Five Important Accounting Tasks You Should Do Each Week

Accounting and bookkeeping are critical functions if you are running a business. They are as important for a startup as for an established business, looking at high growth. Whether it is about ensuring profitability, making decisions that include investments for the business in terms of space and infrastructure, or simply sustaining the business, accounting and bookkeeping are functions that cannot be pushed back, with the business owner multi-tasking as the accountant and bookkeeper. If you do so, you are already creating a disadvantage for your business.

Consider the following chain of events:

• As soon as you begin your business, your transactions too start; whether with vendors and suppliers, or with clients.
• Every exchange of money, whether in the form of cash or credit, is a transaction and must be recorded.
• Over a period of time, sometimes as short as a week, you will notice your business has already notched up a significant amount of transactions.
• If these transactions are not noted, in the form of invoices or records in the bill book, you will lose track of money owed.
• Ideally, important accounting tasks, including bookkeeping and maintaining a record of daily transactions can take care of basics. This can then be reviewed over the week, thus ensuring your business books are in order.

For a growing business, failing to keep a record of transactions can lead to several serious consequences:

• Difficulty during tax time.
• Losing track of revenue, profits, and available cash within the business.
• Difficulty when making critical business decisions, including investments and large-scale ones such as take-overs and buy-outs.

Following is a list of five important accounting tasks that can help you ensure accurate accounts for your business:

1. Ensure Documentation of Every Transaction

File, record, and maintain receipts. If this is not done on an everyday business, you will probably start doing it once you conduct a weekly check for your business’s transactions. Put into place a system whereby no transaction is completed without a record being made of it. This way, at the end of the week, when you sit down to document it all, you will not be overwhelmed.

2. Assess Payments Due, or Invoices Unpaid By Your Business

Check all the bills left unpaid over the week, including small transactions and large ones. If you have invoices to compare, that is the best. Why is this a weekly task? Because any more gap between transactions and recording, and you are likely to forget all about it, leading to missed records. When you have no record of a transaction, you are liable to lose money as through paying more than what you really owe.

3. Make Overdue Payments; Pay Your Dues

Once you finish assessing payments due, make sure you finish making payments for invoices that are due or overdue. Remember, some vendors have a late payment charge attached to their services. Conversely, some vendors incentivise early payment with discounts or other perks such as a free service offer, etc.

There is software available online that allows you to keep track of your Accounts Payable. Once you install it, you will receive reminders for payment, allowing you to stay on top of your payments.

4. Track Your Business’s Cash Flow

Your business’s cash flow is what tells you how much liquid cash your business has. You can choose to install software that manages cash flow and helps you keep track of it, or you can create your own cash flow forecast using an Excel sheet.

Knowing your cash flow at all times helps you make critical purchase and business investment decisions without wasting any time or effort.

5. Review Invoices; Send Out Receipts

Ensure your invoices are sent out on time. Not all your customers will make their payments on time, but you need to ensure the delay is not from your side. Weekly reviews will help you determine whether your invoices are ready, being sent on time or not. Late invoicing means late payments. Accounting software can help you with this as well, by helping generate invoices on time and even allowing customers to make payments to you directly.

The Importance of The Weekly Review

If you noticed, there is a software available for almost every function listed here that you must include in your weekly review.

However, despite software being freely available, and also coming with its own set of instruction, software will still need a certain level of expertise to be managed optimally.

Ensure you have resources who can help you set up the software, work it, and also troubleshoot as and when required.

If you still feel constrained, you can also hire professionals to take over critical business accounting tasks. When you hire professionals, you save yourself the hassle of setting up systems, putting into place a schedule of reviewing, or even hiring trained personnel to carry out these tasks. Instead, the entire responsibility gets taken care of by the agency you hire.

However, look around a bit and conduct your research before you commit to outsourcing your work. Check out capabilities of the agency/provider and find out the scope of their services offered in detail before signing on the dotted line. The right professional accounting services provider will not just help you with a weekly job list, they will help you streamline your business operations, putting your business on the growth track.

What do you think should be included in the list of weekly important accounting tasks? Do share with us, we would love to listen your list of important accounting tasks.

Written by

Analytix Editorial Team