If you are like most business owners, you prefer to focus your time and energy on serving your clients and growing your business rather than on paperwork. For many business owners, paper quickly piles up due to lack of time, interest or good filing systems. But when papers are not well organized, time is lost looking for documents when they are needed. In the long run it saves time to set up an efficient filing system and develop habits to maintain it.
A good business filing system should include categories for different areas of the business rather than having all types of paperwork grouped together. Below are some general suggestions for categories that work well for many business filing systems. No matter how well organized a filing system, it will quickly fall apart if not maintained. Then within the project, you may have further subfolders for correspondence and contracts.
Even if you know the right folder to look in, finding the correct version of a file can be hard. One way to help is to create subfolders for the stages of a task.
Use the Final folder for any documents that are completed and approved. For example, if you were doing a print brochure, you would put the final press-ready version in this folder. Then use the Archive folder to store old materials for reference, like notes, research, scrapped ideas, etc.
Here are a few best practices from Stanford:. Rather than duplicating the file, create a shortcut. You can then move that shortcut to another location, but your original file stays in the same place. It gives you a way to easily track expenses and even integrates with bookkeeping software. You can use it to keep your files accessible from anywhere.
For easy access to all of your important files and other office gear, you can get a simple desktop organizer like this one from Poppin. If you only keep a small amount of physical files on hand, then you may be able to get away with just a few labeled folders that you can store in a drawer or even in your briefcase. A slightly larger system, you can fit files of a few different categories inside one binder and still transport and store them very easily.
This product is similar to folders and binders. However, it offers a bit more information that you can fill in about specific products so you can keep everything organized very specifically.
This one is from Staples. This type of product is often used in classrooms or offices where multiple people may have ingoing or outgoing materials. However, you could also use it as an organizer if you have many different types of files and need each of them to be pretty easily accessible.
Are you wondering what business expenses can be deducted from your taxable income? Here's a list of some of the most common small business expense categories.
We may receive compensation from partners and advertisers whose products appear here. Compensation may impact where products are placed on our site, but editorial opinions, scores, and reviews are independent from, and never influenced by, any advertiser or partner. Some of the most common expense categories include utilities, travel, salaries and other wages, and rental expense, but there are many more that you should be aware of. But what counts as a business expense?
A lot more than you may realize. In fact, any expense that is considered ordinary and necessary for your business is likely a deductible expense. For instance, in December of , you receive a bill from Atlas Roofing for repairs completed earlier in the month.
Here are a few ways to make the process a bit easier. If you provide cell phones for field reps and outside sales people, make sure that you include a separate expense for telephones. For smaller businesses, or those that only use an office landline, your monthly bill can be expensed to your utilities account. Some smaller businesses combine printing and postage expenses, but if your business routinely ships goods to customers, you should have a separate account for your postage and delivery costs.
When setting up your vendors, enter a default expense code or category if possible. This links the vendor to the correct expense automatically, eliminating the need to manually code vendor invoices. QuickBooks Online allows you to enter an expense category when setting up vendor details. Source: QuickBooks Online software. If this is not possible, be sure to examine and code the bill properly for the accounts payable process , ensuring that every bill entered is coded to the correct account.
Plus you have the security of having adequate backup and a solid audit trail in place, should you ever be audited. Here are some of the best accounting software applications for tracking your business expenses. Zoho Books offers excellent bookkeeping and accounting capability for small businesses, including a solid expense management feature. Zoho Books offers numerous ways to record your business expenses. Source: Zoho Books software. One handy feature in Zoho Books is the option to record an expense, record mileage, or record bulk expenses.
Zoho Books also offers an excellent primer on how to track business expenses. AccountEdge Pro is designed to make life easier for small business owners. One of its best features is the ability to assign an appropriate expense account to each vendor, so when you enter a bill for that vendor, the correct accounts will be debited and credited automatically.
AccountEdge Pro allows you to view the accounts affected by a purchasing transaction. While there are instances where a vendor can have multiple business expense accounts, such as a business that may offer both printing and shipping services, in many cases, vendors will only represent a single business expense type.
FreshBooks offers multiple ways to track and manage your expenses, including standard expense entry, the ability to upload receipts from your mobile phone, or the option to scan a receipt directly into FreshBooks.
The Expenses feature in FreshBooks categorizes your receipts automatically. Source: Freshbooks software. With automated receipt categorizing, FreshBooks makes it easy to track and later deduct all allowable expenses and is also a good option for those preparing expense reports. Along with this long list of allowable deductions, there are a few expenses that are never deductible for business owners, including lobbying, political contributions, memberships in social organizations, and of course any illegal activities such as kickbacks or bribes.
The good news is that the vast majority of your business expenses are deductible.
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