A bookkeeper walks through setting up QuickBooks and organizing your chart of accounts so you can track finances in under thirty minutes a month. The speaker draws on experience managing multiple companies and explains how a certified bookkeeper keeps your numbers clear and current.
Foreign. All I'm going to say there is that everyone needs to have a QuickBooks Certified bookkeeper. I've had one since I first started in the business. Running, running my chart, my chart of accounts. In your Dropbox you have a copy of my chart of accounts. If you give this to any bookkeeper and tell them that you want to set up something close to this, you could tweak some of these. The whole point of this though is having the numbering system versus the generic chart of accounts that comes out of QuickBooks. So all of my revenue is in 4000. So you'll have some system. Even if you change some of this, you should keep all of your revenue at 4,000. Then your buyer agent splits, your seller agent splits, your referral expenses. Your all of our lead gen is 6200. We have a bunch of, you know, 62001112 through 1762 20, we have a bunch of those. Occupancy is 6365 is telephone, cable, fax, fax, who uses fax education. 6700 equipment is 6800. So you can follow. Follow this. So it's just helpful to have that those series numbers. 7700 is all of our salaries. So absent any other chart of accounts, you can use this one. I advertise on Craigslist for a bookkeeper. I found an awesome bookkeeper. If anyone needs a bookkeeper. I know she's done work for consulting clients of mine, even in different markets. Even though she's local here to Charlotte. She can set up books for you and run your books. You can, you could basically email her everything she needs. Hard copies of your checking accounts, your credit card statements, hard copies of checks and deposit slips. It's all she really needs to do it. So I give her stuff as soon as the end of the month, you know, by the 5th of the month. I have financials for the. For the month prior. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to run books and to monitor your profitability. And she prepares two reports for me. So she prepares a year to date versus last year. So through June, I'll see January through June 2014 compared to January through June 2013. And then she also runs a monthly, so she'll put January, February, March, April, May, June, all next to each other. So I can see the sort of if we're going up or down or we have any lumpy expenses, you know, that are unexpected expenses or whatnot. So that's that. QuickBooks is the number one small business bookkeeping platform it's never going to go away. You have to work in it. I wouldn't even waste time in Quicken. I've had clients of mine that are spending four or five hours a month doing their own books in Quicken and downloading their credit card transactions, and only to find out that they're like four months behind in even doing it. So I own four companies, and I'm able to do everything I need in about 15 minutes in those four companies to get all the information over to Laura, my bookkeeper, and for her to turn around. Sometimes she has questions. She'll email me a spreadsheet with unidentified expenses. I spend another five minutes on those. So less than 30 minutes a month, I get all the financial clarity I need in my business. Super important.
