EOY accounts

End of Year processes for small business

In New Zealand  for small businesses (and not so small) it’s all about EOY – or end of financial year – at the moment and advice is pouring in from experts on how to deal with your particular EOY issues. For example:

Gaylene Hughes at JDI Business Coaching offers her tips for EOY accounting processes. Other accountants are also advising their clients on how to improve their EOY processes.

Phil Astley points out a number of cardinal errors made by small business owners either through the box of papers or even with an accounting system.

What is missing from these and other commentators is help with organising all this financial information so you can store it in a way that makes it quick and easy for you to locate everything you need when you’re preparing to take it all to your accountant.

That’s where we come in.

At Terrace Consulting we specialise in helping businesses to organise their office mess and to sort out their files, either paper or electronic – or both. We can save you money that you would normally pay your accountant because with our help your EOY documentation is in order before it gets to your accountant.

This means that our clients can get on with their money-making work to produce their profit, knowing that they will be able to find the information they need when they need it.  No more wasted time searching for information that hasn’t been organised properly or has been saved in a hurry – somewhere!

Contact us today so you too can benefit from our 20-plus years experience working with businesses of varying types and sizes to organise their information. We can work with you in person, by email, phone or skype. Alternatively you can DIY with our step-by-step workbook “Keeping Good Records for Small Businesses”

Let us do what we do best so you can get on and do what you do best.  You’ve got nothing to lose and lots of time to gain

Oops!! Its tax time again

How will you prepare your information for preparing your tax returns this year?

Will you trawl through all the paper and electronic files to find the information you need and sort it as you go? Or will you grab everything you can see that might be relevant and drop it into a box and take it to your accountant?

It may be a bit late to get your files organised for the last tax year.  But you can make it a lot easier for yourself for next year if you start to sort your tax information now.  And if you do have time to deal with last year’s files, then you can follow this advice now – it will just be a bigger job because you have a whole year’s worth of information to work with.

Firstly make a list of all the sorts of information you have and that you need for your end of year accounts.  This list will need to include invoices, receipts, bank statements, dividend and interest statements, information about all business income, GST returns, cashbook, assets sold and purchased, motor vehicle log books.  If you have an accountant, you will probably get a questionnaire that sets out all the information you need to provide.  You can use this to help organise your files so you don;t have a hassle next year.

It doesn’t matter how you store your business information – in electronic form if you run a paperless office or in some sort of paper filing system; you can organise your stuff in the same way.

A large ring binder or two is a good starting point for your paper filing.  Use a set of dividers to separate out the different bits of information. You can label these dividers for bank statements, credit card statements, PAYE, GST, invoices out, invoices in, investments, etc etc

For your electronic directory, you can use the same headings for your electronic files.

The important thing is to get your tax files organised so that tax time doesn’t seem such a burden.

Just think how nice it would be if this time next year you could just pick up some organised files, or download your electronic files to a USB stick and hand it to your accountant ready for him or her to do their magic to produce a set of accounts.

And more importantly, just think how much teem you will save by not having to spend so much time finding everything that has been put into a pile somewhere not to mention the smaller bill from your accountant because your tax information was so well organised.

So – its tax time again. Yea!