Bookkeeping and Accounting All-in-One For Dummies, UK Edition

Chapter 1

So You Want to Do the Books

In This Chapter

Introducing bookkeeping and its basic purpose

Maintaining a paper trail

Managing daily business finances

Making sure that everything’s accurate

For many small business owners, while they love working in their chosen field using the skills they know and love, they don’t always like to perform ‘bookkeeping’ duties. Most company owners prefer to employ the skills of a qualified bookkeeper. Some may, perhaps, prefer to give their bag-full of receipts to their accountant and simply hope that a useful set of accounts comes out of the end of the accounting sausage machine!

In this chapter we help to demystify the role of a bookkeeper. It may be that you’re just starting off in business and, as a result, can’t afford the services of a bookkeeper just yet! Think of this chapter as a checklist of jobs that need to be done.

Throughout the book, we introduce Have a Go sections, which are practical exercises aimed at helping you understand the bookkeeping principles we discuss. Feel free to draw all over these sections of the book; we want ...