Bookkeeper's Bootcamp: Get a Grip on Accounting Basics [Paperback]

"Bookkeeping can absolutely be the difference between bankruptcy and success" says Angie Mohr. "You can't know how your business is doing until you record it."Bookkeeper's Boot Camp is the first book in the Numbers 101 for Small Business series. It shows small business owners the essentials of record keeping, and why it's crucial to a businesses' success to track financial data. The book gives business owners a greater understanding of the purpose and process of record keeping and a deeper understanding of their businesses.Angie has helped hundreds of small business owners who didn't understand the importance of record keeping and always put it off until "later." These business owners were almost literally buried under a pile of papers, overwhelmed by the immensity of the task at hand. Angie shows business owners how to sort through the masses of information and paperwork, record what is important, and how to use that information to grow a business for success!

Bookkeepers’ Boot Camp is the first book in the Numbers 101 series. It will show you the essentials of record keeping for a small business and why it's necessary to track information. The book will give you a greater understanding of the purpose and process of record keeping and a deeper understanding of your business and how it works.

This book teaches you how to sort through the masses of information and paperwork, how to record what is important for your business, and how to use that information to grow your business for success!

This book includes a self-test to help you understand and reinforce what you have learned. The following topics are discussed in this book:

- Managing the paper flow - Understanding the balance sheet: defining what your business owns and what it owes - Learning the basics regarding the income statement and cash flow statement - Recording the sales cycle - Learning how to account for inventory - Monitoring your budget and cash flow to ensure that future cash requirements will be met - Understanding the transactions between the company and its owners: loans, bonuses, dividends, payments made personally, and company payments of personal bills

Bookkeepers' Boot Camp: Get a Grip on Accounting Basics is the first book in the Numbers 101 for Small Business series. It will show you the essentials of record keeping for a small business and will show why it's necessary to track information. The book will give you a greater understanding of the purpose and process of record keeping and a deeper understanding of your bus

Angie Mohr is a Chartered Accountant and Certified Management Accountant. She is the managing director of Mohr & Company Chartered Accountants and Business Consultants.Angie believes strongly in planning the entrepreneur's business and personal life holistically.Mohr had a weekly radio show called Small Business Survival Tips and was also the author of a regular newspaper column called the "Instant CFO Sessions."

GETTING STARTED

The statistics are mind numbing. In North America, 80 percent of all small businesses started this year will be gone in five years. Of the lucky 20 percent to have survived, another 80 percent will be gone in ten years. That’s a whopping 96 percent failure rate over ten years.

Would you start a small business if you were told that you have a 96 percent chance of failure? Not many people would. But every day, hundreds of people think they will beat the odds. They may be former employees, students, housewives, or others who have never had any business training but are sure that their product or service is so fantastic, so completely unique, that they are destined to succeed.

These are the people who walk through the doors of my accounting and consulting practice every day. They want to know how to make a lot of money, how to leverage their businesses, how to go public. I begin to talk to them about their plans for bookkeeping for the business (“Oh, my wife will sort all that out”), what is in their business plan (“Oh, I’ll pull one of those together if the bank is looking for one”), and what their break-even point is (“We don’t have to worry about any of that; this product is going to sell millions!”). They want to fly before they’ve learned to crawl. They do not understand that business management is a separate skill from doing whatever it is that their business does. For example, hairdressers think that because they are good at cutting hair, they can own and manage a salon. Lawyers think that because they are good at putting together a brief, they can run a ten-lawyer law practice.

Does it sound like I’m being hard on small business? Not at all. Small business is the engine of the world economy. Even Microsoft and Ford started in someone’s basement or garage. However, people all over the world have an idealized and unrealistic view of how to operate a business, and most discount the importance of the basics. With the advent of bookkeeping software such as Simply Accounting and QuickBooks, many entrepreneurs have come to believe that these programs will magically do their bookkeeping for them. Because these people lack basic accounting skills, they are unable to analyze their business results and have no idea what’s working and what’s not. It’s like driving a car in a foreign country where they can’t understand what the road signs are telling them.

The Numbers 101 for Small Business Series

Over the years, my clients have asked me to recommend good books on small-business management and accounting. I have always found it difficult to do so, as most books on the subject are either dry textbooks or too general to be of any use.

This problem was the genesis of the Numbers 101 For Small Business series of books. The series functions as an easy-to-understand reference for small-business owners, and covers such topics as bookkeeping, analyzing and tracking financial information, as well as the complexities of starting, growing, and exiting a business. The series is distilled from the workshops, radio broadcasts, and one-to-one training sessions I have conducted in my accounting firm over the years. You, the small-business owner, will find within this series everything you need to base your business on sound financial and management principles. Throughout the series, you will meet Joe and his wife, Becky. Joe owns a small business called (appropriately) Joe’s Plumbing. Becky does the back-office work for the business: answering phones, invoicing, bookkeeping, and banking. You will learn how Joe worked with his accountant to strengthen his business and make it more profitable and risk proof. You will find samples of financial documents and other useful tools that you can customize to your business needs.Bookkeepers’ Boot Camp

Bookkeepers’ Boot Camp, the book you are reading now, is the first book in the Numbers 101 for Small Business series. It deals with the essentials of record keeping for a small business and will show you why it’s necessary for you to track financial information. By the end of this book, you will have a greater understanding of the purpose and process of record keeping and a deeper understanding of your business and how it works.