I have been working in bookkeeping for years, doing my own as a business owner as well as working as an employee doing bookkeeping for others, and one thing I’ve realised – bookkeeping is data entry!

With the finance software that exists these days, basically what we are doing is entering in the money received and the money spent, often from receipts and bank statements, and the software calculates it all for us. We do need to be careful how things are entered, making sure they are all in the right places, if you are registered for GST, you use the correct codes, and that everything adds up to whatever is on the receipt.

By seeing bookkeeping as data entry instead of maths, this can change things for many people. I know it did for me.

I am good at maths, I did advanced maths in VCE, however I do struggle with many areas of basic maths. I never memorised my times tables, still use my fingers for counting, and have to write things down to work them out… however I am pretty good at bookkeeping!

I have chosen a software that is fairly basic as my accounts are fairly straightforward. I make it a practice to enter invoices as soon as I have completed a task and send it out. I’m not so disciplined with entering in the bills, however I do make sure I bring everything up to date each month. I have started to do this before I do any work for clients in a new month!

This has a number of advantages:

• I know who has paid & who hasn’t so I can send reminders to those who are overdue before they are crazy overdue
• I can do a report to see how things are going. As I have multiple accounts that people pay in to, I often don’t know how things are going simply by looking in the bank
• I can see what things are selling and what isn’t, especially when it comes to my books
• At tax time, my accounts are up to date so all I need to do is create the relevant reports to send to my accountant to do my tax

By changing my mindset to see bookkeeping as data entry instead of maths, this was a total game changer and now it’s something that doesn’t always get pushed to the bottom of the priority list.

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