eBay Business All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3: Taking Care of Your Finances

In This Chapter

• Understanding bookkeeping
• Using accounting software efficiently

When you meet with one of the professionals described in Chapter 2 in this minibook, you'll need to bring a complete and accurate set of books. To prepare accurate books, you can hire a bookkeeper (who will use accounting software) or you can learn how to use accounting software yourself. Don't shy away; you can do this. Lots of folks who are successfully using bookkeeping software today knew nothing about bookkeeping before they set up their own accounts. I'm one of them. This chapter paves the way into effective and relatively painless bookkeeping.

Keeping an accurate accounting of your business gives you one major benefit: You can, at any time, look at your bookkeeping and have an idea of how well (or not) your business is doing.

When your business gets so busy that you have no time to post your bookkeeping, you can hire a part-time bookkeeper to come in and do your posting for you. Sites like Elance (https://www.elance.com/) or even Twitter can help.

I researched to find which software was the best selling and easiest to use. I had many discussions with CPAs, enrolled agents, and bookkeepers. The software that these professionals most recommend for business — generally considered the best, which is why I devote so much of this chapter to it — is Intuit's ...