Whether you are starting a new business or have owned and operated your business for several years, keeping track of bill payments is one of the important daily habits of maintaining your financial records.

When you pay your bills, write on the bills:

• The date you paid it;
• Method of payment:  cash, credit card, online payment and from what account or cheque number if you paid by cheque;
• The amount you paid if you didn’t pay the full amount;.
• What the bill is for e.g., a business lunch meeting, stationery and office supplies, fuel for your car;
• Staple the receipt to the bill.

When you receive payments from your customers, write on the customer invoice:

• The date was the invoice was paid;
• Method of payment:  cash, credit card, money transfer or cheque.  For money transfers note the confirmation number; for cheque payments, note the cheque number;
• Make a copy of the cheque or transaction confirmation if payment was received by money transfer or credit card;
• What date did you deposit the payment;
• Staple the bank deposit receipt to the customer invoice.

When you use electronic accounting software, make sure you note in the transaction deposit record the name of the customer from whom you received payment, the invoice number; the method of payment and cheque number and transaction confirmation number.

These bookkeeping tasks may seem trivial at first especially when you business is just starting up but as you invoice more customers and receive more payments, keeping track of these transactions will help you run your business finances more efficiently.

No doubt you’ve probably heard that said a thousand times.  Backing up your data is something that should be done every day.  It’s a precaution to ensure you have your data safely stored in the event you need to recover it.

There are different options available for backing up your data.  You can use an external hard drive, USB devices, or an online back-up application.  External hard drive can be purchased at any stationery supplies stores as a desktop external hard or portable external hard drive and are available in different data storage capacities.  Using USB devices is convenient because they are smaller, can fit in your purse or pocket making them more portable and your data is always available to access from either your PC or your laptop.  Once you subscribe to an online remote backup system, however, it is constantly working the background backing up your data.  If your computer crashes and you lose all your data, you will be able to retrieve all data that was on your computer – applications, documents, accounting application data files, pictures – from the online remote backup system.  Two popular online remote backup systems are Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) and Mozy (http://mozy.com/).

I have experienced computer crashes.  I once had to have the internal hard drive replaced on one my computers and I was very thankful that I had subscribed to Carbonite because all I had to do was log into the Carbonite website and restore my data onto the new internal hard drive.  This saved me much panic, anxiety and stress of having to find all my documentation and re-inputting.

Unless you have one of these back systems, when all the data is lost you may never get it back again.