How to do Small Business Bookkeeping in Excel like a Boss

At their best, templates are a great tool for increasing productivity and letting you focus on tasks that are more complicated. There are many templates available online to suit this exact purpose, meaning it’s never been easier to ensure you’re making your finance tasks as simple as possible.

Excel can help you with countless aspects of your small business accounting. Excel formulas significantly speed up business expense tracking and analysis. I could go on for eons about the Excel features that small businesses can leverage for accounting. Nonprofit annual reports often use visual aids to communicate where they spend their money. For-profit companies might prepare similar reports when pitching investors. Improving workflows is beneficial for the entire organization, and simplifying accounting and book-keeping tasks empowers finance teams. However it’s also important to ensure that you’re doing this in a safe and compliant manner which is adaptable to any changes.

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With Novo, you can add details to every transaction, including adding categories and notes, and uploading images and documents. You can also export all of this data in a CSV file for easier bookkeeping in Excel. Before you take a deep-dive into your business finances, an essential first step is to ensure you’re making your bookkeeping process as simple as possible. The easiest way to do so is to keep your business and personal finances separate with a business checking account.

A template likely comes with some accounts listed already, but you will probably need to tweak it a bit to fit your specific company needs. You’ll want to list the account type and a number with each account. You can also include a short description that may help you later as you start to record transactions. The double-entry method of bookkeeping is free accounting software standard for larger, more complex businesses. It’s more effective than single-entry for tracking cash flow and protecting against errors and fraud. However, it’s also more work to maintain—and difficult to set up in Excel. If you’re at the point where you believe your business needs double-entry bookkeeping, it’s time to use accounting software.

The ultimate Excel accounting template for bookkeeping

Using this accounts payable template will help to keep track of what you owe to each party, and will provide a quick look at the total outstanding balances and due dates. Your company’s real-time financial data is kept in one central place – online, in the cloud. Bank statement lines are fed into your software – it’s automatic, and reduces the amount of data entry and potential mistakes. Setting up an Excel spreadsheet that meets all of your financial needs requires a lot of thought and planning. It takes time to set up things like expense reports and invoice tracking. You may find yourself in a situation where you constantly need to add or change information on your spreadsheet. Depending on your type of business, you may want to take your bookkeeping a step further by creating some extra Excel spreadsheets to help you assess your company’s financial health.

After you download and tweak your expense report template, click “Save As Template” and save it to an accessible place for you and your employees. Any time someone clicks on the template file, you can be sure they won’t inadvertently ruin all your hard work in creating it. Many small businesses swear by Excel for all of their bookkeeping needs.