Five best practices for record keeping that will help you grow your business

The fixing a mess question. How does one fix a mess? Two ways I've used successfully:

1) Ditch the old file. Start over with the records, create a new file and design a proper system for keeping records. Sort out the records, banking, deposits, credit cards, purchases and sales. Reconcile and adjust the sales taxes and income taxes from what was filed to what should have been filed.

2) Start from today forward with a new file, and fix the historical records to end where the new records start. You can do this at any point. It separates out the messed up past and allows you to move forward with a clean slate. The old records eventually have to agree at the end to the new records start point.  Keeping that in balance can be challenging, but it is necessary. You can divide out the labour this way too. If one person tackles moving forward with the owner/manager and the other tackles fixing the books up to that point, it allows the business to move forward with current information and allows for discussion about internal controls and systems design, plus documentation of procedures. That can lead to solutions about how to fix the books up to that date.

The way that's not so successful? Picking your way through thousands of transactions that may or may not be real, deciphering why coding is the way it is instead of how it should be, undoing bank reconciliations, deleting transactions to reconcile the bank that don't make any sense, reconciling payables that don't tie to the money, deposits that don't tie to the bank, figuring out what was filed for GST/HST and PST, determining why Inventory is negative most of the time... I could go on, but I'm sure you get the picture.

You end up at #1 (above) but it takes far longer than if you'd started over. You spend time on transactions that are completely messed up when you should be focused on what the records should say rather than what someone else thought they might say.

Once the mess is fixed, what are some best practices to stay out of a mess in the first place?

1) Work Backwards. Figure out what the end result should be, then create a system that will work with the end result in mind. Keep checking that the results are what you expect they should be.

Yesterday I had a call from a frustrated business owner who said that there was no way he could accept that the books were done properly as none of the outcomes were what he knew they should be. Business owners, at least the savvy ones you want to work with, should know what their books ought to look like.

2) Reconcile the accounts constantly, bank first, then AR, and AP, then every other account on the Chart of Accounts that has a register

3) Delete transactions that don't make sense and don't reconcile. Transactions that don't reconcile shouldn't be left in the records unless you expect them to reconcile next month. Each of your customer's books should be perfect, and reflect perfectly what the financial transaction records of third parties say. The bank, your customers and your vendors have something to say about what's on your books. They issue statements. Use those statements to reflect back what happened. If there's a transaction that your bank, customer or vendor doesn't show, call them to talk about it, or delete it because it doesn't belong. If your bank and your customer disagree, you definitely need to be talking to both or reviewing the transactions to figure out if the naming is correct.

4) Review the links to your accounts from your Items to ensure that each Item's links work. Sales link to Income and purchases to cost of sales. Linking your Items to the wrong accounts will lead to much confusion and dismay at the end results. Understating revenue or expenses isn't acceptable. Netting reimbursements against expenses isn't either. Reimbursements are income - required by both GST/HST and PST and accounting principles.

5) Be consistent in your application of your design principles. Create rules. If you design a system, stick to it. Document your system by creating a procedure manual for that system.

If you want to learn more about how to establish best practices to stay out of a mess, IPBC encouraged me and sponsored my courses for members to help them with exactly this process. We recorded them. If you purchase them, you own the video's. They are stored on your computer, so you can watch them over and over, or share them with your staff/accountants for lunch and learn.

You'll find the Table of Contents for the 10 sessions here:
http://www.flipsnack.com/TaxDetective/

To help you with figuring it all out, here are free sample data files created during these courses so you can follow along in QuickBooks.

http://www.taxdetective.ca/Samples.html

Poor record keeping practices can stunt your business growth. To grow your business, you'll need to design systems and procedures to handle even more transactions as you grow.

Confidence that your record keeping needs are being met allows you to have the confidence to grow your business. It doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars, but I will warn you, it will take at least 100 hours.

The alternative? Hire a bookkeeper. But, when you don't know how to keep records yourself, if they get stuck, or don't know what to do, it will cost you THOUSANDS of dollars and lost productivity.

That's time you could have spent learning how QuickBooks works so you can check the bookkeeper's work, every day, week, month, so that year end isn't a huge headache. There's other benefits too, like always knowing what your finances are because your books are current...

You can learn how ... for only $290, it's all here in these webinars.

You choose, solid training content for $290 or mega-thousands of dollars and heartache to fix that mess, AGAIN. It's time you took control.

http://www.taxdetective.ca/bundled-products.html

One hour free consultation online when you purchase the bundle.