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 categories that match what a Canadian sole proprietor actually files
• Receipts attached to transactions, so the paper trail lives with the number instead of in a shoebox
• Recurring transactions posted automatically, so subscriptions and rent stop being a monthly chore
• GST and HST collected versus paid, which is the figure that decides your remittance
• Multiple books, for people running more than one thing

The month-end that takes twenty minutes

Pull in the recurring entries, photograph anything still on paper with the document scanner, categorise the handful of one-offs, and look at the summary. That is the whole routine. It works because the invoices and receipts you already issued through Xerion are sitting there waiting to be reconciled rather than needing to be re-entered from PDFs.

What your accountant gets

A clean export by category and date range, with receipts attached. 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, 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.