Basic Financial Records Every Small Business Should Maintain

You do not need an elaborate system to be well organised. You need a small number of records kept consistently.

Sales records: every invoice issued, numbered in sequence, with nothing missing from the series.

Purchase records: supplier invoices and expense bills, filed by month, matched to what you actually paid.

Bank and cash: statements for every account, reconciled monthly against your books, with cash movements recorded the day they happen.

Receivables and payables: who owes you, who you owe, and since when. This single list prevents more cash surprises than any other.

Payroll: what was paid to whom, and what was deducted and deposited.

Assets: what the business owns, when it was bought and for how much.

Statutory filings and their acknowledgements, kept together for the retention period that applies to you.

The test of a good system is not how sophisticated it is. It is whether you can answer a question about a transaction from eight months ago in under five minutes.