Lynley Averis

A great bookkeeper cares that the financial statements make sense and gets upset when something doesn’t balance or stuff goes missing. They also feel responsible when it comes to getting customers to pay on time. A good bookkeeper, in other words, is worth their weight in gold.This Cheat Sheet summarizes what you need to know to be an excellent bookkeeper.

So you’ve made a mistake on a Business Activity Statement (BAS) that you’ve already lodged with the tax office. Don’t despair! Correcting this kind of mistake is surprisingly easy. Usually, the best approach is to simply adjust your next activity statement, adding or subtracting the Goods and Services Tax (GST) to the boxes where the amounts belonged in the first place.

Understanding debits and credits is a tricky business. (How did accountants get to be so warped, you may wonder?) Don’t sweat, with this table you can get your debits and credits spot on, every time. Account Type To increase this account To decrease this account Asset Debit Credit Liability Credit Debit Equit

How do you picture your bookkeeping business? Are you content pursuing a small, home-based, part-time business, or do you want to grow your business to become a self-sustaining enterprise, independent from you? Bookkeepers tend to follow one out of three different paths with their business (or occasionally all three paths, one after the other): A simple owner-operated business providing bookkeeping services.

One of the big changes in accounting software in the last couple of years (whether cloud-based or desktop-based) has been the introduction of bank feeds and bank rules. These two features combined can serve to automate an enormous amount of data entry. With bank feeds, all transactions appear automatically in your accounts, without you having to enter anything.

If you are the bookkeeper responsible for recording employee pays, then it’s inevitable that before long, you’re going to have to deal with an enquiry from an employee about their pay. Some enquiries may be quite routine in nature, but others can be more complex. Remember that payroll can be very sensitive and in some situations, employees may even perceive any mistakes that you make as being personal.

Even with a calculator close to hand, a few shortcuts to help you calculate Goods and Services Tax (GST) are real handy. The whole business of dividing by 11 or multiplying by 0.15 can get very ugly indeed. Australia New Zealand To calculate how much GST to add Multiply by 0.1 Multiply by 0.15 To add GST to arrive at a total price Multiply by 1.

This step-by-step bookkeeping checklist should help you sleep easy at night knowing that you have done what you needed to do to get your books in tip-top shape. Ensure you set up bank feeds for every account. At least once a month, reconcile every bank account against bank statements. Look for pre-dated or future-dated transactions.

Understanding the difference between account types is the secret to coding transactions correctly. Here’s the cheat’s guide to understanding the difference between assets and liabilities, equity and income, bananas and apples. Current asset: Anything that a business owns that can realistically be converted into cash within the next 12 months.