Petty cash funds are funds that are kept on hand at your business office and is used to reimburse employees for small expenses. Sometime it is misused as if it were an extra bank account. Keeping track of petty cash is a key control for small business owners. Failure to do so will leave your…
There are two basic forms of accounting that should be used to track your revenues and expenses – cash basis and accrual basis. Cash basis means that you recognize the income when you receive it and you recognize expenses when you actually pay them. Accrual basis means that you recognize income when you have the…
When most people think of job costing they think of construction businesses. But you can us job costing in any business that has multiple streams of income that are significant to that businesses bottom line. Job costing is all about assigning the proper costs to individual project or jobs, to help determine its profitability. In…
A business plan is no easy task. It is the most important document a small business owner should have and the one that most small business owners don’t have. A traditional business plan is minimally 20 pages long and can takes months to prepare. And that’s why most SBOs don’t create one. But what if…
Have you ever had to pay out of pocket for a job or business related expense that you were unable to receive a reimbursement from your employer? To most Americans, unreimbursed employee business expenses are one of the least understood areas of the tax code. Many of us believe it is an automatic deduction and…
When you start your own business, you face many challenges when you first start out. What are you going to sell? Who are you going to sell it to? Where and how are you going to sell it? And what are you going to charge? These are all tough questions to answer when you are…
I recently attended a tele-seminar about being your own voice in your writing, given by The Writing Whisperer, and one of the take aways was a reminder that people want to work with PEOPLE. Meaning, even in your copy you have to let your light shine through. You have to be yourself in order for…
Business process improvement is the developing of a systematic approach to helping an organization optimize its underlying processes to achieve more efficient results. It is the methodology for process redesign and process reengineering. It is a systematic way for businesses to become organized as they grow and develop by looking at their current processes, documenting…
Last week I talked about the importance of using account numbers. One of the main reasons is that it creates structure and allows you to group your transaction based on the five main categories of accounting. There are five main chart of account categories that are the foundation of an accounting numbering system. These five categories…
I was recently working on a clients books and noticed that they didn’t use account numbers. And I asked them why, they didn’t have any reason. They simply replied “Why do I need them?” The Chart of Accounts is the framework to your reporting system in your business. This framework is a complete list of…
