalies, inaccuracies and missing data will be sent to you, for your comments and instructions, prior to final reports being sent to you for your review in your decision-making process.

If you’ve never had up-to-date reports to run your business on… You are going to love this.

Once you begin to understand and harness the power of information, you will find that…

• You will understand your business better
• You will make more informed decisions
• You will understand where things are going wrong, and be able to fix them
• You will understand what’s going well, and do more of it
• You will feel in control of your business and act more proactively, rather than reacting

You will never go back to the dark side :-).

(Being in the dark :-))

You may have discovered there are some new concepts and principles outlined in this short document.

I understand that it may be difficult to assess it all.

That is why we have put forward the free 20-minute review of your bookkeeping situation, where you can ask an accountant and  digital bookkeeping specialist any questions you have.

To access this offer, please click on the button below.

If you are in a hurry, and would rather just talk to a specialist on the subject, simply click the button below, for an “advice only” online meeting.

Conclusion and Next Steps

The conclusion I am hoping you reach is that you must give your bookkeeping system a major overhaul if you’ve found any weaknesses or any reports that you do not currently receive.

Besides the savings in time and money, which could be considerable and valuable, you have the business intelligence to draw upon when running your business and making decisions.

Giving the responsibility for collating the data to a specialist has the additional benefit of being able to discuss the reports with a seasoned business owner and business mentor. The benefit we bring to businesses like yours is immense.

At the very least, please stop doing your own bookkeeping (unless it is your hobby, and you do it in your hobby time). Your time is better spent looking after clients, marketing, developing new strategies, in building your business.

If you would like to discuss any of the issues raised above, please book in a call at a time convenient to you, using the link below. It will give you access to my calendar in real-time. Look forward to speaking to you and adding your bank of knowledge.

All the best your business. You deserve it.

Gordon D’Silva

Appendices

Link to a small wireless business/home printer

Link to a small footprint sheetfed scanner…