You have decided to maintain your own books. You weighed the cost benefits, the time associated and come to the conclusion that your business isn’t tricky enough just yet to warrant another outsourced cost.

If you are a service business (no product inventory to track), the most important thing to track is money in out.  There are several options on the market that can help you since double-entry bookkeeping isn’t critical in the beginning stages of a service-based business. Outright accounting, Freshbooks or a simple Excel spreadsheet can be very helpful in tracking your income and expenses.

As a bookkeeper who has worked with many small businesspersons such as yourself, the best advice I can give is spend at least ten minutes each work day entering invoices, payables, paying your bills and entering your expenses. Maybe you don’t have all of these items to do each and every day, but if you spend just ten minutes you won’t be overwhelmed a month or six months down the line.

Bookkeeping doesn’t have to be hard, unless you let it be. Do the math for ten minutes a day or one hour a week and you’ll be happy you did.