What is accounting?
As you can read in this Investopedia post
Accounting is the process of recording financial transactions pertaining to a business. The accounting process includes summarizing, analyzing and reporting these transactions to oversight agencies, regulators and tax collection entities. The financial statements used in accounting are a concise summary of financial transactions over an accounting period, summarizing a company’s operations, financial position and cash flows.
Who needs accounting?
All companies need accounting, but the period may be different, it can be monthly or yearly. A lot of Estonian service providers include accounting in the monthly fee. Unfortunately, his fees were to high for my company. At the end I found a service provider that said me that because the small number of invoices I didn’t need monthly accounting, the yearly accounting was enough. It is my service provider now.
Meanwhile, what can I do?
It was a good new, I could save some money monthly, but I wanted to know some financial information about my company. So I started to do my self a very simple accounting using Google Drive. I have learned accounting when I studied an IT degree first and later when I studied a company management degree, that I haven’t finished.
At the same time I was looking for a simple tool to do accounting, I found a tool created for Estonian startups and SMEs, it is called e-Financials:
The first year is free but then you have to pay a monthly fee, firstly 5€, later 9€. But using it you don’t have to pay for the annual report it is created automatically using this tool.
You can test it using the demo environment. So I tested and I realized that it is too complex for the first financial year of my company, may be I will use it next year.
Then I found a website called Excel Skill, they have a lot of Excel templates, some of them designed for accounting.
I purchased one of these templates and some months later I still think that it is the best tool for my small company. Once a month I enter my company data (invoices, bank statements, …) and I check if it matches the bank account balance.
Top photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash