If you own a small window cleaning business, you are most likely earning enough to make ends meet but not enough to employ a permanent accountant. You still need a rudimentary book keeping system in order to file your tax and VAT returns and to know if you’re making a profit or not. Below is some more information about basic book keeping for small window cleaning businesses.
To start off with you need an invoice book and a receipt book. The invoice book is if you should provide credit to some of your customers. You then issue an invoice and make then sign on the invoice. The receipt book is meant for cash sales, which should hopefully cover the bulk of your work.
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 your accounts receivable register shows that you had credit sales during the month, which haven’t been paid yet, that amount has to be added to the profit shown by the cash book, because if it had been paid you would have had more money in the bank. The same is true for credit purchases: if you owe money to suppliers at the end of the month, that amount must be deducted from your profit according to the cash book.
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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