As a startup, you’re focused on the short and long-term goals of your company. You’re constantly experimenting with new tactics to grow your business.
Fortunately, bookkeeping helps you fine-tune your strategy by providing you with important financial information. This means you can make better decisions that will help your business reach its full potential.
Pay Your Bills on Time
One of the most important things you can do as a bookkeeper is to pay your bills on time. Doing so will help you build good relationships with your vendors and organize your finances.
To keep track of your bills, QuickBooks has a built-in feature called Accounts Payable. This is a way to organize your bills by date and amount due.
You can also set up Reminders for specific bill dates to help you remember that they are coming due.
Using Reminders is a great way to stay on top of your billing and avoid late fees or worse.
Keeping track of your bills is easy in QuickBooks. Just click on the “Show Bills” tab in the left navigation pane to see all your upcoming and past-due bills. You can also see your open balances and the total owed by the vendor.
Keep Track of Your Vendors
Whether you need a coffee corner, a pantry, or an electric company to light up your office space, vendors are a vital part of your business. So, it’s important to know how to manage your relationships with them efficiently and effectively.
Managing your vendors properly can mean resolving issues like price negotiations, performance concerns, deadlines, quality complaints, and more. These are all things that can affect your relationship with your vendors and, ultimately, your profitability.
To avoid such problems, you should create sound vendor management procedures that are backed up by digital tools that personalize, streamline, and centralize the various activities you undertake for vendor-related tasks. Such procedures will also help you avoid costly mistakes that can jeopardize the long-term health of your business.
Vendor management is an ongoing process that includes finding and vetting potential vendors, negotiating the best price and terms, maintaining vendor relationships, and monitoring their performance. These procedures are critical to boosting productivity, ensuring quality, and lowering expenses.
Keep Your Records Up-to-Date
One of the most important aspects of starting your own bookkeeping business is keeping your financial records up-to-date. Keeping these records in good order allows you to monitor your finances and control your cash flow.
The best way to keep your records up-to-date is to set aside a specific time each week that you can devote to reviewing and maintaining them. This will ensure that you’re always on top of your finances and can take action if necessary.
Another great way to keep track of your business is by creating a budget. Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced business owner, a budget will help you plan for the future by projecting what your expenses will be and when. Ideally, you’ll also build in padding to cover your business’s earliest operating expenses and an emergency fund.
Create a Budget
If you want to grow your small business, you need a good financial plan. A budget is a blueprint for this plan and it should be created early in your business.
You can create a startup budget in a spreadsheet or with a budgeting software program. You can also work with a financial expert to develop the ideal budget for your business.
Your budget should include all costs related to launching your business, including initial equipment and supplies, legal fees, website hosting fees, and other expenses you’ll incur in the beginning stages of your company. These expenses can be hard to predict, so it’s important to make them as accurate as possible.
Your budget should be updated monthly and yearly to track how your business is progressing. It’s a great way to evaluate your budget against actual income and expenses so you can tweak your plans as needed.
Conclusion
Most small businesses start with an online store, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce or any other platform. At the end of the day, you need a balance sheet, income statement, need to process purchase orders, and various financial statements. Connecting your online store to an Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system when using various marketplaces to then connect to your accounting software such as XERO, Quickbooks, Sage, or another system, makes your business automation more streamlined. You can also connect directly without an ERP if your inventory control is being managed within the store itself. If you have any questions on how to make your financial reporting work for you with your online store - feel free to reach out at wish@thegenielab.com