Feedback - How do you track expense and finances of your business
The market currently have a number of solutions that helps small businesses, freelancers (who pay taxes ;D) track and manage their finances and business expenses (especially you have a small team with staff expense claims). For example, Receipt Bank, Expensify, some accounting SaaS like Xero, Quickbooks have app that allow uploading and scanning of receipts, invoices etc through the mobile app.
I'd like to learn from those of you who run a small business:
- Is tracking business expenses and finances important to you? How much time do you spend doing it in a month?
- How do you currently track business expenses and finances?
- What do you like or dislike about your current way of doing this? What would you change or like to have to help you do this better?
Looking forward to learning from your experiences. Thank you!
I've used an accountant in the past, and also had periods where I barely focused on tracking anything at all, then retroactively did it at the end of the year when taxes came due.
Mostly, if I could've wished for anything, it would be a simple app that would show me all my transactions + categorize them + make it easy for me to see what I'm spending per month. I suppose it also would be nice if it could grab receipts out of my emails and attach them to transactions.
That said, I'm sure Mint can do a decent part of all that, and I never signed up for it, so maybe it just wasn't important to me. Ultimately, getting more insight into my expenses wouldn't have drastically saved or made me money.
That's interesting insight. Thank you. For some context, what's your company team size or a solo entrepreneur?
In Europe you typically use a tax consultant / accounting guy. I just send him receipts and he get access to a live stream of the movements of my business bank account. Depending on the size of your business he could send you reports every three months or more or less frequently but he basically figure out what you can deduct and fill and send your taxes forms for you
Indeed. In your case did you had to consolidate receipts from everyone in your company/team/multiple offices before you send it to your accountant all at once?
Now what I do is to spend a few minutes every friday checking my bank account and verifying I have a receipt for everything. Last year I did not do that and when I sent the receipts to my tax consultant he did the matching with my bank account and asked the missing receipts. I have also toyed with the idea of building a program that analyzed data from PDF of invoices but I then realized it was just a waste of time given the small size of my business