Your management accounts should be shared across your business as far as necessary to ensure that actions to improve profits and cashflow and reduce costs and risk can be taken as soon as possible.
It also reminded me that it can be daft to make decisions primarily for tax reasons. Putting the tax cart in front of the business horse is the wrong way to run a business.
Most businesses should be indifferent to VAT. You add it to your sales invoices, collect it when you get paid by the customer and pay it over to HMRC when it’s due. In principle: no problem.
If your business sells annual subscriptions or licences and you issue invoices upfront but want to see the revenue come through you P&L over the life of the contract, this is how to do the accounting in QuickBooks.
We use QuickBooks in our business and have been recommending it to clients for many years. We’ve built up a wealth of experience in how to apply QuickBooks to a wide variety of businesses from start-ups to international, multi-user, multi-site companies.
With the vast choice of software solutions available, this sounds counter-intuitive but in both cases Excel is the best answer.
Coming at us all full-speed, like an unstoppable train are more cloud-based accounting packages than you can shake a stick at. It’s challenging. It’s disruptive. And it should be beneficial, but where are we at the moment?
This blog could have been written at any time in the history of commerce. If Gutenburg had published it he may not have been made bankrupt!
Towards the end of this burst of activity the accounting processes should be working on “autopilot” and everyone can concentrate again on delivering the profit and achieving growth potential of the business.
A useful Aged Debtors report is one that’s in top-down order (not alphabetical), highlights negative balances for attention and is readily available for you every day.
