14 Common Small Business Bookkeeping Mistakes To Avoid

If your bookkeeping system isn’t tailored for your business, you’ll spend way more time doing the books than you should. Setting up a customized chart of accounts from day one is key. Bookkeeping mistakes are common and costly but easily avoidable. If you’re wondering about doing your bookkeeping yourself, here’s our Small Business Bookkeeping Checklist to ensure your business and bookkeeping is on the right track. The common school of thought is that all money flowing into your practice’s bank account should be classified as income. You can have several various reasons for incoming funds that aren’t classified as profits, such as the sale of equipment or supplies and even reimbursements to your practice.

If you’re in the business of selling products, it’s essential to track your inventory levels. This will help you ensure that you have enough products to meet customer demand and avoid stockouts. If you keep your receipts, your accountant will easily be able to include all your expenses for that year when doing your taxes. Furthermore, if the IRS decides to question your return, you’ll have all the necessary documentation to prove that your expense write-offs are accurate. The goal is to keep your books up-to-date, so you understand your financial situation.

Common Bookkeeping Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

Reconciling is the process of making sure your expenses in your bank account match up with the expenses in your books. While reconciling, some small business owners record the same expenses twice — once when they receive a bill, and another time when they actually pay the bill. The mistake small business owners make is recording those transfers from one bank account to another as expenses and/or revenue. When you transfer $500 from your checking to your savings account, for example, you didn’t really incur a $500 expense — you just moved the money. One final common bookkeeping mistakes businesses make is not keeping track of bookkeeping deadlines. This might not seem like a big deal, but it can have serious consequences.

It is, therefore, important for businesses, particularly the smaller ones – including those dealing in real estate, to avoid committing errors in their financial records. Any cash that you pull out of the business that would be considered the owner’s draw and those things are not expense items. There are also accounting firms that provide professionaltax planning servicesonline, among other helpful services. By hiring these professionals, you’ll find that your books are always accurate and up-to-date, while you and your employees get to focus on other essential business tasks.

Mistake 2: Letting Tax Time Sneak Up

In many businesses, not accounting and not reporting sales tax is a commonly found bookkeeping error. Oversight in reporting sales taxes and collection can lead to notable penalties and fines. On the other hand, incorrect data entry might result in an overstated sales tax and an amount higher for total sales.

One way to master good bookkeeping is to recognize the most common bookkeeping mistakes entrepreneurs make. This way, you can steer clear of them and give your business a fighting chance. In today’s blog, we take a closer look at these blunders and show you how to steer clear of them.

Did you learn a lot about bookkeeping mistakes in this post?

Make sure you classify expenses correctly based on their purpose and use, and keep accurate records of all expenses. Here’s a list of 11 common bookkeeping mistakes small business owners make and the ways to avoid them. 1 Here’s a list of 11 common bookkeeping mistakes small business owners make and the ways to avoid them. Bookkeeping is a complex and time-consuming process, and most business owners don’t have the skills or knowledge necessary to do it properly. This often leads to bookkeeping mistakes that can cost businesses a lot of money in the long run.

• Or if you record each invoice and each payment to you separately, it might look like you made more money than you did.
• Top 7 Bookkeeping Services For Small Business With new businesses emerging every day, people are…
• The truth is, available cash is not simply a restatement of profits.
• Plus, it causes undue stress when you are under a time crunch to get it done, which can cause additional bookkeeping mistakes.
• Just so you can keep everything in good shape and start rethinking or reimagining your money instead, and break those two things apart to where this is my business and this is me.

Also, if you don’t keep your books up to date throughout the year, you never have a clear picture of your business finances. So, when it’s time to make important decisions—how to spend your money or how to earn more of it—you won’t have good numbers to base them on. That way, your bookkeeper only needs to monitor your business accounts. It’s guaranteed that anything showing up on your statements must be recorded on your business books. You use one credit card for all your personal and business transactions. One day, you go out and buy a brand new, ultra-ergonomic office chair.

Maintaining accurate books are essential as business owners tend to make decisions based on the financial records of their business. When founders do their own books, we often see them farming out their tax compliance. They have their lawyers attempting to do Delaware Franchise Tax and their local, small-town CPA doing their tax return. Due to experience , the CPA inadvertently leaves out the R&D Tax Credit.

That’s why many tax shield try to put it off until the guilt drives them to do it. But if you wait until your boxes are overflowing with receipts to start bookkeeping, there are going to be serious consequences. Sure, bookkeeping is an essential part of running a business, but it shouldn’t take all your time. And if it seems like you’re always stuck on this task, it’s very likely that you’re using a bookkeeping system that’s not tailored for your business. Designed for business owners, CO— is a site that connects like minds and delivers actionable insights for next-level growth. In other words, said Roberts, if an owner “runs their business from the bank account” instead of consistently evaluating their books, they lose out on valuable insights into their business operations.

Bookkeeping is not a simple data entry position, and hiring someone without the right experience could turn out to be a costly move. Dental accounting requires a deep understanding of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles andIRS guidelines, as well as dental industry standards and practices. Mistakes could cost you in the form of unnecessary tax bills, theft due to a lack of internal controls, incorrect cash reconciliation or an inaccurate, faulty accounting system. An experienced dental CPA can not only save time and money, but can also help track dental tax deductions while providing effective operating systems. Misclassifying expenses is a common bookkeeping mistake that can lead to errors in financial reporting and tax problems.

For example, if you use the payroll service Gusto , you may receive expenses that appear in your bank account as Gusto tax, Gusto reimbursement or Gusto fees. By setting your rule to record everything from Gusto as wages, you could be misclassifying other expenses from Gusto. Your chart of accounts is the list of all your financial accounts such as cost of goods sold, business expenses and more. As a small business, your chart of accounts should be short and sweet. Finally, if your books were disorganized last year when you filed, make a point this year of putting a bookkeeping solution in place.

But all too often, entrepreneurs leave taxes to the last minute. After slacking off on bookkeeping duties throughout the year, their books are in shambles. So, when the time finally comes to file, they’re left scrambling. Besides mental and emotional stress, this approach has some serious negative consequences. At its heart, bookkeeping is all about tracking how money enters and leaves your business.

But, you won’t be able to identify that it’s the mistake that has happened with the entire bookkeeping and accounting. Sometimes people just want two or three accounts where pretty much everything’s bucketed in there. You really can’t understand what’s happening in your business, or they’ll have things like miscellaneous or general, and they’ll just bucket things. Also a big red flag to make sure that you’re being as descriptive as you need to be and not doing more than you need to be in order to get the information that you need.

The receipts and remaining cash should equal the original dollar amount designated to the fund. When the fund is exhausted, a check can then be written to cash to set up the full amount again. Not having a petty cash policy, custodian or receipts can create headaches for your bookkeeper and may result in serious problems when taxes are filed. It is a common tendency among real estate owners to records business and personal transactions in a single account, without marking them as business or personal. According to Fortunly, 29 percent of small businesses fail because they run out of cash, the primary reason for which is cash mismanagement. The first step toward cash management is maintaining up-to-date and error-free books of accounts.