5 Helpful Accounting Tips for Startups

When you have a start-up business, you want to make sure that you do all that you can in order to make sure that your company offers a great product, provides impeccable customer service and perhaps, most importantly, earns a profit. Especially since according to many reports, nearly half of all new businesses close their doors within the first five years of opening them.

Well, when it comes to keeping your finances in order, one of the main things that you need to do is to put some smart accounting tips into practice. If you’re interested in knowing some helpful accounting tips for start-ups, we have provided you with five of them below:

Open up a business account. If you were to ask a lot of business owners about one of the main mistakes that they made when they first started out, we’re pretty sure one of the things they would say is they wished that they had kept their business and personal expenses completely separate. Not only does it make the day-to-day bookkeeping easier but it also makes tax preparation a much smoother process. Therefore, something that should go on the very top of your to-do list is opening up a business account with your bank. Don’t forget that it should include having credit, debit and checks that are specifically designated to your business account as well.

Use some accounting software. Something that can help to keep your financial records in order is some accounting software. Although there are several on the market that you can use (including free ones like Wave and GnuCash), one of the more popular ones, by far, is QuickBooks. But if you would like to see a list of some of the top-ranked accounting software on the market, go to Accounting-Software-Review.TopTenReviews.com

Keep great records. Another great accounting tip that every start-up should incorporate is keeping great records. This would include keeping the invoices that you send and receive, maintaining your gross receipts, keeping up with your employees’ records and also providing proof of all of your expenses from equipment that you purchase, any traveling that you do and also the office supplies that you’ve bought.

Hire a tax accountant. If you were to ask a company like Fulton CPAs (one that has a staff of accountants and auditors) about something that you should do, one of the things we’re sure they would recommend is that you hire a reputable tax accountant. The reason why is because they are professionally trained in being able to prepare your taxes in such a way that you can pay as little money as possible to the IRS each year. Plus, they know all of the things that you need to do in order to avoid an audit as well.

Do everything online. In order to be a successful company, you want to be as productive as possible. One thing that can help you to achieve that goal is to do everything online. By maintaining a lot of your records this way, you can immediately transfer things like invoices and receipts into your accounting software. This makes your accounting practices fast, easy and virtually error-free and that’s definitely something that you want when you’re in the process of getting a company off of the ground. For more information on other accounting start-up tips, visit Entrepreneur and put “accounting basics” in the search field.