The last two blog posts we have gone over some of the basics of accounting and bookkeeping. You are starting to realize how important bookkeeping and accounting are for business, but are like Savannah, my accounting bestie, WHERE DO I EVEN START?

Don’t worry in this blog post we are going over the next six steps you should take now that you have decided to get serious about the finance backend of your business.

Last week on the blog, we talked about accounting being the language of business and that through accounting we can tell the story of a business. This week we are going to dive into the nitty gritty of the accounting equation. But before we do I want to talk about accounting entries.

Accounting entries or also called journal entries are just a fancy way to say the record of what happened. I think of these entries as the sentences that make up the story of the business. The financial statements we talked about in the last blog post are really a summary of all the sentences that make up a business. When an event happens in your business, there is usually an entry that goes along with it. For example, if you paid $100 in cash to receive 10 printed copies of your books to sign and then sell, that is an event which would trigger a journal entry. The simple entry is that cash decreased by $100 and book inventory increased by $100.

Accounting doesn’t have to be icky men in suits up to their ears in formulas. Accounting simply is the language of business. We get to tell the story of where we spent our money, what we invested in and how much money we brought in. So, it might take a little bit to get used to the new language, but I promise you can learn it!