How much time do you spend on bookkeeping?

[photoengineer]

I do a small amount of consulting work on the weekends and evenings. It's about $5k a year or so.

I took a class in Financial Accounting as part of a graduate degree program last summer, and it made me think a little about bookkeeping. In a matter of a couple hours, I created the basic chart of accounts in Excel.

Then I got to thinking about using software like QuickBooks or Peachtree to formalize the books. Do many people here use computer accounting software? I picked up a free copy of Peachtree and found that it will take some time to sit down and learn. I'd rather spend my time engineering or having fun that learning accounting! But if it brought good benefits in the end, it'd be something I was willing to.

What do you do for your books and how much time do you spend on them?

Cedar Bluff Engineering

http://cedarbluffengineering.webs.com

 

[byrdj]

Excel file.

one page to track invoices. column for I#, date, customer, hours, expenses, invoiced amount, calculated date to expect payment, payment status
one page per year for bank account with columns for each 1120S entry. Insurance, taxes, medical rembersment, office expens, etc, invoice deposits
one page that takes data from the above and calculates taxes and compensation (with profit sharing IRA deductions).
one page that has yearly summary (profit/loss)

I still submit info to CPA to allow him to verify, but he was impressed with the iterration loop I have that calcs employer/employee taxes. I print the above and file with 1120s each year.


customer invoicing (time sheet) is done with seperate Excel file that calcs with hours, rates plus expenses. this Excel file is changed per use. the excel invoice is then "printed" as a PDF and emailed to Customers Financial Office.

The amount of time I spend is mainly filling out the invoice and making sure I have no errors in it. Then entering into the main file. If there is any time spent on book keeping, it is like last week doing a little to compensation calc sheet to see how many hours I need to meet self set goal for this year.


so far this has work for about 3 years now for me

 

[greenone]

I do the books for my husband's consulting, and just use an Excel spreadsheet. For income of about $100,000, it takes me about 2 hrs/mon. Of course, we first set up an invoice template, an expense template and the spreadsheet with formulas, so all I need to do now is input invoice info.

Here in our 5 person office, we use BillQuick for tracking time; it can also be used to generate invoices and has quite a few useful reports. But for actual bookkeeping, we still use Quickbooks.