Category: 🧾 Accounting/Bookkeeping

Recording Income and Getting Paid Income is the reason the business exists, yet recording it is where some of the most damaging errors hide: double-counted revenue, forgotten invoices, and deposits recorded as income when they’re not. The full cycle: billing the customer, receiving the money, and recording it correctly. Invoicing: bill promptly and precisely Invoice…

Chapter 8 — Payroll: The Basics a Bookkeeper Must Know Payroll is where bookkeeping meets the law. Get income recording wrong and your reports mislead you; get payroll wrong and the government fines you. The rules are unforgiving, the deadlines are rigid, and the penalties for late payroll tax deposits are among the harshest in…

Your Books, Your Business’s Memory You began this book staring at a receipt, wondering where it goes. Now you know where everything goes — and more importantly, you know why it matters. Let’s take one final walk through the journey, then talk about where you go from here. The journey we took together We started…

Working With Your Accountant (and What to Never Do Yourself) You can keep your own books — this book was written to make that possible. But bookkeeping and professional accounting are different jobs, and knowing where one ends and the other begins is what separates a well-run business from one that’s merely busy. What belongs…

Month-End and Year-End Close Checklists Good books aren’t maintained by heroic annual efforts. They’re maintained by small routines, performed on schedule: a monthly close that keeps every period honest, and a year-end close that turns a year of books into a tax return. The monthly close routine Do this in the first week or two…

Reading the Three Financial Statements Every invoice, every bill, every reconciliation, every adjusting entry you’ve made exists to produce three reports. Lenders read them, buyers read them, and the IRS cross-checks them. This chapter teaches you to read them like an owner. The Profit & Loss statement The P&L answers the book’s first question: am…

Chapter 11 — The Trial Balance and Adjusting Entries By now you’ve recorded months of transactions: invoices, bills, payroll, deposits, payments. Before those records can become financial statements, they need two things: proof that the books are mathematically sound, and corrections for the things daily recording doesn’t capture. The trial balance provides the proof; adjusting…

Chapter 10 — Accounts Receivable and Payable, Done Right Receivables and payables are the two sides of business credit: money owed to you and money owed by you. Managed well, they’re a quiet engine of cash flow. Managed poorly, they’re where profitable businesses go to die — starved of cash while waiting on customers, or…

Chapter 9 — Inventory, Equipment, and Depreciation Some of what a business buys gets used up right away — cleaning supplies, printer paper, fuel. Some of it sticks around: the products on the shelves, the delivery van, the ovens, the computers. This chapter covers the “sticks around” category — how to track it, when it…

Cash, Bank Accounts, and Reconciliation Your bank account is the financial record you can’t argue with: the bank knows exactly what came in and what went out. Reconciliation is the monthly ritual of proving your books agree with the bank — and finding out why when they don’t. It is the single most important control…