Bookkeeping: Expert Guides and Resources

Good bookkeeping comes down to a few core skills: controlling your cash, recording transactions accurately, and keeping your financial records in balance. This cheat sheet breaks down everything you need to know — from how double-entry bookkeeping works and what belongs in your Chart of Accounts, to the best methods for valuing your business inventory.

Bookkeepers manage all the financial data for small companies. Accurate and complete financial bookkeeping is crucial to any business owner, as all of a company's functions depend on the bookkeeper’s accurate recording of financial transactions.Bookkeepers are generally entrusted with keeping the Chart of Accounts, the General Ledger, and the company journals, which give details about all financial transactions.

To stay organized and on top of your nonprofit’s bookkeeping and accounting responsibilities, timely complete accounting tasks need to be done daily, weekly, quarterly, and yearly.Keep necessary financial information up to date so you’re prepared to submit paperwork to your independent certified public accountant (CPA), the government, and all stakeholders, both within and outside your nonprofit organization.

There are several steps to understanding bookkeeping and maintaining a good record of your business’s finances throughout the year. It’s advantageous to get your head around the trickier bits of keeping the books and to know the process in order to better check and control those incomings and outgoings.Double-entry bookkeepingIn double-entry bookkeeping you enter all transactions in the books twice: once as a debit and once as a credit.

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.

The title of bookkeeper brings up mental images of a quiet, shy individual who spends countless hours poring over columns of numbers. In reality, the job of a bookkeeper is of vital importance to any business that needs to account for its assets, liabilities, and equity. From the company founders to the investors to the IRS, the bookkeeper must be able to report the financial status by way of balance sheets and income statements and keep an organized and detailed paper trail of every financial transaction.