Archive for April, 2009

Accounting For Freelancers

April 27th, 2009 by Mariela

When you start out as a freelancer, the accounting requirements are usually pretty simple. You know your expenses and how much you are earning. However, as your business starts to grow so do your expenses and earnings, so it would be a good idea to take a look at software for accounting to take care of all your bookkeeping requirements.   Good accounting system software will help you keep track of your expenses and who owes you money.

Accounting Plan

The accounting plan for your business will take into consideration the following factors:

  • Will you hire an accountant to handle your money matters or would you purchase accounting software?
  • What type of bookkeeping system will you use?
  • What kind of business bank account would you open?
  • Will you use a business credit card? How will it be used?
  • How often do you plan to send out the invoices and what are the terms of payment?
  • What type of system will you use for filing receipts and recording deposits?

If your business has just started, you might not want to spend money hiring an accountant. What you can do is seek out advice on proper ways to set up your books. If the money is really tight, you can do the basic accounting yourself. Just collect all the receipts and paid invoices and remember to update your ledger on a weekly basis. Then at the end of the year you could hand over your ledger, receipts, and paid invoices to an accountant.

The major problem with doing the accounting yourself is that you would not know until the end of the year how your business is performing. You might be under the impression that you have been making a profit, while in reality you are taking a loss.

Accounting System Software

What you can do is invest in software for accounting to keep track of all your finances. Accounting system software will not only help you save time and money, but will also give you an insight into the true picture of your business.

Take A Class To Help You With Basic Accounting

There are many of us who do not know anything about accounting. Terms like cash flow, credits, debits, financial statement, etc. confuse us. It’s a good idea to join a class that would help you learn the basics about accounting. There are many simple accounting software programs that deal specifically with accounting for freelancers or small business accounting. Understanding the basics would help you maintain your bookkeeping the proper way.

Overall, without a proper accounting system in place, your business cannot expand. So setting up an accounting system should be your topmost priority.

Going With a New Look

April 3rd, 2009 by Ben Hwang

Merchant's Mirror v2 Many of you have been wondering what we’ve been doing quietly in the background for the past few months. And we’re happy to say that here’s a little teaser. We don’t quite have an ETA although I can probably say that we’ll have this in definitely by May if not earlier.

As you can see, the entire interface has a new fresh look. But that’s not all! There are some things that have been done so that the user experience itself has been intensified. We’ll do a more in-depth post after both the test teams and development staff have finalized the migration to version 2. What you see there is something on our testing platform and we are extremely excited to bring this to you as soon as we can.

In other developments, we’ve actually moved into a new office! Excited, but tired from the move, we’re happy to join the the Nussbaum Center of Entrepreneurship as one of the incubating startups. That has actually taken some time out of our schedule but it also reinforces our test and development teams into one area for an instant feedback arena.

We definitely have more great things coming down the pipeline and didn’t want you to think that we left everyone in the dark. Look for wonderful things appearing in your favorite accounting software soon!