How Do I Keep Good Accounting Records? Uk Tax Advice for Business Owners

Hi, I'm Graham from Inca Chartered Accountants. And in this video I'm going to talk about record keeping. Record keeping is all about paperwork. If we haven't got the right paperwork then there is little we can do. So the important thing is keep all those receipts, the things you have spent your money on and are going to want tax relief on. Keep emails for things you have bought over the internet. Keep your supplier invoices. Make sure you keep invoices you send to your customers. Keep your bank statements, and if you want to minimise your Accountant fees don't stick it all in a shoebox and give it to us on the 30th January. We really won't thank you for it. So having got all the paperwork together, how do you start to record it. Well, we don't mind and funnily enough neither does the Government. You can write it all down in a book. You can pop it into a spreadsheet or you can use an accountant package. It doesn't matter. Lots of our clients use spreadsheets. One thing you might find beneficial is segmenting your paperwork by month. Buy yourself a ring binder file and keep all your receipts for the month in one tab and then move onto the next one. Keep your bank statements in the same one or with invoices in a separate file. Just a way of organising your paperwork you might find useful. Software, now that's an interesting one, as your business grows some accounting software you might find quite useful. As to the packages, there are loads out on the market place. Find one that's most suited to you, your style and the way you operate your business. Accounting packages save you time by automating various functions, raising yours sales invoices, they can allow you to get reporting on the performance of your business. In the next video I'm going to talk about when you pay your taxes.