For small business owners, being organized is vital to ensuring that your business runs smoothly and that nothing gets left by the way side. Being organized is a fairly broad term that can apply to many areas of your business. Organizing your desk, cleaning up your Mac desktop, and organizing your client accounts are all important aspects but the last one is an area that may not be thought of at first. There’s a certain time of year that not a lot of people enjoy hearing…it’s called tax season. You may have heard of it. Now before you let out a big sigh and decide to postpone having to deal with anything tax related, just remember that the more attention you pay to details along the way, the easier it gets to deal with in the end. It’s kind of like when you remind your kids that if they pick up their toys and put them away after each time they play with them, they won’t end up with a big mess at the end of the week.
Entrepreneur has a great article written by Bonnie Lee with tips to prepare for taxes titled 5 Year-End Tax Tips to Get You Ready for 2014.
Lee offers some helpful suggestions for small business owners to make sure they’re prepared for tax time and not bombarded with stress when the time comes. Here’s some addition tips of things you can do regularly so you’re ready for tax time.
Manage client accounts
By using reports and visual clues in Billings Pro, you can spot who’s overdue instantly. This saves you time rummaging through invoices checking to see who’s paid and who hasn’t and helps you stay organized when it comes to doing your taxes. To view a list of all clients that are overdue, simply go to Reports in the Billings Pro sidebar and select “Overdue Invoices” from the ‘Invoice’ tab. You’ll see a list of overdue invoices as well as how many days each client is overdue.
Send statements & follow up
After completing work for a client, make sure you send them a statement promptly. If you’ve done a great job for a client, it’s better to present them with a statement right away while you’re still in their mind and they are beaming with delight that you provided an excellent solution for them. Make sure you do a follow up to ensure that they have received the statement. By staying on top of your accounts on a regular basis you can make sure you are always getting paid and you’ll have less work to do down the road.
Track expenses
Nobody likes keeping a shoebox full of receipts and notes for expenses. By creating categories for expenses in Billings Pro, you can view a report of all your expenses broken down by client meals, travel expenses, operating costs, etc. This can also be helpful for budgeting by breaking down all your expenses so you can see what areas of your business your money is going to. To view your expenses by category in Billings Pro, just select ‘Expenses By Category’ from the TimeSlip tab under Reports and then choose the dates you want the report to run.
Use payment reports to balance against bank statements
Balancing numbers and bank sheets for most people is not the most exciting part of the month. However, if you get in the habit of comparing your payment reports to your bank statements at the end of the month, you will save yourself a lot of headache at the end of the year. By checking your bank statements against your payment record, you can make sure that all your numbers are accurate and that the payment you should have received from each client, is actually in the bank. You can find your Payments Recorded under the Payment tab of Reports in Billings Pro.
With these tips you can avoid some of the added stress that comes when you have to do your taxes. It’s one of the ways Billings Pro makes your life a little bit easier. Billings Pro helps you to keep all your accounts organized without making you do any extra work searching through invoices made with Pages, Word, InDesign, and other apps.
