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10 Things You Will Like About A Home Based Business
Here's a few things I've discovered along the way that you will like about owning your own home based business.
1.You Are The Boss
How many people endure a Boss that undervalues your contribution to the organization? Or one who takes...
Ecommerce solutions for small business owners
You are running a small business.
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You may have a web site but has not been generating a good income.
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You may have a web site, which is generating a good income, but you want to increase your income.
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You do not have a web site, but thinking...
New web-based HR tool is "Max" from NAS, Hannibal, and InfoLink.
Three highly respected names in Human Resources have joined forces to provide companies with a revolutionary blend of services that make the hiring process more efficient and effective. The partnership joins three companies: NAS Recruitment...
Small Business Marketing Magic
Once upon a time, in 1969, there was a young woman who had a dream of starting her own company. She had ideas, talent and work ethic to spare but what she didn't have was cash. After careful research she found that marketing would cost...
The Secret To Mining Online Gold Using The Hidden Profits in Digital Resale Products
The myth that you can't make money online with resale digital information products will be EXPLODED right now.
Have you ever heard about the massive profits being made online selling Digital Resale products (videos,audios, ebooks and...
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Picking A Small Business Accounting Program
A small business accounting program should accomplish three tasks: track income and expenses, generate business forms, and keep detailed records for other assets and liabilities.
Tracking Income and Expenses
The task of tracking a business’s income and expense is really the most important job of an accounting system. If you own or manage a small business, obviously, you need some tool for measuring your income and your cash flow.
Although checkbook programs like Quicken and Microsoft Money do little more than keep a checkbook, you can actually keep financial records for a business right out of a checkbook. To do this, you simply categorize deposits as falling into some income category. And when you write a check or make some other withdrawal, you categorize expenses as falling into some expense category.
One problem with using a checkbook program, however, is that by using a checkbook program, you are implicitly using cash-basis accounting to track your income and expenses. Cash-basis accounting counts income when you receive a deposit and counts expense when you write a check.
Cash-basis accounting is easy to understand, and that means you are less likely to make errors in implementing it. However, cash-basis accounting is generally too imprecise for more complicated businesses. If you use inventory in your business, for example, cash-basis accounting isn’t very accurate—and the Internal Revenue Service does not allow it.
And there are other circumstances, too, in which cash-basis accounting produces serious and usually unacceptable errors in precision. For example, if you often receive money before you have actually earned it or if you often incur expenses long before you actually have to pay for them, you need to use a more sophisticated accounting program than a checkbook program.
Generating Business Forms
The second task that a small business accounting program should help you with is the generation of business forms. The most common business form is simply a check. Any checkbook program help you do this. Other business forms that small businesses commonly need to produce include invoices, credit memos, monthly statements, purchase orders, and so forth.
If you
have a small business with very simple form requirements—perhaps you need only checks—then a checkbook program may work very well for you.
However, if you have extensive or complicated business form generation requirements, a more full-featured small business accounting package, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks, Peachtree’s Complete Accounting, or Microsoft Small Business Accounting will do a better job for you.
If you produce more complicated forms, but you produce these other forms with a word processing program, then a checkbook program may still work for you.
Detailed Record Keeping for Other Assets and Liabilities
The third task that a small business accounting program should help you with is detailed record keeping of your most important assets and liabilities. A checkbook program lets you keep good detailed records of cash, and for some businesses that is the principal asset. But many small businesses have other significant assets and liabilities they need to track, for example, accounts receivables, inventory, and vendor payables.
Whether or not a particular software program’s accounting tools provide adequate asset and liability record keeping depends on the situation. However, no small business accounting program does everything you need it to do. Any accounting program that provides an extensive list of features, by its very nature, becomes a challenge to use. For example, moving to the accrual basis of accounting adds an entire layer of complexity to financial record keeping, and keeping detailed records of inventory adds another layer.
For these reasons, even when a particular program doesn’t do everything you need it to do, your best choice still may be to use the program—and then simply live with its shortcomings.
About the Author: Seattle accountant Stephen L. Nelson CPA is the author of both Quicken for Dummies and QuickBooks for Dummies and several other books about accounting software as well. His website is http://www.stephenlnelson.com.
Source: www.isnare.com
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