Bookkeeping may seem like another task to add to the ever-growing list but following the practices of professional bookkeeping with the support of accountants, like us here at Coleman and Co, is essential to success and stability. Throughout this blog we hope to answer the important question and make it clear why bookkeeping is important.
For small businesses, bookkeeping is one of the main factors in organising their finances and records. Bookkeeping is as old as man and according to the National Geographic, the first bookkeeping recording was 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. The ancient stone tablet recorded “29,086 measures barley, 37 months Kushim” which can clearly be seen as some kind of business record.
Beginnings of Bookkeeping
The practice first began many years ago before computers were around and was the long tedious process of adding paper files to journals and recordings by hand. These were then split into sales journals, purchases journals, cash receipts and cash payments to speed up the filing procedures. As you can imagine, handwriting was never accurate, amounts were often wrong and the whole procedure or bookkeeping was frowned upon by many accountants in that era.
Bookkeeping Today
With computers, speed and technology, bookkeeping has never been quicker in today’s financial world. With the ability to generate invoices, reports and inventories on demand, you can control your business accounting practices with ease.
Coleman and Co cover everything from tax deductions to payroll and make bookkeeping the solid foundation for any business looking for financial assistance. Without it, you can struggle to manage your accounts and will find it hard to see where exactly all of your finances have gone.
Without bookkeeping we wouldn’t be able to:
- Save for your taxes because you would be guessing at how much you owed
- Couldn’t pay your staff wages in comparison with your business revenue as you wouldn’t know it
- You would never have a budget to follow
- HMRC wouldn’t know how much you earnt or owed
- Everything would need to be manually calculated leaving loads of room for errors
Developments
Just like everything else, and the fact it is 2016, bookkeeping has developed over time massively. We no longer scribble on slabs, stone or etch it into parchment with wild guesses, we now periodically record data using accurate facts and figures so that all businesses can:
- Fill our tax returns accurately
- Create financial reports
- Plan for the future
Without bookkeeping you are unable to effectively manage your business’ finances. If that doesn’t answer your question about whether you need bookkeeping, we don’t know what will because to us, bookkeeping is of high importance.
Get in Touch
If you are suddenly thinking you need bookkeeping or want to enquire further, call Coleman and Co on 028 9266 3599.