“For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” Benjamin Franklin had it right by suggesting it’s better to keep your affairs in order and plan ahead. A small business’s success often rests upon its level of organization and the clarity with which owners and managers are able to view what’s working and what isn’t, where money is going out and where it’s coming in, as well as many other aspects of proper organization.
Get your small business organized and efficient with these essential accounting forms.
Employee Timesheets
Train your employees to consistently keep track of daily, weekly and monthly amounts of time spent in office or on the clock. Tracking these hours is beneficial to you as well as your employees, as it guarantees that they’re receiving their appropriate pay rate, that their hours are accounted for, and that they can get their overtime pay if applicable.
Incorporate timesheets into your payroll records to make the whole payment process more accurate and efficient.
Income Statement
Knowing and clearly understanding the profitability of your business is necessary to keep the doors open — income statements allow you to see this. Monitoring the ups and downs of your business’s income and expenses over various periods of time gives you a larger picture impression of how your business is performing and whether or not cuts or changes need to be made in any department.
Journal Sheet
Bookkeeping is a necessary part of running a business and is the process that allows you to record daily transactions. Important for tax returns and making sure nothing slips through the cracks, alter these forms with any expense categories you choose that will best suit the style of your business. Summarize how your business incurs revenue and expenses via operating and nonoperating activities alike.
Bank Reconciliation Form
The addition of this form to your financial tracking process will organize your bank reconciliation process so that when the time comes to file things away, they’re already in order. These handy forms are perfect for entering checking information, as well as date, statement balance, deposits and withdrawals. Keeping track of this information in real time saves small businesses the trouble of having to dig through past records and spend excessive amounts of time finding the information they need.
Profit & Loss
Not using accounting software means you have to be particularly organized in keeping track of both your profits and losses so that your bookkeeping is accurate. Your entire business is built upon money that flows out and money which comes in. Keeping track of the finances for this is not only important in a legal sense but from a healthy business operation maintenance standpoint as well.
Balance Sheet
Snapshotting the position of your company at a specific point in time is extremely useful for analyzing progress as well as for storing in case you need to look back on past performance as reference. While profit and loss statements fulfill this task in the long run, balance sheets allow you to view where your business stands at a specific post in time. Summarizing the company’s assets, liabilities and equity at a particular point provides an overview of its standing then and now, allowing you to compare current periods with previous ones and vice versa.
Delivery Docket
Shipping or posting goods is a process which will always requires documentation of some form. A delivery docket can be a useful tool for small businesses, since it allows you to itemize what’s in a shipment and be able to keep track of the products you have moving out, as well as any that comes back in as returns or errors. In addition, it helps you to ensure that the correct items are being properly provided to your customers. Each of these components will have an impact on your accounting and financial information, so these documents should be closely tied to your finances data tracking processes.
Conclusion
While all of these accounting forms are useful for small businesses who want to better organize their finances and expedite processes, it’s still important to back up this information in a secure way.
Businesses typically compile and store all of their accounting records and financial information in one place, leaving that data vulnerable to a multitude of threats — from human error to drive crash to viruses and more. There is little point to compiling a wealth of knowledge about your company, its transactions, and its standing at various periods in time if this information can be lost in an instant due to a multitude of possible errors, digital and human threats.
Even if you’re managing your accounting data in an accounting software, backing up that data in order to prevent permanent loss of financial data should be a priority.
We suggest investing in a secure, trusted backup service like those provided by Nordic Backup in order to protect your accounting information and the rest of your business data. Start a 30 day free trial of cloud backup for small businesses and instantly improve your data recovery and restoration abilities.
