5 top tips for organising your paperwork

Want to be more like this?

Here are our 5 top tips to help you get super-organised.

1. Each week set aside a couple of hours for paperwork – this could be for raising sales invoices, filing receipts or sending payment reminders. Friday afternoons often work best as this is the quietest time of the week for most businesses.

2. Deal with paperwork little and often – this makes it less of a chore.

3. Use envelopes for your filing system

– If you buy items that relate to specific jobs/clients put the receipts into an envelope marked with your client’s name along with the sales invoice. This way you will know you are invoicing the correct amount.

– Put receipts for any items you purchase on behalf of the business into a separate envelope. Depending on how many purchases you make, collect receipts either weekly or monthly.

Once you have sorted your receipts into envelopes, it is a lot easier to enter them into your bookkeeping system. Just don’t forget to mark the envelopes once entered, so you don’t end up adding them twice!

4. Put your sales invoices in numerical order in a lever arch file. This makes them easier to find when you want to mark them as paid and stops you wasting time chasing clients who have already paid you.

5. Set up virtual folders to represent the envelopes and lever arch file system if you have most of your sales and purchase information electronically.

Don’t have a bookkeeping system? – Use our service

If you don’t have a bookkeeping system, then we will happily manage the whole the process for you. Once you have sorted your receipts into the envelopes, simply drop them off to us and we will do the processing for you. To provide a full service, we will also need copies of sales invoices and bank statements.

Not only does this remove the hassle of having to manage the bookkeeping yourself, but more importantly any queries can be answered soon after the end of the month in question, when you are more likely to recall the information. When the time comes, this makes preparing your annual accounts or tax return a lot easier for both of us.

If you would like to learn more about our bookkeeping service, please get in touch.

Breaking even – checking the numbers

In previous newsfeeds we have described how you can calculate the level of turnover you need to create in order to meet all your costs whether they be fixed costs (rent, rates etc.,) or variable costs (goods you need to buy to convert into goods you sell).

For example, if your fixed costs are £50,000 per annum and your variable costs are 25% of your turnover, the annual turnover you need to breakeven will be £200,000. The formula is:

Annual fixed costs divided by 25 (the gross profit)

Bereavement Support Payment

The amount of Bereavement Support Payment you can claim will depend on your relationship to the person who died and when you make your claim.

Your payments will be paid into your bank, building society or credit union account.

If you were married or in a registered civil partnership with the person who died

If you were receiving Child Benefit when your partner died (or did not get it but were entitled to it), you will get the higher rate.

This is made up of:

a first payment of £3,500;

Tax codes for employees

The P9X form is used to notify employers of the tax codes to use for employees. The latest version of the form has been published and shows the tax codes to use from 6 April 2023. The form states that the basic personal allowance for the tax year starting 6 April 2023 will, as expected, be £12,570 (£12,570 in 2022-23) and this means that the tax code for emergency use will remain at 1257L.

The basic rate limit will be £37,700 (£37,700 in 2022-23) except for those defined as Scottish taxpayers

Properties not let at commercial rates

There are special rules where a property is let at less than a commercial rate or isn’t let on commercial terms. These rules also apply if a property is occupied rent free or at less than a commercial rate, for example, a property is occupied by a family member at a reduced or nil rent.

In these circumstances, HMRC can take the view that unless the landlord charges a full market rent for a property and imposes normal market lease conditions, it is unlikely that the expenses of the property are

Fed up with looking at this every month?