There may be a whole lot of tasks you have to do for your small business, and bookkeeping is definitely one of the most important ones. Bookkeeping isn't familiar to everyone, however, and you may be unsure of how to tackle it properly. Initially, you can act as the bookkeeper for your business whilst it is still in its starting phase, but as it grows, you may want to delegate this task to someone else. But it still pays to learn as much as you can about how to do it right, just so you will always be aware of your business's financial standing. So what are the most important pointers you should remember when doing bookkeeping for your small business? Here's your guide.
Know the difference
Accounting and bookkeeping are two terms that are often interchanged, and understandably so. But there is a difference between the two. Bookkeeping, in essence, is the recording as well as reporting of your financial transactions and information, whilst accounting is the analysis of your financial transactions and information and the creation of a financial system or strategy. Accounting helps you make decisions based on your position financially, whilst bookkeeping is more of the recording and collation of your financial details.
Know what’s involved
Bookkeeping is the overall management of your finances from day to day, and it includes such aspects as paying your bills, chasing client payments, calculating and paying the right amount of taxes, claiming taxes for your business expenses, and managing your business’ payroll so you can pay your workforce and HMRC properly.
You can keep track of all your payments with three kinds of financial records – your cashbook, sales invoice, and purchase invoice. The cashbook will record all your business's cash flow, which includes everything that moves in or out of your accounts. The sales invoice is a record of what you have sold (including your paid and unpaid invoices). The purchase invoice, on the other hand, is a record of what you have bought as well as how you paid for it.
Keep in mind that these are only the most basic; you will probably have more as your business expands, as experienced GSM Accountants in central London will attest.
Points to remember:
- Keep a record of each bill or payment. Record all payment transactions in your books and note when you made them and when they were received.
- Be mindful of deadlines. It will not do to settle payments late, especially when it comes to HMRC, because you can end up with penalties. If you are sending out invoices, give deadlines to your clients for the more effective chasing of payments. Note down those who pay late and think about cancelling their contract if they are serial late-payers. This is termed credit control, and your aim with this is to ensure a healthy cash flow for your business.
- Keep proper track of your expenses. As mentioned, this is an obvious bookkeeping task, but in line with this, you can claim your taxes back from your expenses so you can decrease your overheads. Make sure you keep your receipts and organise them so it will be easier to present them to HMRC when you claim your taxes.
Image attributed to Pixabay.com
By home remodeling, we mean changing how the interior areas of our home look. This is not just how different we can make them look, by changing the wallpaper or adding a bespoke piece of art to the wall, but more how we can completely transform our rooms when they become tired, unappealing, and lack purpose.
So, this article will look at ways we can remodel our home in terms of the most important rooms within our house. This will provide us with some ideas ready for when we look to hire a company such as Sudbury Remodeling to complete our designs and bring our home interior ideas to life.
Bedroom
This may seem like an odd place to start because we spend most of our time sleeping in the bedroom, so do not have all that much time to appreciate it. However, it represents our personal space, a place where children were conceived and would be a room so much harder to get off to sleep in if the aesthetics were wrong and the comforts were simply not there.
In terms of construction, it is necessary to decide which bedroom is the master bedroom, which other room is best left as a bedroom, and then whether a smaller bedroom can be converted to a room for storage when siblings have flown the nest.
So, one option, as the family moves out, might be to convert a spare bedroom to a storage area by re-modeling it for that purpose. This would mean creating additional shelving and cabinet space where the bed once was. Before doing this, however, we need to be sure that loves ones are not likely to return and want to stay overnight on too many occasions. However, this is where a sofa bed can be useful. One that folds out to make a bed when needed, but the rest of the time is simply a sofa used for seating. This can then be situated in the living room and not the spare bedroom, which is now needed for storage.
These are all considerations you could talk through with a company experienced in home design so that your home continues to suit your needs.
Kitchen
Fitted kitchens are the way forward when it comes to saving on space. The universal space of a kitchen is likely to need to cater for food preparation, eating, and washing. It needs to house in a confined space all your appliances that keep food cold, cook, and clean, and all in convenient locations. Also, you will want to house your utensils. You have a choice of high or low cupboards. Your choice might be about keeping certain things away from children. We were all curious at that age. We still are, about things like house design.
For a way of making available use of all your kitchen space, you can consider an island. Then, you not only have the space of your kitchen on all three sides but in the middle as well. With larger kitchens, it can still be possible to fit in an eating table. Or your island can double as a preparation and easting surface. High bar-like stools can be sat on instead of chairs. After all, most food eaten in a kitchen will be just breakfast cereal, toast, or snacks. Evening meals, or main meals, are generally eaten in the dining room. Designing a food hatch can help deliver food into an area away from the kitchen if you have a willing volunteer on the other side of the hatch.
Different types of kitchen layouts include U shape, L shape, galley, island, peninsula, and one wall kitchen. So, there are a few to explore with your kitchen designer.
Bathroom
In most cases, the bathroom is the smallest room in the house but it does not have to be. It can be remodeled in its construction to be larger. An en suite can be created so that a bathroom is combined with a bedroom. This makes it very convenient for the middle of the night. Anyone on water pills will appreciate an en suite, and so will family members and partners not wanting to disturb their loved ones.
In conclusion, we have three main rooms of the house that should be remodeled if we are to keep our house looking modern and purposeful. A bedroom is a space that needs to aid sleep or passion, the kitchen needs to accommodate kitchen gadgets and utensils economically, and the bathroom does not need to stay the smallest room in the house when it has a function too.
A Shrewsbury based messy play group, Ready Steady Let’s Get Messy which has been unable to operate since March has pivoted to creating activity boxes for toddlers and babies.
For the group owner, Laura White, it was a big change from the sessions she was used to delivering. She made an initial 20 Halloween themed boxes to test the water, they sold within 24 hours.
She set a more ambitious target of 70 boxes between then and Christmas. They sold out by early December, she spent much of the month hand making play dough, assembling boxes and going back and forth to the post office.
Laura learnt a lot about which activities and products worked well and with some great feedback from customers she were able to refine what she did and how she did it.
Laura had plenty of ideas for other themed boxes, the initial run of Dinosaur boxes sold within a few days. Her latest creation is the Woodland box, she wanted to get natural elements into a box so that children could experience wood and leaves as well as her home made play dough, cloud dough and coloured rice.
The boxes are priced £19 with free delivery in the Shrewsbury area. They are available to purchase through her website www.letsgetmessy.co.uk and through her Facebook page.
I live opposite the Ditherington Flaxmill in Shrewsbury - the oldest iron structure building in the world. It's fallen into disrepair over the past 20-30 years however we had the chance to look at the plans for redevelopment. At the same time I took some photos of the accessible areas:
The road facing side of the main building is covered in scaffolding.
The mill closed in the 1980's, it has been abandoned since.
The site has a very strange feel to it.
The architects behind the two phase redevelopment are applying for planning permission.
Shropshire Maltings.
There are various regeneration plans for the South Silo including turning it into a clean energy building with a Bio Mass boiler.
All windows have either been boarded up or smashed.
The out lying buildings are set to be turned into offices or apartments.
The delivery point for the south silo.
The internal structure is held up with scaffolding. Many of the architects plans deal with how to support the current structure with a modern steel frame.
Signs still exist from the Flaxmills long history.
The redevelopment plans have wide public support.
Running a consulting business is both very rewarding and very lucrative. However, when you're starting out, finding regular clients can appear difficult. The consulting business is fiercely competitive, and that spirit of competition is only expected to grow in the near future.
That means that you'll need to stand out to get regular clients. But it isn't just your consulting skills that you need to utilize to stand out in the consulting business, but also your marketing skills.
Below are a few tips and insights to help you get more clients for your consulting business.
1. Website and Portfolio
Your clients will inevitably search for your consulting business online, so having a good website is necessary. You want to create a good impression in front of prospective clients, and a well-polished, easily navigable website can help you achieve this.
Through your website, you'll be aiming to promote your consulting business in two ways - through your portfolio, as well as by making it easy for your clients to contact you. Consider setting up a newsletter or mailing list that prospective clients can sign up to through your website.
In exchange for basic information like their name, email idea, and the name of their business, they'll receive helpful generalized consulting tips on a monthly basis through your newsletter. If the prospective client likes your advice, they're more likely to hire you for your services.
Your portfolio also has a role to play in getting your consulting business more clients. Gather samples of previous projects that you've worked with, and showcase your advice helped your client succeed. Ask for your clients permission first, and show proof of your prior success as a consultant.
2. Write a Blog
To make your consulting business stand out within your niche, you'll need to establish authority as well as your reputation. One of the best ways you can do this is by writing a regular blog that provides useful information to your clients.
You can blog about ideas that are relevant to your industry, and provide solutions to real-world problems. Take, for example, a case study where you feel your solutions could provide better results. You can create a blog post about that to show your readers that you can provide unique strategies and solutions.
Ensure that you keep your valuable information for your paid clients. But engaging with your readers through your blog will help expand awareness about your consulting business.
Participating and answering questions in online communities such as Quora and Reddit is another way you can grow your reputation as a consultant.
3. Paid Advertising and Social Media
One of the fastest ways you can increase your clients is through paid advertising on platforms like Facebook and Google. Both these platforms allow you to market to your target audience. You can decide who you're marketing to based on their interests, geographical area, and more.
At the same time, you should also develop your social media accounts. Instead of having an account on multiple social media platforms, select only those that'll actually help you grow your business.
For a consulting business, you can think about LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as your business social media profiles. Here, post quality content related to your niche in consulting on a regular basis. Provide backlinks to both your website and your blog, and answer any and every question users bring your way.
4. Cold Calls and Perfect Pitches
Cold calls are generally avoided by businesses, but they can be very useful when they're done right. Isolate potential clients that you think could benefit from your services. Then look for a problem that you can solve.
Once you've determined these, you'll need to provide actionable solutions that the prospective client can implement to grow and expand their business. Formulate your ideas into a winning pitch, and then cold call the client. You shouldn't be cold calling every person who can be your client, but those who you genuinely think you can provide your consulting services to.
5. Negotiating, Referrals and Testimonials
Negotiations go hand in hand with securing new clients. A good negotiator knows how to read the client. They know what the client is looking for, as well as how to show the client that only they can help the client find the success they need.
Ask for referrals from your previous clients, as well as the people in your life. Also ask for testimonials as these are proof of your success in working with clients previously. Adding testimonials to your blog and website can help future clients gain more confidence when it comes to hiring you and your consulting business.
Aim to develop trust in all your client relationships, and you can find regular work from your older clients and their referrals. Work with those clients you think you can establish a good rapport with and provide value to, and avoid work that isn't a good match to your expertise.
As a consulting business owner, you can also consider getting a business insurance. A business insurance for consulting business will be able to provide cover for you if you face potential risks while running the business. Professional liability insurance is a popular insurance to consider.
Conclusion
Consulting business owners can make use of strategies like developing an online reputation, handling better negotiations with clients, and even cold calling certain clients to get more clients for their consulting business. Use these tips to ensure that your consulting business never runs out of work. With these tips, your main focus will remain on growing and building a sustainable consulting business.