Business guide
Bookkeeping basics for founders
4 chapters · 8 min read
Bookkeeping done once a year, in a hurry, produces numbers too late to be useful and a year-end that costs more than it should. Done monthly, it takes less total effort and tells you something while you can still act on it.
This guide is about the minimum discipline that makes the difference, not about accounting theory.
Contents
Chapter 01
Separate the money first
A dedicated business account is the single highest-value thing you can do. Mixed personal and business transactions turn every reconciliation into an archaeology exercise, and make expense claims difficult to substantiate.
Do this before you do anything clever with software.
Chapter 02
Close the month, every month
Closing the month means reconciling the bank, making sure every transaction is categorised, and checking nothing is sitting unexplained. It takes a fraction of the time when the transactions are recent and you remember what they were.
- Reconcile every bank and card account
- Categorise all transactions — no unexplained balances
- Chase missing purchase invoices while suppliers still have them
- Check that what you invoiced matches what you delivered
Chapter 03
Keep evidence as you go
An expense you cannot evidence is an expense you may have to give back. Photograph receipts at the point of spending — the habit costs seconds and removes an entire category of year-end problem.
Chapter 04
Read the numbers
Management accounts exist to be acted on. Look at three things monthly: whether revenue is where you expected, whether margin is holding, and how many months of cash you have. Everything else can wait for the quarter.
If your accounts arrive too late for those three questions to be actionable, the reporting cycle is the problem, not the numbers.
If monthly discipline is not realistic alongside running the business, that is a reasonable thing to outsource — it is what our accounting service is for.
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