ACCOUNTING AND BILLING

CHECK BOOKS

We recommend that you maintain a business checking account in addition to a small business credit card merchant account so that you can take credit cards from purchasers. This way you will know exactly how much is going into your merchant account and how much of your volume percentage is being done through credit card usage. You should shoot for 50-60% credit card sales and debit cards. If you are an owner/operator, you may not be as concerned with this number.

However, if you are an owner of many locations or units, this percentage is relatively important. One reason is because these transactions are the most traceable. There is no way for employees to steal this money. Between ten and twenty percent of your volume will be in checks if you have a local business and decide to take checks. The rest will be in cash or credit card sales. If you are worried about five to thirty percent of your money being stolen, don’t be. You can keep track of that even if you are on not on the premises with a good procedural policy for employees who ring up sales.

If you are not good with check books (i.e. balancing, bouncing, reconciliation or writing check amounts and numbers down) hire a bookkeeper/accountant to pay your monthly expenses. Simply keep a stack of deposit slips in your store and deposit the day’s take at the end of each day in the business bank account. The accountant can do the rest and then write you a check for the net proceeds at the end of each month or every two weeks if you prefer. If you hire an accountant, combining the merchant account with your regular business checking account isn’t as big a deal because your accountant, if requested, can break down the amounts of deposits into cash, check or credit card for you.

If you do your bookkeeping yourself, you will have to keep track of each type of deposit. It is not wise to have a business checking account at a savings bank because they will not credit your deposits with the total amount from your deposited checks until those checks have cleared. Usually there is a standard period of three to five business days to wait even though most checks clear in one to two days, although recently the Federal Reserve is changing this which will tend to help businesses but also cause more consumers to bounce more checks, so be alert to this issue and perhaps if a customer seems uneasy ask them if they would like you to hold the check one or two additional days since the float is no longer going to be in their favor and thus it could effect you as well.

Therefore, you do not have complete use of your money yet, but you have still made the sale, which is your primary objective and that way the check will not bounce in your account causing a further conflict. Business is hard enough without a bank holding your funds, making interest on your money and inevitably controlling your cash flow. No matter what you do, we recommend that you use the accounting software such as QuickBooks to help you with your business accounting and your checkbook. At the end of the year you will be glad you did.

Lance Winslow

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