Christmas Accountancy

Like many small businesses people, in between the frenetic consumption Christmas is a time to do the jobs there's no time for the rest of the year. With the January the 31st deadline looming that for many means tax. I find others only admit to such bah humbugish behaviour when I fess up to my Christmas activities. Here are two tips, passed on by to me by a couple of accountants, that can save hours,

1) Don't bother sorting receipts and invoices into date order. Stick them all into a ring binder as they come and sequentially number them. Enter each into a spreadsheet as usual along with its number. Sort the sheet into date order and it doubles as an index to the file's contents.


2) Accountants need your spending classifying, stationary is treated differently from hardware purchases for example. The slow way do that is that is via a category column, but that means the sheet has to be sorted by that column and each category separately totaled. Far quicker is to give each category its own column. As always make the column heading always visible (using the freeze command on Excel's View menu / ribbon or Open Office's Window menu). Once done a few clicks totals each categories' column.

Now back to selflessly fighting the recession with gifts and calories.