Small business cashbook questions..

RollYerOwn

Hi. I started a new business as a sole trader very recently and I'm trying to get as much order on my bookkeeping as possible to keep accountancy costs down at the end of the tax year. Hope some of ye can help a wee bit..

I'm trying to create an Excel cashbook for payments and receipts - I've based it on a UK book "Small Business Accounting". I don't have too many transactions but I got some of these a little mixed up at the beginning - used some of my own money to part finance a van, took out a few hundred from cash machine to pay for some other stuff etc.

In my payments spreadsheets (one sheet per month), I have columns that include (straight from the book):

Motor (does that include purchase of a van?)
Admin
Drawings
Finance
Legal/professional
Advertising
Cost of Sales (Ive included purchases of safety clothing etc in this?)

Is this a sufficient breakdown or are the UK and Ireland systems very different in regards to tax categories of expenses/overheads..?

If I have a "capital introduced" section in my receipts cashbook, can I balance this as "drawings" when I took it back or does that look dodgy?

Thanks in advance..

J.Ryan

You're going to have a lot of questions on this, if you wish to send me a PM, I'll send you my email address and you can then send me the spreadsheet.


I'll adjust the headings for you to be more suitable, this is the sort of question that is simple, but everyone has minor different ways of dealing with these items.

The trick on keeping accounting costs down is to be consistent in your postings, if (for example) 12 monthly payments are all posted to the same wrong account its a quick journal to fix it, if the are posted to different columns it takes time to find them.

RollYerOwn

Thanks very much, I'll do that.

Herbalist

If it would make life a bit easier than doing it all in excel there is a free accounting package called Tas Books Basics you could take a look at.

You could create a nominal code for each of the columns you listed above it will also help you to do vat and track your bank payments and recipets.

RollYerOwn

Thanks, yeah I did get it, but I wanted to get my head around the whys and wherefores first.