Simple excel accounts sheets

misterthrifty

Hi, I'm expecting to do some consultancy work this year so, my accounts will be simple, income from one source and expenses.
Can anybody recommend a (preferably free) excel based accounts sheet that I can use to keep that will help me calculate my profit?

TIA

Grumpy_chap

Will you be engaging the services of an Accountant?  If so, they may have a template that they can share with you and geared to keeping the Accountant's time (and fee) requirements low.

There are various online forms available and can be found though internet searches.

My personal advice would be to avoid using a free form that you downloaded as, ignoring the risk of downloading a corrupted file, if you create your own spreadsheet that you understand, you know there are no spurious formulae looking at things in a way you don't expect and resulting in anomalous outcomes.

Mistral001

If you know the basics of excel, you should be able to do it yourself.  One sheet for income and another for expenditure.  

MattMattMattUK

misterthrifty said:

Hi, I'm expecting to do some consultancy work this year so, my accounts will be simple, income from one source and expenses.
Can anybody recommend a (preferably free) excel based accounts sheet that I can use to keep that will help me calculate my profit?

TIA

Even if you have a fairly fundamental understanding of Excel you should be able to build one in a few minutes. There are a fair amount of templates online on small business forums as well. 

martindow

You really need to start by talking to your accountant, as has been suggested.  There is no point spending time setting up a particular spreadsheet if the accountant wants something else.  If what you present to them gives them extra work to do it will cost you more even if your spreadsheet was free.

Pennywise

If you expect to do your own tax returns, a good thing is to look at the figures required to be entered on the tax return and work backwards from that, i.e. different columns for income/expenses to match the boxes on the tax return is a good start.

You also have to decide whether you'll be adopting the traditional accruals basis (i.e. based on value of work done and expenses incurred in the year) or the simplified cash basis (i.e. simply money in and money out).  You wouldn't want to set up a spreadsheet based on the cash basis only to find you decide to prepare the tax return on the accruals basis!

Babbien

I'm looking for a template too - (whilst looking at the Quickbooks, Xero route as well). Anyone have one or can link to one they can recommend. Similar to OP with one source of income and relatively few expenses. The ones I have found online are one extreme or the other.... too basic or way too complicated!
Thank you kindly.

Pennywise

Babbien said:

I'm looking for a template too - (whilst looking at the Quickbooks, Xero route as well). Anyone have one or can link to one they can recommend. Similar to OP with one source of income and relatively few expenses. The ones I have found online are one extreme or the other.... too basic or way too complicated!
Thank you kindly.

If you can find them that are too basic or too complicated, surely you can download and tailor them to suit your needs.  You shouldn't really be using any spreadsheet unless you know enough about them to confidently (and correctly) tailor them to your needs, such as adding/removing rows/columns, adding and cross casting totals, etc.  

Spreadsheets are a nightmare when used by people who don't understand the basics of how to change them, as far too many people add in a row or column and don't bother to check the row/column additions are including the new row/column.  Then you have people who put "text" in a cell rather than a pure number, i.e. they type in "£1.00" or "2,000" where the pound sign or the comma turns the number into text so the number doesn't get added into the totals etc.  

99% of the time, I recommend clients not to use spreadsheets for book-keeping due to these kind of problems.  Proper software is always a better solution (with the caveat: as long as the user spends a little time with the online tutorials etc so they know how to enter transactions properly!).