Spring Cleaning | Organizing Your Books

Now that tax season is finally over let the Spring Cleaning begin! That’s right, now is the time to get your books organized and begin planning for next year. Maintaining good records will ultimately make filing your return next year a lot easier.  Shred what you don’t need any more and keep the records you need in case of an audit.

If you’re a business owner it is extremely important not to mix personal and business. You should keep your books and taxes separate.

Now let us help you get organized:

1)   Keep all of your tax records in a designated location. This will save you time when looking for important documents.

2)   Keep all CASH receipts.

3)   Hold onto Bank Statements

·         The IRS will want to see Check Stubs and pictures of checks that cleared

·         Sales information - deposits or sales reports (total of invoice) most are cash method and sales tax

·         Payroll Summary - QuickBooks or via a payroll company

4)   Stay on Top of Payroll

·         It is important that your payroll taxes are taken care of, so that you do not receive a penalty.

5)   If you receive your documents electronically, you can simply save them to your computer. Create a file for the current year; then create subfolders for each type of document. This will help you stay organized, while saving paper.

6)   If you are saving important documents to your computer it is important to back this information up.

·       You can save  your  information to an external hard

    drive that simply plugs into your computer

·       Or burn a CD

·       Ideally you backup your data offsite, not only with an external hard drive or CD.

    

If you own a business, below are the types of business paperwork you should keep:

Receivables: All of your gross receipts; cash register tape records, bank deposit paperwork, receipt ledgers, all your invoices, log of all credit card receipts.

Purchase: All canceled checks, credit card records and invoices

Expenses: All canceled checks, bank account statements, credit card records, invoices and all your petty cash slips

Assets: Receipts for all equipment purchases, capital investment or improvements in the business, property records for any real estate purchases.

As you can see, just because tax season has come to an end doesn’t mean you can forget about your taxes and books. “Spring Cleaning” is a great way to be prepared for next year. If you are new… let us help you get caught up on your taxes. Professor Tax USA not only takes care of your personal and business taxes, we will take care of your bookkeeping and accounting needs. Live out of state? We will come to you. We travel all around the United States.