Book-Keeping Made Easy: a guide to book-keeping for new business start-ups.

If you are starting a business, Book-Keeping Made Easy explains how you can use accounting records to obtain valuable information on your new business start-up.

More new business start-ups fail in their first year or two because of insufficient financial control than for any other reason. Book-Keeping Made Easy provides the new business owner with an understanding of the fundamental principles of book-keeping and explains how your business can benefit from the information that your accounts contain.

Most people who are starting a new business for the first time wrongly believe that setting up a set of accounting books is an unnecessary and unpleasant chore that they must undertake simply for the taxman.

Think again: Book-Keeping Made Easy will show you how much your business accounts can tell you... if you would only learn to listen. In fact, the ability to understand their accounts is often the difference between a new business going bust or flourishing into a successful new business. 

And if that does not convince you, we will also show you the secrets of good book-keeping/accounting and a lower tax bill.

This guide will teach you how to look at your business accounts as a skilled accountant would, and use them to minimise the tax liability for your business. Which means more profit for your new business.

Written from the point of view of a businessman and not an accounts whizz-kid, Book-Keeping Made Easy shows you how simple it can be to set up business accounting records. It explains all the accounts jargon used in book-keeping, and helps you to realise what these accounting tools really mean for your new business. And Book-Keeping Made Easy provides lots of real-life new business examples to reveal the practical uses to which a go-ahead businessperson can put the information stored within their business accounts.

Topics covered by Book-Keeping Made Easy include double-entry book-keeping, reconciliation, VAT, ledgers, budgets, cash flow forecasts, payroll and final accounts.

Get Book-Keeping Made Easy today. Essential business reading!

About the Author

Roy Hedges was a freelance writer, entrepreneur and consultant. His practical business guides drew on extensive hands-on experience of starting up, buying and selling businesses himself, ranging from retail grocery outlets to garages and property. His career as an entrepreneur peaked when a firm of bankers' agents that he started grew into a finance company with seven branches, offering trade and consumer finance facilities, before becoming a bank. From this, subsidiary, insurance, property and leasing companies emerged. Later, he was to become one of the founding directors of London Trust Securities and Equilease Commercial Finance Ltd. Roy was also a director of a leading management consultancy and a board member of the leasing subsidiary of a major trade financier and invoice discounter.

This edition has been edited by Hugh Williams FCA.

Book-Keeping Made Easy Contents:

 1. Book-keeping & accounting explained

  • Different forms of accounting made clear
  • Who keeps books and why?
  • Assets, liabilities and capital
  • Business transactions clarified
2. Book-keeping records for the small business
  • The cash book
  • The sales book
  • The purchase book
  • Dealing with petty cash
  • The petty cash book
  • Using credit cards for business payments
3. Reconciliation & VAT 
  • Business bank accounts
  • Reconciling your accounts
  • What to do at the end of year
  • Self-assessment
  • VAT
4. Accounting for growing businesses 
  • Accounts
  • Ledgers
  • Daybooks
  • Managing original documents
  • Purchase and sales ledgers
5. Final accounts 
  • Trial balances
  • The Balance Sheet
  • Stock valuation
  • Trading and Manufacturing Accounts
  • Profit and Loss Accounts
  • Adjustments to the accounts
  • Accounts of limited companies
  • Year on year consistency in accounts
6. Budgets & cash flow forecasts 
  • Budgets and cash flow forecasting
  • Costing and pricing
  • Computerised accounting
7. Payroll 
  • Payroll calculations and book-keeping
  • Other items
  • Tips for running a payroll system
8. Putting accounting data to work
  • Monthly financial reports
  • Statistical control figures and their uses
  • Efficiency ratios
  • Liquidity ratios
  • Profitability ratios
  • Other useful ratios
  • Purchasing a business
  • Ledger entries for merging and buying a business
9. Partnership accounts & tax cutting tips 
  • Partnership accounts
  • Source and application of funds
  • Tips for cutting tax and avoiding an HMRC probe