I hate doing the Accounts

This is my biggest bugbear about running a business, I love the business I’m in. When a customer thanks you for a job well done and that entire business is down to you it’s a pretty good feeling.

It has it’s negative points, but the accounts are the biggest (I even don’t mind that it interrupts holidays and stuff!), it’s definitely the accounts I don’t like.

In case you hadn’t gathered already I hate doing my accounts

I have an accountant, and she’s great – keeps me on the straight and narrow and tells me what I can and can’t do, but it’s the physically getting all the transactions and invoices from everywhere into the accounting software that I hate.

Maybe I don’t hate accounts, I don’t have to do them – maybe it bookkeeping I hate?

I did my first year accounts back in 2002 and vowed never to do them again. I’d only been trading a few months but having decided on Fiscal Year accounting I had April rapidly approaching. I’d made something like 30-40 transactions but it put me off for life.

And now?

The business is now a whole LOT bigger. I wrote some software a couple of years back to automate some of the accounts. Great I hear you cry. Yeah kind of!

Because everything works in delay with settlement periods and the like, you have to work at least a month in arrears, my problem with that is I put it off. So when I actually come to do it, I have 9-10 months to catch up on.

I did find someone willing to do it all for me once, but when it came to the crunch he confessed – he ran a similar company to my own, not a wise idea to give him all my details.

So here we are again. I’m avoiding doing the accounts by writing blog posts… But I thought I should explain why…

Now where was that other project I was debating starting this month????

photo credit: jon_a_ross