Salt Lake City Bookkeeping Blog

As far as your clients are concerned, you are your company. So doesn’t it make sense to capitalize on whatever it is you bring to the table? Making use of personal branding to promote your business is a great way to take a more active role in its direction and growth.

From open to close, the accounting cycle is a series of steps that lets you collect and organize bookkeeping data in a way that clearly shows your company’s changing financial position. As a small business owner, you can benefit from a basic understanding of how the accounting cycle works, even if you don’t perform your own bookkeeping duties.

There’s an epidemic sweeping our nation, and its name is perfectionism. The last few decades, says social psychologist and perfectionism expert Thomas Curran, have seen a disturbing increase in our drive to be perfect in body, mind, and career. But the reality is that perfection is an impossible objective by definition – the compulsive pursuit of which can, among other things, compromise your health, your goals, and your company’s bottom line.

Maintaining a complete and organized set of records for tax purposes is one of the most important aspects of your small business bookkeeping. Not only does it let you optimize tax deductions, it helps streamline the audit process and prevent costly tax penalties. Simplifying your business tax record keeping comes down to one fundamental task: gathering, documenting, filing, and reporting the right paperwork.

Regardless of the size of your company, deciding to open a business bank account shouldn’t be a question of if, but a matter of when. In an ideal bookkeeping world, every company would open a business account before conducting their first commercial transaction. But if you’ve yet to separate your company’s payables and receivables from your personal bank account, it’s never too late to make that happen.

More customers mean more sales, and an eventual increase in your profitability. But many business owners are so focused on going after fresh clients that they neglect the ones they’ve already managed to attract. Given that it typically costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to hang on to a current one, it can be well worth your while to explore the enormous income potential offered by previous buyers.

The goal of organizing your company’s digital filing system is to be able to find what you need, when you need it – even if it’s months or years from today. Whether you store files locally (on office desktops, laptops, or mobile devices), in the cloud, or with the help of a dedicated company server, good file management practices will save you time, money, and endless frustration.

Today’s labor market is the tightest in decades. And with millions of job openings across the nation, companies of all sizes are finding it difficult to attract and hang on to the talent they need. The quest for qualified staff is only expected to intensify going forward, leading experts to predict that business owners will have to ramp up their efforts to retain a solid and reliable workforce.

It seems to me that most small business owners number one priority and goal is growth. Everyone wants to grow their small business.

Young and growing businesses rarely turn a profit – let alone manage to break even – right out of the gate. In fact, when we look beyond the estimated 50% failure rate for small businesses in their first five years, we find that it can still take the average surviving business several years to become profitable.