New start up sole trader REALLY struggling w/ bookkeeping

tyllwyd

I think you are confusing the records that you want to keep for your own information about the buisness with the kind of accounts that you need for tax purposes.

The tax man isn't interested in your profit on each individual bracelet. They only want to know how much did you spend on stock in total in the year, what costs did you have in total during the year etc etc. So as long as you are recording each significant transaction (eg I paid £10 to buy a batch of bracelets, I received £40 from person A from the sale of bracelets, I paid £10 postage, I paid person A £5 commission), and you have receipts etc to back everything up, you don't need to go into detail on each item.

SnowWhiterThanWhite

Hi there,

In case you haven't already, you should really register yourself as Self-Employed as soon as possible.

Link here to the HMRC web-site
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/startingup/index.htm

Seanymph

You are confusing yourself here.

The bookeeping for the revenue is very easy - (although I am suspicious that you MAY be in trouble by 'employing' the people selling for you).

The revenue needs to know what you paid, what you sold, the difference between the two.
You need a list of what your company spends, in that list will be items you buy, the invoices from your suppliers - keep ALL invoices/supermarket bills/electric bills - ALL EXPENDTIURE in one file. List these things, every single thing you spend from the company so you can make monthly totals and an annual total.

Keep a record of all sales - ALL INCOME. In your case that will be receipts from your sales people - there takings less their commission if you do it that way around - or their total takings with their commission being shown in your expenditure file.

The difference between the two files at the end of the year is what you will pay tax on.

For your own interest you will want to keep more detailed track of what is successful and what isn't, and what commission you need to pay etc.

But for tax purposes - two folders, two sheets - easy peasy.

property.advert

You could cover variable sales prices through a negative discounts column.

In any case, the taxman doesn't care about how many bracelets you sell. He wants to know that you sold £50,000 which cost you £30,000 and you had £10,000 expenses, leaving a profit of £10,000. You should file the relevant receipts etc.

What you need to do is devise a book keeping system which you are happy with and which is simple and quick to operate. If done in Excel, this is easy to aggregate into your accounts.