Easy Small Business Accounting Practices

If you're trying to figure out how to handle small business accounting jobs and responsibilities for your business there is a lot of information that you need to keep track of. Whether you're using a piece of software or not to keep track of your financial issues, there are several things that are going to be important. Preparing a general ledger, revenue accounts, balance sheet, and income statement are all crucial parts of small business accounting jobs.
The General Ledger
The first part about using your accounting employment practices effectively is creating a general ledger of accounts. This general ledger is crucial in any accounting careers as it is the first place where debits and credits will take place. Whenever you have expenses that need to be added up or revenue accounts that need to be totaled, the general ledger keeps track of both.
Deciding on the revenue accounts and expense accounts that go into your general ledger is another matter. There are several ways that a business can approach this issue, but the best way is to itemize each revenue stream so that all of the revenue accounts can be seen in a clearly organized manner. For example, some of the revenue accounts that every small business will want to consider having in their general ledger include labor sales or even parts and equipment sales. The basic idea here is that the revenue should be broken down into categories. Creating T-accounts for these revenue accounts if using a manual accounting method is important; software programs will probably have a different method of organization.
The same principle applies to expense accounts, however. Your accounting employment practices should ideally include expense accounts on your general ledger such as supplies expense, payroll expense, freight and delivery expense, and advertising expense among many other possibilities.
Balance Sheet and Income Statement
The balance sheet and income statement are two of the most important financial statements of any business; these show the net worth and profit margins of a company. The balance sheet is composed of asset totals, liability totals as well as owners equity. The general formula that you're dealing with here in your accounting careers is "Assets - Liabilities = Owners Equity."
On the balance sheet, the cash balance of the business needs to be recorded along with several other important factors, including inventory, equipment, and any other business furniture that you have. In contrast, liabilities should include your accounts payable transactions, or the money that the business owes such as a bank loan. By subtracting the liabilities from the total assets you should arrive at the total net worth of the business or owners equity.
In contrast, a business' income statement should be a listing of all expenses and revenues to arrive at the business' bottom line or profitability. There are several ways that an income statement of a business can be constructed, including the single step or multi-step approach. Even though both of these methods are different, a business should arrive at the same total or bottom line using each one.
As you can see, creating a general ledger consisting of revenue and expense accounts in order to develop your business' balance income statement and balance sheet is crucial. Whether you are just starting out in your accounting careers using these financial statement methods or you're thinking about using software to take care of the financial matters of your business, keeping track of the net worth and profitability of a business is absolutely needed.