Accounting for small businesses is done by keeping a complete record of all income and bills and accurately extracting financial information from business transactions. This is a necessary chore that helps small business owners record and manage their money effectively – especially during the first stages. Besides keeping you cognizant about your business’ past and present performance, small business accounting also helps in generating invoices and concluding payroll.
How Do You Do Bookkeeping for your small business?
Analyzing Financial Transactions
The procedure of accounting starts with analyzing financial transactions and entering those pertaining to the business entity into the accounting system. For instance, loans taken for personal reasons aren’t contained in the business documents
The first rung on the ladder of the accounting process involves the preparation of source documents. A source file or business report serves as the foundation for recording a transaction.
Journal Entries
Business ventures are recorded in a journal (also known as Catalogs of Original Entrance) in a chronological order using the double-entry bookkeeping system. The journal entries include two accounts – debit and credit. To make this technique easier, accountants use a particular journal to record recurring orders such as acquisitions, sales, cash receipts etc. the trades that cannot be included in the special publications are registered in the overall journal. To get more information about Accounting Basics
Ledger
The general ledger is an assortment of accounts that screen the changes made to each account predicated on past transactions, combined with the current balances in each account. It is also known as the Books of Final Accessibility.
Unadjusted Trial Balance
A trial balance is ready to test if the total debits equal total credits. The accounts are extracted from the ledger and established in a written report. The amounts of the debit and credit columns should be equal.
If not, the trial balance contains mistakes which have to be located and rectified with correcting entries. It’s important to note that some problems may exist regardless of the debits equaling credits, such as problems caused by dual posting or due to the omission of entries.
Adjusting Entries
By the end of the accounting period, the accountant must prepare the adjusting entries to update the accounts that are summarized in the financial claims. For instance, income earned but not documented in the catalogs.
Adjusting entries are made for accrual of income and expenses, depreciation, allowances, deferrals and prepayments.
Modified Trial Balance
After the adjusting entries are created, an adjusted trial balance must prepare yourself. That is done to test if the debits match the credits after the altering entries are created. This is the last step prior to the planning of the business’ financial assertions.
Financial Statements
The financial statements which include the income statement, statement of changes in equity, balance sheet, statement of cashflow and notes will be the end products of the accounting system.
Closing Entries
To prepare the machine for another accounting, non permanent accounts that are solution periodically, like the income, price and withdrawal accounts, are closed. The total amount sheet accounts also known as the everlasting accounts, remain open for the next accounting cycle.
The past step of the accounting cycle is to prepare a post-closing trial balance to check the equality of the debits and credit amounts following the closing entries are created. This trial balance consists of real accounts only as the non permanent accounts are shut down this accounting circuit.