How Good Bookkeeping Can Grow Your Business with Annie Hillman

Don’t you just love bookkeeping? Well, I sure don’t. Yet, proper bookkeeping can make a difference in your business. To get you excited to dive into your books and records so your business can grow, I brought on a guest with a real passion for managing the minutiae of business.

 

About Annie Hillman

Annie Hillman is the founder and head bookkeeper at Atlas Bookkeeping Co. While finishing her college degree, she took a temporary accounting job and instantly fell in love with accounting. She worked her way up to staff accountant and stayed there until starting Atlas in 2020.

Now, she spends her days helping business owners treat numbers like a tool, not a threat so they can run empowered, profitable businesses with calm confidence. She helps business owners embrace numbers, increase profits, and stress way less with monthly money management. Besides crunching your numbers, Annie loves fitness, baking bread, and hanging with her husband, daughter, and two dogs.

 

Why It’s Time to Hire a Bookkeeper

Even if your business is tiny or you’re just starting out, getting help with your books is a great thing to do. One thing that helped me grow my business was hiring a bookkeeper. Annie and I explain how doing this will free up your time so you can focus on actually running your business, not just managing its details.

Unless you’re an expert at this already, a professional bookkeeper will also provide you with data you might otherwise miss. You can then use this information to help your business thrive even more. It’s also helpful to get an outside perspective on your business for an objective viewpoint.

 

What You Can Do to Better Manage Your Books

To get your books in order, Annie has some suggestions. First, don’t wait until the end of the year. Regularly dedicate some time to it. Also, don’t muddy up your numbers with personal expenses. Keep your business numbers separate from everything else. 

Annie also wants you to keep your receipts organized. Even storing them in a simple Google Drive folder will make everything so much easier when it's time to crunch the numbers. 

We also discuss helpful tools for keeping track of expenses and income, such as Annie’s Money Mapper and accounting software. If a tool can save you time and effort, then it will be worth the cost in the end. Even if your business is small now, set all this up so that things will continue to run smoothly as you grow.

What’s been your biggest bookkeeping challenge? Leave a comment on the episode page!

 

In This Episode

• Why paying a bookkeeper will save you money in the end [6:00]
• The most common mistakes business owners make with their books [13:30]
• The important distinction between a bookkeeper and an accountant [17:00]
• Helpful tools for tracking income and expenses [22:00]
• Accounting for the difference between profit and sales [31:30]
• Making sure you have enough money for tax time [42:30]

 

Quotes

“There’s something to be said about looking at your business objectively. Sometimes as a business owner, you can’t do that with your own numbers.” [12:28]

“A bookkeeper is going to manage your books on a monthly basis. So they’re going to get really into the minutiae of it.” [17:50]

“That might work when you have two clients. But we all want to grow and scale our business. That’s not going to work when you have a hundred clients or more.” [30:32]

 

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