Lynley Averis

A great bookkeeper cares that the financial statements make sense and gets upset when something doesn’t balance or stuff goes missing. They also feel responsible when it comes to getting customers to pay on time. A good bookkeeper, in other words, is worth their weight in gold.This Cheat Sheet summarizes what you need to know to be an excellent bookkeeper.

With a bit of practice, understanding financial statements is easy. Think of your Balance Sheet reports as a set of before-and-after photos, with your Profit & Loss report telling the story of what happened in between. Balance Sheet report: Provides a snapshot of the value of assets, liabilities and equity at

Forget birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas and instead, punctuate your diary with a list of tax deadlines. Here’s a summary of the deadlines that every Australian bookkeeper needs to know about in order to stay out of trouble. Australian Bookkeeping Deadlines Business Activity Statements Monthly payments: 21 days after the end of each month.

In Australia, if you’re a contract bookkeeper providing BAS services, then you must register as a BAS agent. The penalty for providing BAS services without registering ranges from a not insignificant $43,000 for an individual to a whopping $212,500 for a body corporate. A BAS service includes any bookkeeping activity related to GST or PAYG, including configuring tax codes in accounting software, coding tax invoices, generating employee payment summaries or preparing Business Activity Statements You don’t have to register as a BAS Agent if you’re an employee receiving wages or you only do basic bookkeeping data entry based on explicit instructions provided by the client or by their tax agent.

How do you prevent employee fraud in the workplace, and how can you be sure that nobody has their hand in the till? Like double cream and crash diets, keep bookkeeping tasks and the handling of cash or business assets completely separate. This includes Authorising online transactions via internet banking W

Understanding the difference between account types is the secret to coding transactions correctly. Here’s the cheat’s guide to understanding the difference between assets and liabilities, equity and income, bananas and apples. Current asset: Anything that a business owns that can realistically be converted into cash within the next 12 months.

Understanding debits and credits is a tricky business. (How did accountants get to be so warped, you may wonder?) Don’t sweat, with this table you can get your debits and credits spot on, every time. Account Type To increase this account To decrease this account Asset Debit Credit Liability Credit Debit Equit

Even with a calculator close to hand, a few shortcuts to help you calculate Goods and Services Tax (GST) are real handy. The whole business of dividing by 11 or multiplying by 0.15 can get very ugly indeed. Australia New Zealand To calculate how much GST to add Multiply by 0.1 Multiply by 0.15 To add GST to arrive at a total price Multiply by 1.

This step-by-step bookkeeping checklist should help you sleep easy at night knowing that you have done what you needed to do to get your books in tip-top shape. Ensure you set up bank feeds for every account. At least once a month, reconcile every bank account against bank statements. Look for pre-dated or future-dated transactions.