Hate Doing Your Bookkeeping?

Hate Doing Your Bookkeeping – Simple Ways To Help Learn To Love It

We work with many business owners who outsource their bookkeeping and they do this for lots of reasons e.g. to give them more time to focus on other areas of the business, because they want expertise they don’t have etc.

However, there are also quite a few of our clients that simply just can’t stand doing their own bookkeeping. They have been battling with it for a period of time and in the end it’s become a problem for them.

So I thought that in this blog I would try and help some of those business who are doing their own bookkeeping but hate doing it. If they learn to love it then they are more likely to do it well and their bookkeeping shouldn’t then become a problem for them. So here goes;

1. Acknowledge the value of doing it. Many people see that doing their bookkeeping is just a necessary evil and that it’s just about compliance and making the HMRC happy. If you think about it, it’s so much more than this. It’s a picture and a measure of how well your business is doing. If you are excited about where your business is going, then wouldn’t you be excited to see each month how much you have progressed towards your business goals? If you start to think of it in this way, then you can look forward to running your profit & loss reports once your bookkeeping is finished.

2. Stop doing the bookkeeping in evenings and weekends or holidays. This just makes you resent doing it even more. It is a critical part of running your business, so why not prioritise it and schedule it into your working week?

3. Don’t let it pile up and become a monster. Do your bookkeeping as you go – at least weekly. This way you feel in control and can see exactly what is going on. It’s more satisfying and you will no longer worry about it. Set aside a time each week for this.If you reading this and thinking that this has already become a monster and therefore it’s going to be a problem to deal with, either plan in time to work on it yourself or get in touch with a bookkeeper to help you get up to date and back on track and, if you want to, you can then continue it on from there.

4. Make sure you know what you are doing. Many of us will feel agitated or negative if we aren’t sure if we are doing something right or properly and it’s the same with bookkeeping. If you have never been trained to do it correctly, it lessens your commitment and can just make you feel fed up with it. So why not get some bookkeeping training? This doesn’t have to be a huge time commitment – go on a short 1 day course or get a bookkeeper to do some 1 to 1 training with you.

5. Use a great software. There are many great cloud based bookkeeping softwares out there. This makes the process much more enjoyable and efficient timewise too.

6. Understand and use the information your bookkeeping produces at the end of it. When you have a profit & loss which shows you that picture of how your business is doing financially, make sure you understand what it is telling  you and think about how that information can help you in your business. For example, you can see the trends in the different types of sales you have – this may lead you to see that there are areas which are growing that you can build upon and other types of sales which are reducing and you may want to address this? You can monitor your expenditure and see if there are any areas you are spending too much and need to address this.

7. Get people to help you. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Perhaps you have someone in the business or a spouse who can do some of this for you – even if its only pulling together all the paperwork you need. Alternatively, get a professional bookkeeper to do it all for you.

I hope that by reading this, I have helped you think a little differently about your bookkeeping and that if you need to get it back on track that I have pointed you in the right direction. If you need any help, at the Bookkeeping Department we provide bookkeeping support, training, set up and bookkeeping rescue so please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you think we can help.  

For those of you who have read this and thought that you just want someone else to do it. That’s OK too. Some bookkeeping can be very time consuming, complex and it’s just not something you want to be doing. We provide a fully outsourced bookkeeping service for this.

Our contact details are www.thebookkeepingdepartment.co.uk or lynne@thebookkeepingdepartment.co.uk Tel: 01462 455455.