Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping for a one-person business is not hard. It is just relentless. Every month you either spend twenty minutes on it or you spend a weekend on it in March, and the second option is how deductions get missed.

What it tracks

• Income and expenses against a starting set of categories that match what a small business actually spends on, which you can add to, rename or archive
• Receipts attached to transactions as a photo or a PDF, so the paper trail lives with the number instead of in a shoebox
• Recurring transactions posted automatically on the schedule you set, from once a week to once a year, so subscriptions and rent stop being a monthly chore
• Sales tax collected versus paid, under whatever label you use (HST, GST, VAT), which is the figure that decides your remittance
• Separate books, each with its own categories, transactions and reports, for people running a business and a household or more than one business

The month-end that takes twenty minutes

The recurring entries have already posted themselves. Photograph anything still on paper with the document scanner and attach it, categorise the handful of one-offs, and look at the summary. That is the whole routine. It works because the paid invoices you issued through Xerion import in one click rather than being re-entered from PDFs, and a CSV import covers the rest of your history.

What your accountant gets

A profit and loss report by category, and a CSV export for any date range with the category, payee, amount and tax portion on every line. Handing over a tidy export instead of a bank statement and a bag of paper is worth real money, because you are paying a professional by the hour either way and sorting is the cheapest part of the job to do yourself.

Being clear about what this is not

This is single-entry bookkeeping designed for a sole proprietor or a very small business. It is not a general ledger, it does not do payroll journals or inventory accounting, it does not connect to your bank, and it will not file anything on your behalf. If you have employees and a corporation, you need more than this. If you are one person invoicing clients, this is the level of bookkeeping the situation actually calls for, and the alternative most people are using is a spreadsheet they do not trust.