
Ask HN: Entrepreneurs who do their own bookkeeping and accounting - m33k44
Would love to hear from entrepreneurs who do their own business accounting and bookkeeping:
- How did you learn accounting and bookkeeping, what resources did you use?
- How did you simplify the financial process of your business?
- What simplification did you make?
- Do you get our financial statements audited?
- How do you use your company&#x27;s financial data for decision making?
- And what financial data do you use for decision making purpose?<p>Thank you!
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ThePhysicist
There are two types of bookkeeping: External and internal. External
bookkeeping is what you do for the government / IRS to determine how much
taxes you pay. Depending on your company type and country this can be quite
complex and personally I would never attempt to do it myself as you can get a
tax accountant / lawyer to do it for you for a reasonable price and learning
to do it yourself will take many months or even years. Also, if you go through
a tax accountant you can transfer a part of the legal risk of bookkeeping to
them, which is one thing less you’ll have to worry about (there are enough
other things to keep you awake at night as an entrepreneur so you really don’t
want to also worry about your tax declarations; I’ve been there myself). If
you are a one-person business it might still be manageable but even then I’d
say your time is better spent thinking about your core business instead of
worrying about bookkeeping.

For internal bookkeeping you can do whatever you want and you don’t have any
legal restrictions, you would typically make use of this to measure the
performance of your company and make sure you don’t run out of money. If
you’re a small company I would use the data your tax accountant provides to
you and simply put it in a finance plan in Excel to see how you’re doing. The
core metrics you’re interested in are probably revenue, cash flow, cost and
profit I’d say (current, past and projected future values ideally). There are
many guides available on the Internet for this, look e.g. for business
planning as a keyword.

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nik736
I have a tax adviser but I do most of the things myself and let her look over
it. 4 Years ago I had no clue what had to be done but I didn't want to give it
away because it's an important topic and I want to know what has to be done.
So I let her show and explain me basically everything (of course I paid them
for it).

If you give it away completely, at least here in Germany they are paid based
on revenue (%) so they get their money anyways and as it usually is they want
to have the easiest path so they cut corners and not always have your best in
mind. They are paid the same, if they save you money or not.

This was honestly the best decision I made because I learned a lot about
taxes, businesses in general and ways to optimise my company. That would've
never happened if I would've chosen the easier path back then. Of course it
takes some time, and might distract you from your day-to-day business, but
it's knowledge you will benefit from your whole life.

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aspantel
At one point we got ourselves a QuickBooks Online account and found a
bookkeeper to help us enter and reconcile all data into QB monthly. Works
great and having such a bookkeeper is pretty cheap. For taxes we use an
accounting firm but having the up-to-date QB account helps alot. -A

