Bookkeeping For Dummies

Lita Epstein

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118950371
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The fast and easy way to master the art of bookkeeping

If you're a business owner or an employee who manages finances, the latest edition of Bookkeeping For Dummies is for you. This handy guide gives you clear and concise information on how to keep track of accounts, prepare balance sheets, organize ledgers or journals, create financial statements, and so much more. Packed with the most up-to-date bookkeeping practices, tax information, and small-business laws, Bookkeeping For Dummies is an accessible, invaluable resource you'll turn to again and again.

Accurate and complete bookkeeping is crucial to any -business owner—but jumping in headfirst without knowing your accounts from your balance sheets can confuse even the most astute businessperson. That's where Bookkeeping For Dummies helps! Written in the familiar and friendly tone that has defined the For Dummies brand for more than twenty years, this clear and comprehensive guide covers everything you'll encounter as you set out to tackle your company's books, ensuring you're on the right track and saving you tons of headaches along the way. So what are you waiting for? It's time to hit the books!

• Offers easy-to-follow instructions to keep track of your business' financial well-being
• Covers managing assets and liabilities
• Includes updated QuickBooks screenshots and Excel spreadsheets
• Provides guidance on producing balance sheets and creating financial statements

Whether you're just starting out with bookkeeping—or a bookkeeper who needs to brush up on your skills— Bookkeeping For Dummies sets you up for success.

Part I

Basic Bookkeeping: Why You Need It

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In this part …

• Introducing you to the world of bookkeeping
• Exploring bookkeeping basics
• Developing your financial roadmap

Chapter 1

So You Want to Do the Books

In This Chapter

Introducing bookkeeping and its basic purpose

Maintaining a paper trail

Managing daily business finances

Making sure everything’s accurate

Putting on a financial show

Few small business owners actually hire accountants to work full time for them. For a small business, that expense is probably too great, so instead the owner hires a bookkeeper who serves as the company accountant’s eyes and ears. In return, the accountant helps the bookkeeper develop good bookkeeping practices and reviews his or her work periodically (usually monthly).

In this chapter, I provide an overview of a bookkeeper’s work. If you’re just starting a business, you may be your own bookkeeper for a while until you can afford to hire one, so think of this chapter as your to-do list.

Delving into Bookkeeping Basics

Like most business people, you probably have great ideas for running your own business and just want to get started. You don’t want to sweat the small stuff, like keeping detailed records of every penny spent; you just want to quickly build a business in which you can make lots of money.

Well slow down there — this isn’t a race! If you don’t carefully plan your bookkeeping operation and figure out exactly how and what financial detail you want to track, you’ll have absolutely no way to measure the success (or failure, unfortunately) of your business efforts.

Bookkeeping, when done properly, gives you an excellent gauge of how well you’re doing. It also provides you with lots of information throughout the year so you can test the financial success of your business strategies and make course corrections early in the year, if necessary, to ensure that you reach your year-end profit goals.

Bookkeeping can become your best friend for managing your financial assets and testing your business strategies, so don’t shortchange it. Take the time to develop your bookkeeping system with your accountant before you even open your business’s doors and make your first sale.

Picking your accounting method

You can’t keep books unless you know how you want to go about doing so. The two basic accounting methods you have to choose from are cash-basis accounting and accrual accounting. The key difference between these two accounting methods is the point at which you record sales and purchases in your books. If you choose cash-basis accounting, you only record transactions when cash changes hands. If you use accrual accounting, you record a transaction when it’s completed, even if cash doesn’t change hands.

For example, suppose your company buys products to sell from a vendor but doesn’t actually pay for those products for 30 days. If you’re using cash-basis accounting, you don’t record the purchase until you actually lay out the cash to the vendor. If you’re using accrual accounting, you record the purchase when you receive the products, and you also record the future debt in an account called Accounts Payable.

I talk about the pros and cons of each type of accounting method in Chapter 2.

Understanding assets, liabilities, and equity

Every business has three key financial parts that must be kept in balance: assets, liabilities, and equity. Assets include everything the company owns, such as cash, inventory, buildings, equipment, and vehicles. Liabilities include everything the company owes to others, such as vendor bills, credit-card balances, and bank loans. Equity includes the claims owners have on the assets based on their portion of ownership in the company.

The formula for keeping your books in balance involves these three elements:

Assets = Liabilities + Equity

Because it’s so important, I talk a lot about how to keep your books in balance throughout this book. You can find an initial introduction to this concept in Chapter 2.

Introducing debits and credits

To keep the books, you need to revise your thinking about two common financial terms: debits and credits. Most nonbookkeepers and nonaccountants think of debits as subtractions from their bank accounts. The opposite is true with credits — people usually see these as additions to their accounts, in most cases in the form of refunds or corrections in favor of the account holders.

Well, forget all you thought you knew about debits and credits. Debits and credits are totally different animals in the world of bookkeeping. Because keeping the books involves a method called double-entry bookkeeping, you have to make a least two entries — a debit and a credit — into your bookkeeping system for every transaction. Whether that debit or credit adds or subtracts from an account depends solely upon the type of account.

I know all this debit, credit, and double-entry stuff sounds confusing, but I promise it will become much clearer as you work through this book. I start explaining this critical yet somewhat confusing concept in Chapter 2.

Charting your bookkeeping course

You can’t just enter transactions in the books willy-nilly. You need to know where exactly those transactions fit into the larger bookkeeping system. That’s where your Chart of Accounts comes in; it’s essentially a list of all the accounts your business has and what types of transactions go into each one.

I talk more about the Chart of Accounts in Chapter 3.

Recognizing the Importance of an Accurate Paper Trail

Keeping the books is all about creating an accurate paper trail. You want to track all of your company’s financial transactions so if a question comes up at a later date, you can turn to the books to figure out what went wrong.

An accurate paper trail is the only way to track your financial successes and review your financial failures, a task that’s vitally important in order to grow your business. You need to know what works successfully so you can repeat it in the future and build on your success. On the other hand, you need to know what failed so you can correct it and avoid making the same mistake again.

All your business’s financial transactions are summarized in the General Ledger, and journals keep track of the tiniest details of each transaction. You can make your information gathering more effective by using a computerized accounting system, which gives you access to your financial information in many different formats. Controlling who enters this financial information into your books and who can access it afterwards is smart business and involves critical planning on your part. I address all these concepts in the following sections.

Maintaining a ledger

The granddaddy of your bookkeeping system is the General Ledger. In this ledger, you keep a summary of all your accounts and the financial activities that took place involving those accounts throughout the year.

You draw upon the General Ledger’s account summaries to develop your financial reports on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. You can also use these account summaries to develop internal reports that help you make key business decisions. I talk more about developing and maintaining the General Ledger in Chapter 4.

Keeping journals

Small companies conduct hundreds, if not thousands, of transactions each year. If every transaction were kept in the General Ledger, that record would become unwieldy and difficult to use. Instead, most companies keep a series of journals that detail activity in their most active accounts.

For example, almost every company has a Cash Receipts Journal in which to keep the detail for all incoming cash and a Cash Disbursements Journal in which to keep the detail for all outgoing cash. Other journals can detail sales, purchases, customer accounts, vendor accounts, and any other key accounts that see significant activity.

You decide which accounts you want to create journals for based on your business operation and your need for information about key financial transactions. I talk more about the importance of journals, the accounts commonly journalized, and the process of maintaining journals in Chapter 5.

Computerizing

Most companies today use computerized accounting systems to keep their books. You should consider using one of these systems rather than trying to keep your books on paper. You’ll find your bookkeeping takes less time and is probably more accurate with a computerized system.

In addition to increasing accuracy and cutting the time it takes to do your bookkeeping, computerized accounting also makes designing reports easier. These reports can then be used to help make business decisions. Your computerized accounting system stores detailed information about every transaction, so you can group that detail in any way that may assist your decision-making. I talk m...