In ‘Do It Yourselves’ (DIY) the concept is to do it yourselves and Save Money.
One area that people try and save money is their accounting whether Personal, Home or Small Business.
Some argue that it is time consuming, make you hectic and above all ‘boring’ or you can do better things by not wasting your time on accounts. Let the professionals do it.
Here we need to consider two aspects: 1. Am I generating enough to pay a professional? 2. Do I get ‘control’ over my fund or business management?
First question can be answered by you only with a self- assessment. But for your home economics you don’t need a professional accountant, for sure.
Second: Control- Yes that is the key word. Whether you are doing a home or business accounting, what you gain is the first hand information on where do you stand financially.
If you are able to identify how much control you want over your business’s financial health, you’ll be able to determine whether or not you want to do your own bookkeeping.
ADVANTAGES OF DOING YOUR OWN BOOK-KEEPING
It’s totally possible to do your own accounting, the tools are relatively basic and commonly available.
Tradeoff between the time spends doing own accounting and the cost of hiring a professional to do it is completely depending on your financial stability. If you think your time is worth more than paying to an accountant then hire one.
Beyond the monetary savings, there’s also the benefit of saving time. Getting your receipts and accounts in shape is the bulk of the work behind accounting, and you’ll end up doing this whether you do the entries or hand your work off to someone else, particularly for small businesses.
There’s another advantage above any savings of time or money, and that’s the fact that doing your own business accounting gives you a hands on understanding of your finances. By balancing her own books, you will know where you stand with profit/ income and loss/ expense at any given moment, and can make quick decisions based on that information.
I HATE ACCOUNTING? IS IT JUST COUNTING?
Here also we can find two schools. 1. Accounting is not my cup of Tea and I hate it.
Such people should realize that Accounting is the back bone of your life. If you are doing home (Family Finance) book keeping, it will help you to determine where you should put a break on spending. If you entrust your job to a professional book-keeper, what he can give you is only figures and not the ‘sense’ attached to it.
If you are doing, Business Accounting, Control can be effected in every aspect which can help you to make decisions of your own.
2. After all, ‘it is just counting isn’t it?’
Many think that accounting is only Counting. Yes, eventually it is counting. But, you are doing book-keeping, not to ‘sum up’ but to determine, how much you received, how much you spent and how much you made. Going deep, you would like to know in what all items you got more, where you made loss, where I spent more and finally how can I control it. In short, you are placing each item in each box and making a sub-total of each item and getting a final sum.
In earlier years, all book keeping was done manually. You must have seen large ledger books in all shops, offices and business establishments. A lots of people were employed and it was a tiresome job too. Hence many sought the help of an accountant, whether part-time or full time.
After the emergence of technology (Software) lots accounting packages came out which can be cut and stitched according to your needs. There are many good accounting packages available in Cyber Space such as Turbo Cash, Quick Books, Tally, Quicken, Waves etc. People also use Google Sheets and Excel for Data Entry purpose and have unlimited scope.
Out of the Accounting Packages mentioned above, we recommend you to download, Turbo Cash which is Completely Free (Open Source). You may install it and try to go through.
But, still people are reserved themselves from doing it by themselves due to lack of accounting knowledge. With the emergence of accounting software packages, it is easy now to keep your own book-keeping. Software completely obliterated the ‘Counting Process’. Now what left is to determine what eggs you have and place them in particular boxes. It can be learned easily with a little book-keeping knowledge and training.
Whether you use personal accounting software, software geared toward small business finances, or a basic spreadsheet program, there are plenty of resources online to learn how to make the most of these programs and how best to approach financial record keeping.
If you see that you need personal help and training, we provide. We teach you basics of Book-keeping and give training on Turbo Cash software.
It is $ 99 but NOW only $49.
Whether you’re a freelancer keeping track of your clients or a startup business trying to make the most of your time and money, managing your own accounting is a helpful soft skill to add to your toolkit.
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