. Hints & Tips

I know there are a number of you out there who absolutely dread, or don’t have the time to organise the paperwork involved with your business and in particular avoid looking at anything to do with bookkeeping until it becomes urgent.

Making the effort to carry out paperwork tasks once or twice a week will save you time in the long run and your business will be more efficient.

My tip would be to mark out some specific time in your busy schedule at least once or twice a week to attend to the paperwork.  Easier said than done?

Listed below are a couple of simple hints and tips to help you get organised.

RECEIPT KEEPING

This is one of the tasks we all find quite difficult to do but it is important to keep all of the receipts in connection with your business whether you are VAT registered or not.  If you keep your receipts then it is always easier to trace a specific amount when you are checking back your records or completing tax returns, vat returns or bank reconciliations.

Receipts are easy to lose so in your receipts and payments file or any other file which is easy for you to find take a large A4 envelope and punch a couple of holes into it, slot it into the file and every time you have a receipt just pop it into the top of the envelope until you are ready to deal with it.  This way they will all be in one place and won’t fall out of your pocket or get lost in the van etc etc.

 CREDIT CARD BILLS

Dependent upon your business type/size you may have credit card bills showing a large amount of transactions, however this tip can be used regardless of how large or small your credit card bill is.

My tip would be to gather together the receipts (should be easy if you use my method of keeping receipts together) that apply to the particular transactions on your credit card bill and give them each a number starting at 1.  Write the corresponding number against the transaction on your credit card bill and once you have processed the entire bill staple the receipts in order to the back of the credit card bill they apply to and file the whole thing in a “Credit Card Transactions” file.

Watch This Space for Further Hints and Tips!

Please note these are only hints and tips that I have found useful, they are in no way advice and you should always decide what works best for your business.