Accountants do an excellent job of helping small business owners keep track of their finances. As a small business owner, you need to do most of the work. Otherwise, you will find that your accountant is completely lost with all of your receipts, bills, and invoices. Here are some ways to keep your records more organized so that your accountant can do his/her job and find any accounting errors you might make.
Quickbooks
A lot of invoices and business finance operations are now digital. If you send invoices to customers via email, or request payments via an online money transfer service, that is part of the digital finance operations of your business. These records need to be logged and kept somewhere, usually with the use of a program like Quickbooks. Every digital purchase, every bill paid online, and every invoice or bill you send, as well as money paid to you, can be downloaded into these programs. It keeps things quite tidy for your accountant.
Files for Paper Copies
You should always keep "hard" copies of all of your financials, too. Everything digital should be printed and filed in its own separate folder in your work desk. This serves two purposes. One, your accountant can verify all of your digital stuff with the hard copies when looking for errors. Two, if you are audited by the IRS, you have copies of everything that you can show them.
Uncluttered Work Space
Not surprisingly, it is hard for anyone to find an accounting error in the midst of a cluttered mess. If you have a separate work space in your office for your accountant, keep his/her work space clutter-free. The accountant can sort through paperwork a lot easier if he/she is not drowning in it.
If you take all of your documents to the accountant's office offsite, do your absolute best to keep all of your documents neatly organized and properly filed. Split the documents between "incoming" and "outgoing," and then subdivide these two files in a way that makes sense. If you can, provide your accountant access to your digital financial files via your accounting program.
During Tax Season
Tax season is extremely busy for accountants. This is the time of year where it becomes extremely important for you to have everything in your digital and paper files in perfect order. If you are missing anything, your accountant cannot proceed with your taxes. Accounting errors can seriously mess the process up as well, so you might want to have an accountant working with you for most of the prior year.
For more information, contact a business such as Blueback Accounting.
