10 ways to make Home Based Bookkeeping Easier

Debits towards the window, credits towards the door. Or, Debits on the right, credits on the left. What does this mean to your business? You have cash coming in, and cash going out. You need to focus on sales, blogging, customer contact, and service. You know that accounting is part of the business, but, frankly, it's a pain, and you don't want to deal with it.
These are 10 things you can do to keep your accounting simpler.

1. Keep track of your cash coming in. On eBay, sellers have summary reports that show what they have sold for over the last 60 days. Paypal has account activity reports. These are good tools to use, but also use a columnar pad or spreadsheet to show your income, and keep track of when it was deposited in the bank.

2. Make your expense tracking easier. If you share a checkbook with your business, it is more difficult to separate business expenses from personal ones. Open a checking account for your business. Open a credit card just for your business. And don't share.

3. If you open a business checking account, do it where you do your personal banking. This will enable you to share funds.

4. Keep track of what you purchase to make your product. This is your cost of goods sold and will help you mark up your items to ensure you make a profit.

5. Use a spreadsheet to track your expenses. Create one spreadsheet, named "My Business", and use the individual sheets within this to log sales, cost of goods, and expenses.

6. Buy a simple plastic bin for holding files. Using hanging folders, label them "Jan Sales", "Jan Cost of Goods", "Jan Expenses", etc., and file your customer invoices and receipts by month. If you only want to track details every few months, this will make it simpler.

7. Don't let your filing stack up. Do this every day. It takes 10 minutes a day, and you won't have to suffer anxiety looking at the stacks.

8. Order your supplies online and have them delivered to your home. The delivery will include a packing slip, which will make it easier to separate the items into Office and Cost of Goods. It also saves your valuable time.

9. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of your customers. Keep all their information in one place, including phone, address, and email contacts. Also track when you last called them, worked for them, etc. You can also use this to track the hours you worked for them.

10. Consider purchasing accounting software, such as QuickBooks Pro. After the initial setup, this makes your life much simpler. You can track cash from customers, inventory items and their costs, jobs you are working on, customer information, information on people you pay, and how many hours you work per day for each customer.