Why I Use a Spreadsheet for Bookkeeping in My Startup Business

I do my bookkeeping on a spreadsheet. 

I'm in the startup stage of my business, and I don't have enough transactions going through my bank account to justify the expense of a monthly subscription to bookkeeping software. 

I'm also a service business, so tracking inventory or cost of goods isn't necessary. I also don't have debtors or creditors. So I'm all good there. That said, my bookkeeping spreadsheet is perfect for product businesses too, because I've created columns for you to track your income and expenses for physical products.

But ....Getting deep down into the truth below the bottom line, I don't want to pay for a recurring bookkeeping software subscription and I'm not ready to pay for a part-time bookkeeper. I will soon because I would love to engage the services of one of the remarkable bookkeepers recommended in our business directory.

https://www.findherdirectory.com.au/bookkeeping-services 

Putting my financial doldrums aside, where they belong, and setting aside the desire to have a FindHer member do my books, so I can further support her small business, I love bookkeeping software. I love it because I feel like a "real" businesswoman when I use bookkeeping software. When I use my bookkeeping spreadsheet, I feel like an astute businesswoman who is careful where she spends her money when she doesn't have much.

I created my bookkeeping spreadsheet on Excel when I started Curry Traders with my sister and her husband many moons ago. The spreadsheet worked a treat. 

Until it didn't. 

I remember having receipts bundled up in elastic bands in shoe boxes. My sister would methodically peel each one out and read the details to me as I methodically added the details to the spreadsheet (on my laptop, on my kitchen table) every Friday morning.

It was easy to do it this way back then. There were just the two of us running and building our little empire-to-be, and doing our bookkeeping this way got us in the habit of knowing what our cash flow was every week. But when that business hit its tipping point, and we were manufacturing our product in our own factory with many more receipts flying in the door with the pallet loads of raw goods and packaging, the need to quickly upskill myself by learning bookkeeping software hit home. 

And by hit home, I mean literally hitting home. I bought an MYOB Student Pack CD-Rom and spent many hours, after hours, learning how Barry The Baker mastered his bookkeeping.

Fast forward to today, and I'm back on my beloved spreadsheet. 

Cash Flow is automatically calculated, and so is my Profit & Loss Statement.

It's had a few updates over the past few years, as thousands of businesswomen (read some reviews here) around Australia (and the world) now use my spreadsheet. I still do my bookkeeping each Friday morning. Within the 10, maybe 15 minutes, it takes me to enter the payments received and purchases for the week, I also send the auto-calculated GST to a tax-offset bank account and my auto-calculated income tax to another account, so I'm not looking for the money at the beginning of each quarter and at the end of the financial year. 

I discuss setting up your bank accounts for business in my YouTube video. 

It's a simple system that takes no time to implement, and if you set up your bank accounts, as I explain in the video, you will ALWAYS have money to pay your tax obligations. 

As I mature in life and start another business that I plan to mature to prosperity, I spend time making things in my life stress/struggle-free. I don't want to stress. I'm too vain to worry about things anymore. Stress kills collagan. I'm unsure if this is true, so I asked ChatGPT. This is what it returned, "A study published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology found that psychological stress can interfere with collagen production in the skin, leading to premature aging and other skin-related problems." Gawd forbid! 

So no stress, and back to the topic at hand ...I made two videos on how to use my bookkeeping spreadsheet. Throughout the video, I slide in marketing education, and if you watch the videos, you will learn that when you do your own bookkeeping, you become more operationally efficient. 

Operational efficiency is directly linked to long-term financial business success. 

I didn't make this up. I learnt this at university from people who write textbooks. Doing your own bookkeeping, especially in your business's startup stage, contributes to this operational efficiency. 

If you don't have the cash reserves to pay someone to assist you in your operational efficiency (i.e. an awesome bookkeeper), open up a Google Sheet, create your own spreadsheet and input your numbers, or save time and purchase my bookkeeping spreadsheet. 

It automatically generates your tax obligations, cash flow, profit and loss and includes fancy clear-to-read graphs. It also includes a budgeting calculator. It's pretty cool. As I demonstrate in my YouTube videos, bookkeeping is easy on a spreadsheet when you're starting a business, and when it isn't easy anymore, you'll know that business is booming and accounting software won't feel like you're throwing money down the kitchen sink.