Secondly, it’s all about the process and self-discipline. Keep your books up to date and avoid piles of receipts and invoices stacking up in the corner. Tackling books a little and often would reduce your fear and overwhelm when dealing with it. You can also employ an accountant to keep an eye on your records. This will be much cheaper than getting them to do it all for you, but you won’t have to fear making a mistake and being fined by the “tax people”.

Finally, realise why you are doing it. Bookkeeping is a wonderful practice helping you as a business owner understand where you need to reduce the expenses and how you can gain more profit. Bookkeeping is a core area of your business, it’s the blood pressure measurements of your cash flow lifeblood. If you don’t do it regularly you may miss the warning signals of your business running out of cash. As a solopreneur coach or consultant you would really want to avoid that at all costs!

Here are our useful tips on how to deal with your business bookkeeping:

• Your bookkeeping will be more effective if you have a system that can quickly analyse the financial transaction of your company. You will then see the “large picture” behind the numbers and reconciliation.
• Keep your offline books and registers in either invoice number or date order, rather than entering some in invoice number and some in date order. Try to keep your personal expenses separate from your business expenses at all times. Be consistent with the way you decide to do your bookkeeping.
• Follow a check-off list whether you employ payroll services or you are preparing payroll tax returns by yourself. Keeping a good due date reminders will be the best idea in order to file and pay the taxes on time.
• Keep good records. If your records are poorly maintained, you will not be able to understand the expenses and the income in the past and in the future. You will be unable to decide on important decisions like investment, marketing or hiring staff. This creates massive chaos in your business planning!
• Request bank statement with month end cut off date. This will save your time while reconciling your records with the bank statement every month.
• Establish a systematic practice of monitoring transactions on a regular basis (daily or weekly). This will avoid the small mistakes, lost receipts or the unwanted purchases.
• Depositing the cash immediately at the bank once it’s received. Check how the bank charges you for over the counter services. It may make more sense to receive payments and pay your suppliers via online transfers (direct debit, standing order or direct deposit).

But if all fails and you just don’t want to do it any more – hire a bookkeeper. Online bookkeeping is straightforward and will let you just view the reports and summaries, while someone else, like a virtual assistant, can deal with entering all transactions.

So how can we keep our businesses profitable in tough economic times?

Sell more to your existing customers – you have already created rapport, trust and proved your credibility to them. Use bundles when selling: as your customers decide to buy one product you can offer them another. You can also add low cost bonuses to your offer that have high perceived value – ebooks, member-only sites, consulting, e-reports, etc. And never forget about viral marketing on the Internet!

Create joint venture deals with other businesses and cross promote your products or services. You will reach a wider audience at less cost. Trade advertising with other businesses, find complementary products or services through networking. Start an affiliate program for your business. Less money on advertising, yet more guaranteed sales!

Outsource part of your workload. Outsourcing to a freelancer can be a great alternative compared with hiring someone full or part time. This will save on employee costs, taxes, equipment and office space, expansion, recruitment. Furthermore you will get the flexibility of only using as much or as little of the service as you need – catering for idle periods over holidays and busy times when you have a lot of orders. Why do you need someone helping in your business? Well we can’t all be equally good at everything or equally love all parts of the business. Tasks like book-keeping, call handling, setting up sales pages, marketing, telesales – can all be handled by experienced and able professionals.

Follow up with all prospects. You will need a good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to enter any leads as you find them and keep track of any communications between you by phone, email, fax or in person. Set yourself reminders to chase leads regularly and see if their needs change thus creating you an opportunity to offer your products or services.

Traditionally, company phone systems have been a costly, but necessary means of keeping in touch with employees and customers. PBX phone systems were originally credited with helping to lower overhead costs as they eliminated the need for separate phone lines. Yet, costs for maintaining these systems have remained high. Much like the Internet telephony systems available to consumers in their homes, business VoIP services are springing up to serve small and medium sized businesses everywhere. Business VoIP calls are routed through Internet wiring for a much cheaper alternative than the traditional phone system. Gone is the need for a receptionist to screen and redirect calls, the VoIP PBX system can be set up to do that for you. You can implement a VoIP system as little as one line and as large as a call centre. Some can work with your existing equipment and phone/broadband. And many will offer extra benefits like call diversion rules, custom greetings, group pickup for many agents, e-fax and e-conference centre, call waiting, voice mail forwarding to email account, etc. Our Pro-iPBX VoIP system has been a lifesaver here in TJConsulting on many occasions! And you can always use your favourite call answering service with your VoIP system too.