The blog for anyone that works from home

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Who is Nexus Publishing? Originally from a small town called Darlaston – about ten miles north of Birmingham – I moved to West Sussex about ten years ago to help develop one of the first online retailers. Having recently moved to Shropshire I am now enjoying the working from home life in a semi rural location. I have been a freelance writer and journalist for about fifteen years. Eight of them were spent doing various other jobs such as bookshop assistant, print finisher and returns clerk for a large library supplier, with the writing taking up evenings and any of my spare time. As you can see, much of my life so far has been spent working with books and publishing of one kind or another. My time as an employee came to a conclusion some six years ago with redundancy, so I took the opportunity – and the money – to see if I could survive as a full-time freelance writer. That was five years ago. There have been some lean times – just ask my wife, Joanne. But after tasting the freelance life, there’s no going back.

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How do you track your accounts?

Saturday, June 7th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

Doing your accounts is the less sexy part of being self-employed. But as homeworkers we need to keep on top of the paperwork to ensure our accountants can keep the Revenue happy. But how do you keep track of your income and expenses?

I had tried computerised accounting packages over the years including Quicken and Microsoft Money. Microsoft’s Office Accounting 2008 is also an option, but you know, they all seem like overkill to me. These packages are great if you want to track your entire households budget, but for my business I find a one sheet spreadsheet is all I need.

On the left I list all the invoices that have been paid, divided into clients. Each is subtotalled with a formula, with the grand total at the bottom of the sheet. I can then see at a glance exactly how much has come into the business.
On the right are my expenses. These are divided by type. So a column for stationery, hardware, postage etc. I then total these columns at the end of the year to give me overall expenses.

I also have two boxfiles. One for invoices and one for expenses. My accountant then gets these boxfiles and my one sheet spreadsheet that he simply pulls the figures he needs off to complete my tax return. If you update the spreadsheet whenever money comes in or out of your business, you can generate your end of year accounts in about five minutes.

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