Notes on keeping the books in order.
Practical writing on bookkeeping, budgeting, and the numbers side of running a growing business.
Payroll: the three things that actually bite
Most payroll trouble is not the calculation. It is a remittance date, a classification, or a T4 that does not agree with the books.
Read the post →The shareholder account, in plain English
It is the running tally of money between you and your corporation, and it is the single line most likely to produce a surprise at year end.
Read →What your year end file should look like before it leaves your hands
The gap between a straightforward year end and an expensive one comes down to about six things, and all of them are decided in the months before anyone opens the file.
Read →When it stops making sense to do your own books
Not a question of size. A question of what your time is worth, what the errors cost, and whether the numbers are arriving in time to be useful.
Read →Contractor bookkeeping: holdbacks, work in progress, and why your profit looks wrong
Construction books fail in a specific way, revenue and the costs that earned it land in different months, and every margin figure in between is fiction.
Read →GST/HST: filing deadlines, input tax credits, and the four errors we see most
Most GST/HST trouble is not evasion. It is claiming credits on the wrong things, missing a deadline nobody diarised, or filing on numbers the books do not support.
Read →Two years behind on your books? Here is what catching up actually involves
Catch-up bookkeeping is a defined project with a fixed end, not an open-ended bill. This is the sequence, and what makes one file take three weeks and another take three months.
Read →Restaurant and café bookkeeping: food cost, labour, and the two numbers that decide everything
Hospitality runs on margins thin enough that a two-point drift in food cost is the difference between a good year and a bad one. Most books cannot see it.
Read →Bookkeeping for dental clinics and health practices: the five things that are different
Associate splits, lab costs, equipment financing, insurance receivables, the professional corporation, and what a clinic's year end file needs that a generic one does not.
Read →Why your owner statements don't reconcile, and what to change
In property management, most of the money passing through the account is not yours. Books that don't model that produce statements nobody can tie to the bank.
Read →RECO trust account requirements: what your brokerage's books actually have to show
What RECO expects a brokerage to be able to produce on request, which ledger shows it, and why a trust account is not ordinary bookkeeping with a second bank account.
Read →Five places money quietly leaks out of a growing business
None of these show up as a dramatic line item. They show up as a margin that's a few points worse than it should be, for years.
Read →How far behind is too far behind on your books?
There is no point at which books stop being recoverable. What decides the cost is how much source documentation still exists, rather than how many months have passed.
Read →Why your budget stopped being useful in February
A budget built once and never revisited isn't a planning tool. It's a document, and documents don't catch anything.
Read →What a month-end close should actually produce
If the monthly output is a spreadsheet you can't make a decision from, the close is happening but the reporting isn't.
Read →Want this applied to your own books?
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