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Bookkeeping Checklist
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.
Reconcile every bank account.
Check for stale transactions.
Look for pre-dated or future-dated transactions.
Eat a family bar of chocolate in one sitting (oh yes, and clean up the debtors list).
Sweep through the creditors list.
Check tax codes on all transactions.
Reconcile your GST liability accounts.
Balance your debtor and creditor control accounts.
Give inventory the once over.
Reconcile all payroll liability accounts.
Scan transaction reports for weird stuff or mistakes.
Read through the financials and check they make sense.
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Bookkeeping Basic: Understanding Account Types
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
Non-current asset: A physical asset such as office equipment, land, buildings, computers or motor vehicles, that isn’t expected to be converted into cash within the next 12 months
Current liability: An amount owed by the business that is due within the next 12 months, including scary stuff such as credit cards
Non-current liability: Anything you owe that isn’t due to be paid out within the next 12 months, such as hire purchase debts or bank loans
Equity: The ‘interest’ that shareholders or an owner has in the business, including both capital contributed and the profit or loss built up over time
Income: Money generated from sales to customers or returns on investments
Cost of sales: What it costs in raw materials, supplies or production labour to make the goods that you sell (also called cost of goods sold)
Expenses: The day-to-day running costs of your business, including things like advertising, bank charges, computer consumables, diamond rings, electricity, exotic perfumes, motor vehicle expenses, rent, telephone expenses and wages
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Stay Up-to-Date with Bookkeeping to Meet Tax Deadlines
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. Quarterly payments: 28 days after the end of each quarter, except for the December quarter, where the deadline is February 28 |
| Payment summaries | July 14 |
| Annual withholding declaration | August 14 |
| Superannuation | 28 days after the end of each month or quarter, depending on the fund |
| PAYG withholding tax | 21 days after the end of the month for monthly payments, or 28 days after the end of the quarter for quarterly payments |
| Valentine’s Day | February 14. Remember chocolates, red wine and roses or terrible consequences may ensue |
New Zealand bookkeeping deadlines
| GST return | 28 days after the end of each reporting period, with the exception of the November period, when the deadline is 15 January, and the March period, when the deadline is 7 May |
| PAYE tax and KiwiSaver | 28 days after the end of each month |
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Know Your Debits from Your Credits for Bookkeeping Success
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 |
| Equity | Credit | Debit |
| Income | Credit | Debit |
| Expenses | Debit | Credit |
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What's Included in a Financial Statement?
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 any point in time
Profit & Loss report: Summarises income, expense and net profit over a specified period of time
Statement of Cash Flow: Examines the cash flows in and out of a business
Trial Balance report: Lists the debit and credit balances of all general ledger accounts at any point in time
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Prevent Employee Fraud with Smart Business Practices
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
* Working on a cash register and taking cash
* Receiving payments from customers
* Balancing cash registers at the end of the day
* Accessing assets, such as business inventory
* Authorising transactions above an agreed amount
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Calculate GST in the Blink of an Eye
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 1.1 | Multiply by 1.15 |
| To calculate how much GST is included in a price | Divide by 11 | Divide by 7.667 |
| To calculate how much the price was before GST | Divide by 1.1 | Divide by 1.15 |
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Register as a BAS Agent in Australia
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 $5,500 to a whopping $137,500 per offence.
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.
For details about registering as a BAS agent page, visit the Tax Practitioners Board website.
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dummies
Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/bookkeeping-for-dummies-cheat-sheet-australianew-z.html
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