If you are the proud owner of a small window cleaning business, you most likely don’t have sufficient money to employ a bookkeeper or an accountant of your own. You’ve still got to maintain some accounting records of course, otherwise you won’t be able to compile your tax and VAT returns, and you will have no way to determine whether your business is running at a profit or a loss. Below are guidelines on basic book keeping for small window cleaning businesses.
The two most basic bookkeeping items you are going to need is a receipt book as well as an invoice book. The receipt book is for when you make cash sales and the invoice book for when you grant credit to a client (something you should only do for repeat customers).
Your next step is to file all documents pertaining to company related expenses. If you buy cleaning material and pay cash, keep the cash slip! The same goes for petrol, maintenance of your delivery vehicle et cetera. For wages you need a wage register where the employee can sign for the receipt of his weekly pay.
Next you should keep a cash book. The receipts mentioned above should all be entered in the cash book in numerical order. So now you have a record of all cash sales. Next, on the opposite page, you enter all the expense vouchers. This gives you a record of all your business expenses. There has to be columns for the total amounts, as well as columns for every category of expenditure and income. At then end of the month, if you add up all these columns, you will know how much you spent on various items such as cleaning materials and wages, and how much you made from cash sales.
The cash book is for all cash income and expenses. Use the receipt book above to enter all your cash income on one side, and the expense vouchers you kept to list all your expenses on the opposite side. You also need a column reflecting the total amounts, and then columns indicating the type of income or expenditure it was. This way you can easily add them up at the end of the month and see how much you earned from customers during the month, and how much you paid for cleaning materials, wages, petrol et cetera.
If you had credit sales, the invoices from your invoice book should be entered in the accounts receivable register in numerical order. At the end of the month you will be able to get a total for credit sales therefore. The same is true for items you bought on credit, which goes into the accounts payable register.
If you of course bought certain items on credit during the month, e. G. Some tools and equipment, and they haven’t been paid for yet, you have to deduct that amount from the profit shown by your cash book, since once you’ve paid these bills you will have less money in the bank. In the same vein, if you granted credit to some customers and they must still pay you, that amount has to be added to your profit for the month.
The above describes very basic book keeping for small window cleaning businesses. Although not sophisticated, it will give you a very good idea of whether your business is generating a profit or not.
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