Monthly Small Business BookKeeping-Cabinet Shop

As a cabinet shop owner, you’re going to have to keep up with a few small accounting details in relation to the business. Bookkeeping needs to be attended to on a monthly basis. In my case, I was well taught in fabricating kitchen and bathroom cabinetry but had little formal training in any type of accounting.

Programs are available where you can set up a monthly package pick-up service and delivery of your company’s financial activities. The accounting firm will basically do almost everything for you except write the checks for the taxes and bills that are due.

Once I had the accounting system down, all of the required paper work tasks where easily manageable. My monthly responsibilities included keeping track of all the receipts, paying the local sales tax and IRS taxes that was due, writing a category code on each check and balancing the check book. That was all the book keeping that I had to do every month.

Incidental, we fabricated file cabinet rails out of L-channel for our drawers. This is the best material we have ever used for hanging our Pendaflex folders from.

All accounted for, I spent about an hour per month preparing for the bookkeeper service to come and pick up all of the records. In addition to that hour it took about another hour to make sure all of the bills and taxes were paid on time. The cabinet shop had two employees, a contracted selfemployed installer plus myself.

As Internal Revenue Taxes became due, my book keeper would give me the filled out form, displaying the amount I needed to send in, with a stamped envelope. I would write the check and mail it. This service was applicable to the business taxes and personal taxes that periodically would be due. The only tax I had to figure was the monthly sales tax payment.

Benefits of Bookkeeper/Accounting Service for a small cabinet company

1) Every month they would pick-up, from my place of business, all of the monthly receipts, bank statements, check register and any letters that had been received which were business related.
2) When they would come to pick-up the next month’s worth of accounting, they would drop off the previous month’s folder.
3) Included in every month was a profit and loss statement along with the current year to date figures and all of the items that had been submitted.
4) At the end of the year all of the information was already for the Internal Revenue Taxes to be filed correctly and on time through the book keeping/accounting firm. They would assemble the corporation’s taxes and my personal taxes, and provide copies of everything to me. When the end of the year forms where finished, I was provided with an envelope and  the forms with the amounts due along with all fo the  signature requirements high lighted.
5) All of the records were then kept in the folder representing that month. This was really beneficial when a sales tax audit was issued on the business. The letter of preparation for the audit required that three months of accounting be provided for each of the three years they wanted to look at. I just pulled the folders from the file drawer for the corresponding months requested and we were good to go.

Because my skills where strong in kitchen cabinet design, sales, fabrication and installation, it was a huge burden lifted from my responsibilities to have a small business accounting company handle all of the bookkeeping activities of the cabinet shop.

Really all I had to do is keep all of the receipts in one folder, balance the check books ledger, pay the monthly bills that were due, pay local state sales tax, pay the Internal Revenue Service as they became due and have things in one folder when the bookkeeper arrived to pick things up every month.