Meals and entertainment expenses are vital to some businesses but often these are not recorded in an appropriate way. For clarity, the meals category includes expenses incurred in the consumption of food and beverages, and entertainment includes tickets and entrance fees to an entertainment or sporting event. To be deductible these expenses must have only …
How to Deal with Meals and Entertainment Expenses Read More »
Your payroll frequency is the frequency at which you pay your employees. For example, whether you pay them every other week, on the 15th of the month and the 30th of the month, or every week. You may want to change this as circumstances within your business change. However, since payroll frequency affects your current …
The cash flow of a business is the movement of money into and out of it. To be able to run an effective business you will need more positive cash flow (money moving in) than negative cash flow (money moving out). As the old saying goes ‘Cash is King’ and this saying is something that should be …
Conversion costs are crucial to understanding the financial position of your company if your business involves production and inventory. Conversion costs refer to the cost of production required to convert the raw materials into a finished product to sell. This can be broken down into labour costs and manufacturing overhead costs, where manufacturing overhead costs …
As a business owner you may receive a variety of reports from your bookkeeper and/or accountant. One of these reports might be the Cash Flow Statement. This statement shows where cash has come from and gone over a specific timeframe. The main components of the Cash Flow Statement are Operating Activities, Investing Activities, Financing Activities, …
As a business owner you must wear many different hats. You might be the sole employee at your company and do it all yourself, or maybe you are juggling the weight of 4 different departments while outsourcing or hiring for the rest. Either way, time is of the essence when you are an entrepreneur. These …
Opening your own business is a big job and the benefits of owning a virtual business can be substantial. Below we highlight the benefits we found had the most impactful effect on businesses who either converted to being online or started out being virtual from the very beginning. 1. Lower overhead costs If you have …
Benefits of Owning a Virtual Business for Outstanding Results Read More »
A bookkeeper deals with sensitive information every day. From your company’s financials to your employees’ personal information, we are expected to maintain confidentiality in all situations. This means that our ethics must be of the highest standard to ensure that we are prioritizing the correct things to provide superior and secure bookkeeping services. So, what …
Mixing personal and business expenses This means using your personal accounts and credit cards to pay for business expenses or vice versa. Even if you are a sole proprietor, I highly recommend that you open a separate business bank account and get a business credit card. Firstly, having a separate account and credit card just …
3 Common Bookkeeping Mistakes Made by Business Owners Read More »
They are both QuickBooks, so what’s the difference? The most obvious difference between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop is that QuickBooks Desktop is downloaded and kept on your computer or laptop, whereas QuickBooks Online is a cloud-based program which can be accessed anywhere at any time. When considering which program to choose, consider that how …
Should You Use QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop? Read More »
1. Quickbooks Online (QBO) This can be used as the central app for your companies’ books. All of your sales, expenses, assets and liabilities can be recorded here, and you can then pull financial reports to help you understand your businesses viability. The phone app is very user friendly, and you can email Invoices to …
The Combination Journal, or the Combined Journal, can be used in the place of the Special Journals (Sales Journal, Purchases Journal, Cash Receipts Journal, and Cash Disbursements Journal) to house all these financial transactions in one Journal. The Combination Journal features a column for each account that is frequently used by your company, and then …
Being contacted by the CRA can be intimidating. For many of us it can leave our hearts racing at the thought of what could possibly be the reasoning for it, but what if that phone call or email wasn’t even real? Instead, it was a ruse to gain your personal and financial information. This could …
A Balance Sheet, sometimes called a Statement of Condition, is a report comparing your business’ total Assets to its total Liabilities and total Equity. By comparing these things, the Balance Sheet shows the financial worth of your company at a specific point in time. A formula illustrating this comparison is: Total Assets = Total Liabilities …
When setting up your QuickBooks Online account for your business, you may have noticed the option to turn the multicurrency feature on. The only reason I would recommend using this feature is if you bill any of your clients or customers in any other currency besides Canadian Dollars. Here are some things to remember when …
An Income Statement is the same as a Profit and Loss (P&L) Statement. These financial reports compare a company’s total revenue and total expenses, the difference between the two being either the company’s Net Profit or their Net Loss for the period. Since the Income Statement only compares the revenue and expenses of a company …
It can be frustrating when you have completed work and you have to wait for your client or customer to pay. It is even worse when they don’t pay and you must take legal action, so I have put together some tips to help avoid this: Have a solid contract in place Make sure you …
A General Ledger and a General Journal sound very similar and can be easy to mix up if you are new to bookkeeping. Both are crucial for keeping your books balanced and maintaining records of your financial transactions, so it is important to be knowledgeable on what they are, what they do, and when to …
It is inevitable that at some point in time your business will receive some type of audit from the CRA. This is because we live by a self-assessing tax regime which means the government entrusts us to honestly report our income and our deductions. The audits are a way of them checking that what we …
A Trial Balance is a financial report which lists all the Accounts from the General Ledger at a certain point in time. Trial Balances have four columns which include the Account Number, Account Name, Debit amounts, and Credit amounts. The last row of the Trial Balance highlights the total Debits and total Credits and is …