6 Tips to keep good record keeping and bookkeeping

The importance of good record keeping and bookkeeping:

Staying on top of your bookkeeping ensures you have up to date, accurate and useful financial information to help you manage your business. By ensuring your accounts are frequently reconciled you will have real time information on things like;  money you owe to suppliers, money owed to you from customers, any expected VAT payments, or other liabilities and how well your business is doing. By law, you must keep accountancy records for 6 years, so it is very important that you have good processes for record keeping.

Here are a few tips to ensure the process is as smooth as possible:

• Keep copies of all business purchase invoices and receipts. Even better, send them directly to your accounting software as soon as you receive them, so you have an electronic copy of the invoice saved. If you are VAT registered, you cannot reclaim VAT on purchases without a valid VAT invoice for the expense

• Make sure you use sequential numbering for sales invoices to help easily identify if any are missing from your accounting records. Raising them directly within your accountancy software will help with this

• When employees are submitting expenses for reimbursement, make sure they have the correct receipts attached to the expense report before approval

• Keep track of your petty cash spend and ensure you have a clear record of payments, receipts and the balance of petty cash held

• Make use of as many software integrations as possible, this streamlines processes and usually saves lots of time

• It can seem like a daunting task to gather all your bookkeeping information so set asides a small amount of time each week to keep on top of it