Small Business Bookkeeping for Beginners

QuickBooks Online stands out because it’s easily customizable, comes in multiple versions with hundreds of add-on apps, and offers better mobile access business bookkeeping than its rivals. Learn to create meaningful reports and assess your business’s financial health using revenue, expenses, profits, and cash flow.

Find out what bookkeepers do, and get an intro to double-entry bookkeeping. The two most important tasks in accurate small business bookkeeping are recording and reconciliation. Forbes Advisor adheres to strict editorial integrity standards. To the best of our knowledge, all content is accurate as of the date posted, though offers contained herein may no longer be available. The opinions expressed are the author’s alone and have not been provided, approved, or otherwise endorsed by our partners. Whether you do the bookkeeping yourself or hire someone to do it, certain elements are fundamental to properly maintaining the books. Some of these elements are done more regularly than others to ensure that the books are always up to date.

Zoho Books

When you’re stuck in the minutiae of reconciling your transactions, this won’t feel like “seven easy steps”. You can’t run a healthy, successful business without having your books in order. It’s like driving a car without a fuel gauge or a map—sooner or later you’re going to get lost or run out of gas. Owner Kimme Lafayette brings with her over 20 years of combined office management and bookkeeping expertise. She continuously invests her time and resources in professional continuing education to better serve her clients. 67% of small companies prefer the flexibility of outsourcing to hiring full time workers because it substantially reduces operating costs and frees up resources. Your efficiency will increase and you can focus on your core business and increasing profits.

We recommend FreshBooks especially for sole proprietors and companies with only a handful of employees, though it’s capable of handling more. Very small businesses could use it for basic money management, like sending invoices, monitoring financial accounts, accepting payments, and tracking income and expenses.

Use an online bookkeeping service

You select one, customize it by using the filter and display options provided, and let the site pour your own company data into it. It only takes a few seconds to generate a report after you have defined it. Most small business accounting sites offer the option to import existing lists in formats such as CSV and XLS. They provide mapping tools to make sure everything comes in correctly. This procedure works better on some sites than others. These record templates vary in complexity, so you need to understand the differences before you go with one site or another.