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Sole trader invoice example for Accounting and Tax

if you're self-employed on running a small business in the UK you've got an obligation to keep certain accounting records and in today's video I'm going to show you exactly how I record my business income expenses vehicle use and using our home as an office [Music] hiya folks welcome back to the small business toolbox I'm Andy Mark and I've been involved in the running of small businesses for pretty much my entire adult life hopefully you're done now with your tax return from last year but we're coming up to the end of this current tax year which means the whole process is about to start all over again and today we're going to talk about the fun task of business record keeping in other words what do you do with that great big pile of receipts and what do you actually need to send to hmrc well I'm going to show you my approach to business record keeping it's been through audit several times with hmrc and I haven't had any problems so in today's video we're going to cover keeping track of your business expenses how are generally log business income I'll show you my approach to running a vehicle through the business we'll have a quick look at using your home as an office and how you can claim expenses for that and I'll show you how I deal with electronic receipts from things that I buy online before I start as per usual I am not an accountant I'm not qualified in any way to give you accountancy advice you should always check with your own accountant to make sure that the records that you're keeping are firstly accurate and they're suitable for your type of business so before I show you how we keep track of everything let me just kind of explain why we need to do record keeping in the first place there's some really common misconceptions here because I'm always getting asked what do I need to send hmrc do I need to send them my spreadsheet at the end of the year and stuff like that and the answer is no generally speaking hmrc don't want to see your accounts they don't want to see your great big shoebox full of receipts and they certainly don't want like a whole pile of spreadsheets at least not yet at the end of the tax year when you do your self-assessment tax return hmrc only really want two numbers and that's your total business turnover and your total expenses and then they deduct one from the other that gives you business profits and that's what you pay your tax on however at some point in your business life you will get audited it happens to everyone you don't know when it's going to happen and you don't know what tax years are going to investigate it could be from your last tax year or it could be from a few years ago so you've got to have accounting records so that when hmrc come along and do an audit you've got all of the information on hand that they might ask you about I've made a separate video all about what it's like being audited some of the example questions that you might get asked I'll include a link to that video down in the description below it's not a pleasant process but if you keep on top of things in terms of your general record keeping it'll be over and done with much much quicker it's when you can't answer questions that hmrc start digging deeper and deeper so let's take a very quick look at the hmrc website and see what sort of Records they expect you to keep I've come onto this page here business records if you're self-employed and it says you need to keep records of all sales and income all business expenses that records we're not going to talk about that today because I'm assuming you're not that registered yet pay as you in records that's for if you employ people again I'm assuming you're not employing anyone quite yet you also need to keep records of your personal income we're not going to cover that on this one and we're not going to talk about grants either because that's not really applicable anymore as I was saying before look at this you do not need to send your records in when you submit a tax return but you do need to keep them so that you can work out your profit or loss for your tax return and so you can show them to hmrc if you're ever asked in other words if you are audited it goes on to say you need to keep proof you need to keep all receipts for goods and stock so in other words all business expenses you should keep all of your bank statements check books dubs sales invoices so copies of invoices you've given to customers copies of all your tool rules Bank slips and everything like that if in doubt keep a copy of it just in case I'm going to talk about paper receipts versus electronic receipts later on as well I'm going to assume you're using Cash basis accounting and not accruals accounting or traditional accounts again I've made a video all about the difference between those two things I'll include a link down in the description Cash basis just means that you're accounting for things based on the date that money went in and out of your bank account as opposed to the date that you might have invoiced a customer for example but they haven't paid you for another month down the line but if you are doing traditional accounting or accruals accounting then it does say you need to keep further records for example what you're owed but haven't received yet what you've committed to spend but you haven't necessarily paid out yet in other words if you've bought something you've been invoiced but you haven't actually paid that invoice yet the value of stock and work in progress at the end of your accounting period your year-end Bank balances how much you've invested in the business and how much money you've taken out for your own use you do still need to record some of this even if you're on cash basis so for example how much money you've taken out the business for your own use so yeah if in doubt just record it make sure you've got a record of it just imagine hmrc could ask you absolutely anything and you need to be able to prove what you've done in your business in that particular tax year and bear in mind it could be two or three years before you get audited so you need to think back to three years ago exactly what was your business doing at that point in time asking very specific questions you're not going to remember all that you're going to have to have recorded it somewhere in terms of business expenses let's just have a quick look at this it does cover off expenses if you're self-employed you can have a read through this I'm not going to go into what you can and can't claim in here the general rule of thumb is that if it's an expense that's in any way related to the day-to-day running of your business you need to be claiming that as a cost so that it reduces your business profits that's a key thing you need to get your head around you pay tax on your profits not on your turnover and the other thing that's worth mentioning is that at the moment there's no requirement to keep electronic records of your accounts if you're more comfortable doing it paper-based that is fine generally speaking a spreadsheet is the best route to go down for most people that could change in the future if we ever go down the route of making tax digital for income tax but I'm going to cover all of that on a separate video because that is an absolute Minefield and hmrc don't even know how that's going to work yet in terms of how long you need to keep your accounting records for hmrc say that you need to keep it for at least five years after the 31st of January submission deadline I'm sure I've read other places where it says that you need to keep it for at least seven years and I'm also sure that depending on the nature of what goes wrong for example if it's been like tax fraud or something like that I think they can essentially go back as long as they want so we generally keep our paper receipts for seven years and our electronic records go back way way further than that but then I am a total hoarder so we'll talk about expense receipts first of all because if you're anything like me they're generally the most challenging thing to kind of look after and organize but all I'll do is I keep everything in a big ring binder for that Financial year and then a number of them all so that they're easy to cross reference to at a later date if I need to do that so we'll get rid of this for the second and I've got this bunch of receipts here for business expenses that I need to sort out so you don't really need to put them in date order as such I would suggest doing them by month if you do them by month that does make life a little bit easier but you don't need to go as far as making sure that every single one is in kind of consecutive date order but all I do I take a whole bunch of scrap paper I always keep piles of scrap paper and I'll just sellotape the receipts on the A4 sheets of paper it just makes it much neater to file them away doesn't take very long at all ones like this where the receipt's too big to fit on the page what I generally do is kind of fold over the bits that aren't needed because I would need this barcode here if I ever needed to do a return of the item so I don't want to cut it off and get rid of it all together but what I can just do is fold it over like that but the other thing that is worth mentioning is that sometimes the sellotape can cause the ink or the thermal whatever it is the print to disappear off the receipt so make sure when you put the sellotape on that it's not covering up any critical information if it is if it for example if it was covering up the date or the amount or something like that then I would write um for example this one here I would write the the date let's have a look where's the date on this one well that's a prime example B and Q where's your Implement date right the dates right at the very bottom of this one 6th of January all I'm going to do it's just right on the receipt itself so that's that one done there we go that's a whole month worth of receipts filed in what was a couple of minutes then all I do is I log all of this can you see me I'll log this in a spreadsheet just so that we've got an easy kind of cross-reference so we can find a receipt if we need it in the future so we'll head over onto the computer which is there so here's a spreadsheet I'm using it's dead straightforward I'll take you through it all in a second I'm assuming that you're not that registered if you are bat registered you're going to have to add a couple of extra columns so you can keep track of everything vat related and I'm also assuming that you're using the cash basis if you're going to be using accruals accounts then really the only extra thing I would add in here is an extra date column because you should really track the invoice date and the date that the invoice was actually paid because on accrual's account those are probably going to be two different dates but on cash basis we're going to use the date that the money left your bank account but anyway we're going to assume here that this is a property maintenance business so you're going to be tracking things like customer materials and your own expenses for running the business and things like that I'll just zoom in a little bit and see what's going on so receipt ID we're going to start off with receipt number one the payee is Wix and the item is curtain rails still quite small let me zoom in a little bit more category you make up categories that are useful for your business but I'm going to call this customer materials if these materials are for a specific customer job it's generally good practice to log some customer information how much information you log about the customers entirely up to you because we'll get into the Realms of you you could create a whole CRM system if you wanted to but I'm going to keep this as simple as it can possibly be will then put the total amount including vat because we aren't that registered the date of the transaction whether or not it's a recurring transaction now this is quite a handy thing because if you've got things like insurance or utility bills web hosting all that sort of thing the recurring payments and it's quite useful to keep track of that so for this this is a no because it's a one-off payment have we reconciled it yet no we haven't reconciled it back to the bank statement again I've made a separate video All About reconciliation so you can watch that I'm not going to go into reconciliation in this video and then for the tax year for this one it would be 2022-23 I'll just log a few extra ones so we can see what's going on this one here actually we're going to pretend that we've had to return an item so we've bought a sink for the customer the day before and it turned out it's faulty or whatever so since this has been returned I'm going to put it as a negative figure so negative 105. there we go dead straight forward obviously I would add extra categories in here for things like Insurance Mobile phone bills and really any other expense that relates to the business you can see I've given everything a number here and then what I'll do is I'll write that number onto each receipt and then if I need to find that receipt in the future then all I need to do is go to this spreadsheet and have a quick search for the thing that I'm looking for and then I can find it in the paper file of receipts and when it comes to reconciliation as well then obviously would come back to this and we'd Mark when we go through the bank statement and reconcile everything we would just put a yes in this column for each item as we go through the bank statement and written silent but for the minute because I haven't reconciled it I'm just going to leave all of those blank but for a very basic Journal of business expenses that is plenty to get you started and remember it's easy enough to add columns into this at any stage down the line to record extra information about your expenses that you might think would be useful so for example what I might add into here would be like an invoice number like a customer invoice number column and then you could cross reference expenses directly to the invoice for that customer that related to that expense it's very unlikely in an hmrc audit that they'll want to cross-reference specific expenses back to particular invoices that you've raised for customers I've heard of it happening very occasionally for high value expenses but for relatively low value stuff like this this should be absolutely fine so the next thing you need to think about is recording your business say scales and the methods I use for recording that is going to vary dramatically depending on your business model you might run a corner shop and therefore deal with hundreds of customers and hundreds of transactions per day in which case your point of sale software or your till is going to be your friend again this will vary dramatically depending on the software that you're using for that but end of day reports you know there used to be things like X reports said reports and stuff like that but a lot of it's no software based where you can just run reports off at any time but because of the sheer number of transactions you're probably going to do that on a daily basis and then at the other end of the scale you might have small businesses who only issue maybe one or two invoices a month I'm going to try and hit the middle ground with this video and it's going to kind of be based around uh like a trades type business Property Maintenance funnily enough because that's what I used to do in my situation most customers paid me on the day by credit card but I did get some customers who wanted to be invoiced indeed and pay me by bank transfer later on probably no more than what 20 or 30 invoices per month depending on the size of the jobs I was working on not everyone got a formal invoice that's not really a requirement after all of you go down to a shop and buy a Mars bar they're not going to invoice you for 70p or whatever it is now but you still do need to be recording the sale somehow so here's a sheet I'm going to be using for recording business income it's all part of the same spreadsheet as before I'll zoom in a little bit and we'll fill it in in real time and I'll show you what each of these columns is for so we'll put this job in first um and we'll see it is for the 24th of January 2023 and if you use the invoice numbering system that I like to use what I do is I do the date in Reverse so it will be 23 or one two four and then I put a letter after it so I start with letter A and then if I was to raise another invoice on the same day that would become letter b and so on and so forth I think the only thing you need to be a little bit careful about with that invoice numbering system is whether or not it's valid if you're doing vat invoices for customers but we're not going to go into all of that in here we'll record the tax year which is 20 22 23. this first job here we're going to pretend that we've already completed the job for the customer and this is Paul Smith again we'll log a bit more detail about the customer address here so things like the postcode and whatnot then job description again it's how much detail do you want to go into I'm just going to put a new work top and kitchen repairs invoice amount so obviously it's going to have to cover all of our costs of materials plus a labor charge as well I'm not going to break it down but if you raise a separate invoice for the customer you might want to break that down it's completely up to you but I'm just going to put the total amount in here not 15 grand 1500 quid we're going to say that the customers paid us straight away which is always nice keep the cash flow going they paid the full amount so I'm going to record that as well and we're going to save the paid by credit card if the customer paid you by cash it's handy to keep a record of when you banked that cash because otherwise later down the line if you see random amounts of cash going into your bank account then it can be a little bit difficult to kind of square up where that came from but because this has been paid by credit card that's not applicable and we haven't reconciled it yet and there's no additional information that I need to record about that particular job I'll just enter a couple more in very very quickly right that'll do for now on that one hopefully you get the general idea what you will see on this particular one for Adam Jones is that there's no date paid because we're going to say that we've invoiced the customer but for whatever reason they couldn't pay straight away which I would generally advise you try and get money off customers as quickly as possible but for this one we've just left them an invoice so the date paid is left blank at the minute the payment amount is left blank so that's something we're going to have to keep track on later down the line make sure that they actually pay us so obviously you might raise more detailed invoices for your clients depending on the kind of business model that you've got as long as you're logging enough information so that if you did get audited by hmrc and you've got money coming into your bank account and they say okay you've got 1800 pounds coming in on the 1st of February 2023 what was that for and then you can go back to the a spreadsheet and you can say okay with this job for Joe blogs I did some kitchen repairs for them you might have some photographs and things so you can go back to your photo library that you've got and check all your photos from the 1st of February or around that time so you've got some kind of log of what actually went on and generally that's going to be more than enough information if you ever get audited so obviously as the year goes on you're just gonna keep filling this spreadsheet in this is actually really quite an important one to keep filling in as time goes on especially if you're going to be raising invoices for customers who might not pay you straight away because this is a really good way of seeing at a glance all you need to do is put a filter on for a particular column and just show all of the empty columns and you can straight away see who owes you money if you're planning on running a vehicle through your business you've got a whole load of options here you can potentially put all of your individual vehicle running costs through as separate receipts but that is actually fraught with tax complications the easiest way to deal with this for most people is to ignore all of your vehicle running costs and just base it on how many miles you've traveled instead the standard rate is 45 Pence per mile based on your first 10 000 miles but that can change from time to time it can also change depending on the type of vehicle and how many miles you've traveled so do double check on the hmrc website to see what the latest numbers are it's really something you need to talk to your accountant about to make sure that you're doing this correctly but for most people you're just going to keep a log of your mileage now I'm going to base this on the assumption that I'm working from home and travel to various customer sites to do jobs if you always travel to the same place to do your job for example if you're a freelancer and you always work in an office then generally speaking you can't claim for your journey from home to the office because the office is considered to be your place of work but if you don't have such a base and you work from home then your home is considered your place of work so every Journey needs to be accounted for just depending on where you're traveling from and to so for example you might go from home to a customer's site and then you might go to a supplier to pick up some bits and then you might go to another customer site to do a quote and then you might go back to your original customer you need to track all of those Journeys separately really and keep a tally of your total miles all the way back to coming home again in the examples I'm about to show you I'm going to pretend that I've always gone from home to the customer back home again but it rarely works out that simple so once again I've got the mileage log just as a separate sheet in the same account spreadsheet now there are bandings for your mileage but at the moment this is only set up for 45 Pence so the first thing that I would do in here I would make the assumption that you know on each of these days at least I'm traveling to this particular customer maybe you're going to be traveling them more often than that but let's just make a starting point that on each of these days we went out to see these particular customers so I'm just going to copy those dates over onto the mileage log and I'm also going to copy the customer address as well so that's going in as a destination address now the start address if you've got premises it would be from your work premises if you work from home it would be from your home address so I'm just going to pretend for all of these we're going to start the journey from home and I'm going to keep a log of what that postcode is we're going to use that same start address for all of these tacks here same as before 2022-23 again I'll just zoom in a little bit and see what I'm doing here but the purpose of the journey I'm just going to put that this was a customer job for all of those and I'm going to record the total miles remember to record the amount of miles for your journey there and the journey back as well so on this we'll say it was 15 miles for that one 10 miles for that um 12 miles for that for argument's sake I'll quickly add a formula in there to work out the value of that and I'll copy that down and then exactly the same for business expenses really because we're going to assume on each of these days when we went to buy all of these bits and pieces that we've had to travel there and we'll assume we've had to travel there from home so again I'm just going to take this date column here copy the date in I'll just use the PE details for the moment but we'll talk about that very very shortly but we'll put that as the destination address as I say we're going to keep the home address the same for argument's sake but we'll talk about that in a minute just copy that down for all of this collect customer materials that'll do and then what I would suggest you do is just put a filter on for each of the um destinations so for example Wix because it's all you're going to be going back there all the time so let's say that the postcode of that all I would log is the course code you don't need any more detail than that just using a random postcode and I'll just copy that to all of the Wix ones or very random and then again once I've got the destination postcode in I will just quickly pop on the Google Maps or whatever and double check what the distance is to each of these so for example for B and Q I would go under there check how far it is there and back pop the miles in let's say it's 21 miles just total guess do that for each of your destinations what have I missed uh two there we'll quickly Pop um whatever that's fine copy this formula down and there we go there is our mileage log all filled in and then obviously there might be other Journeys that you've done as well that you're going to have to add into this it's probably a good idea on the mileage log to sort this by date because otherwise things can start to get a little bit confusing so I'm just gonna sort of sending on that and then obviously as time goes on throughout the year we you would just keep this updated for every customer job that you go into every time you pick your materials up you know every time you go to the Post Office everything that's related to your business you should be recording your mileage for it and making sure that you claim that back as a business expense now obviously if you've got business premises you're generally going to claim a hundred percent of the running costs of those premises and log the whole lot as business expenses that get offset against your profits but you can also do this to a degree if you're self-employed and work from home so once again for using your home as an office I've got this as a separate sheet in this spreadsheet this is a bit of a tricky one because um how much you can claim uh it's a little bit open-ended to say the least but I have been through audit with hmrc with this for myself and they didn't raise any problems but I'm not guaranteeing that you'll get away with that with your particular business it really depends on how much they want to clamp down on stuff but say for example Gas and Electric let's say that we've spent three thousand pounds in total over the year water rates let's say that was a thousand pounds council tax I'm gonna say that there's two oh that's optimistic let's say that was two and a half thousand pounds house insurance uh 500 pounds and telephone Now telephone you're only really going to a claim for a landline if it's going to be pretty much 100 used for your business but let's say it's a mobile phone that's for business use and you're spending a about I don't know 10 pounds a month or whatever on that so that's going to be 120 pound a year not very much and then you need to put a Justified weighting in for each of these now again how you judge that is up to you I don't want to be getting it in the neck if you've claimed too much of using your home as an office what I would suggest you do is speak to your accountant and work out what a fair percentage is what you might want to do for example if you live in a three bedroom house and you've got one bedroom completely dedicated to using it for business purposes um well let's see you've also got like a kitchen dining room let's say you've got like seven rooms in your house or something like that one of them is being used for business purposes then I would say probably 15 is going to be reasonable for everything but as I say don't hold me to that check with your accountant to see what you can get away with in fact here you go on the hmrc website itself if you work from home you may be able to claim a portion of your costs for things like heat and electricity council tax mortgage interest or rent and internet and telephone use you'll need to find a reasonable method for dividing your costs for example the number of rooms and hmrc actually give you an example here and that pretty much goes along the lines of what I was just saying you have four rooms in your home one of which you use as an office your electricity bill for the year is 400 pounds yeah 400 pound a month maybe assuming all the rooms in your home use equal amount of electricity you can claim a hundred pounds as allowable expenses 400 divided by four if you only work for one day a week from home you could claim 14 pound 29 so the hundred pounds divided by seven so you just need to work out a fair proportion and make sure it's justifiable but it's ultimately don't know how hmrc are feeling at the time really for telephone I'm gonna say that this is a hundred percent because this is absolutely all for business use this particular phone line or mobile phone but again it would depend on the nature of your particular business so we've got all of these weighted figures here and that gives us a total amount that we're going to reclaim against tax as a business expense of 1170 pounds do make a note of what your justification is for these percentages because again if you got audited hmrc might turn around and it could be in three or four years time hmrc might turn around and say why did you put 15 down as your weighted value and I'm just going to put here three bedroom house using one bedroom as a permanent office for the business I would also suggest that you keep all copies of utility bills and everything relating to these costs so that you can go back and you can show hmrc if you got audited all of your utility bills that came to that three thousand pounds for that particular year because they would probably ask for proof of that as I say this is probably the most contentious part of claiming business expenses so do verify everything that you're logging here with your accountant so as I say once you've filled in all of those details for your business over the course of the year it's really easy to then summarize all of that in one particular sheet so for example here for the 2022-23 taxiate and see we've got a turnover of 3 300 pounds and then we've got all of these expense figures here we've got 100 pounds and 35 Pence of mileage 277 pounds and 17 Pence of General expenses we've got the figure that you saw earlier for using the home as an office 1170 pounds that gives us a total expensive figure of four thousand and forty seven pounds and 52 Pence so when it comes to doing my tax return these are the two figures I'm going to end up using I'm going to use this 3300 for the business turnover and I'm going to use this 4047 and 52 Pence for the total expenses that gives us a profit or a loss of 747.52 Pence but it's because we've got the home at an office for the full Year's worth of expenses but we've only actually put a month's worth of income in so obviously if you've got 12 months worth of income in you would expect that you're going to have a final profit at the end there otherwise your business is kind of pointless and then it's up to you whether or not you want to start a new spreadsheet at the start of each year or whether or not you want to just keep this going as a rolling kind of thing from year to year the advantage of keeping it going is a rolling spreadsheet is that it's then really easy to go into this summary sheet and just keep an eye on how much you've been making from year to year obviously there's Ways and Means of cross-referencing between separate spreadsheets if you would prefer to do it that way but I've always found it's more beneficial to just keep the same spreadsheet running from year to year obviously you can take an archive of it maybe every year so you've got like a point in in time reference that you can go back to if needs to be but as I say it just makes it easier to have this kind of at a glance view of how your business is performing over time and the other thing as well is obviously as your business evolves because of the beauty of spreadsheets it's really easy to just add extra sheets into this to analyze things to whatever degree that you want to analyze things to you could add in for example month by month summaries or you could track business income from particular customers there's all sorts of things that you can do in spreadsheets to record really useful information that you might want to refer back to as your business evolves and that neatly leads me on to the age-old question should you be using spreadsheets or should you be using dedicated accounting software well that's a big topic that I'm going to make a separate video about but look I'm old enough to remember simplexd books and simplexd books were just the way that we used to record all of our business income and expenses back in the day spreadsheets are basically the electronic equivalent of a simplexd book there really is no more perfect tool for recording accounting information than a spreadsheet don't get me wrong there's a time and place for dedicated accounting software but in my experience you should avoid it until you really know what you're doing spreadsheets are far easier to use and give you flexibility Way Beyond what most accounting packages can do and if you use open source software such as LibreOffice calc which is what I use it's completely free so what about things like expense tracking apps where you just take a photo of receipts and put it onto your phone well again there's pros and cons to this and it probably warrants a dedicated video but for me personally I just keep coming back to spreadsheets all the time they're faster they give you better long-term flexibility you're not stuck with a long subscription that you can't get out of and as I say they're free so with that in mind how do we keep track of electronic receipts for example when we buy something online do we need to print out all of those or can we just leave them on the computer so all I do and obviously this will vary depending on what email program you're using but this is in Gmail here and it's pretty straightforward in Gmail I'll set up a couple of labels I'll set up a label called e-receipts and I set up a sub label of that called entered and then as a year goes on whenever I spend any money where I get the confirmation or the invoice or anything like that come through electronically by email I straight away give it the label of e-receipts within the email program so you can see at a glancio we've got what one two three four five six seven here that we need to account for and then all we do is we print off each of these receipts or invoices we just print them as a PDF and save them in a folder for that Financial year we number them sequentially from zero zero one upwards and as we print each one we just give it the label of n Ed and then we know that that is dealt with so once we've created all of our PDFs which literally takes like 10 seconds per item it doesn't take long and then if we just look at the label of e receipts we can see at a glance everything has been ended or it's all been turned into a PDF so ultimately we end up with a folder full of PDFs for the financial year that looks a bit like this as you can see we'll number them from zero zero one upwards we also include a bit of a brief description of what it is but you don't really need to do that because you're going to put that in the spreadsheet anyway but it just makes it a bit easier at the glance to see what's what and then just head over to your expense logging spreadsheet and you'll see what I've done here I've added an extra column in here I'll just zoom in a little bit see and see what I've done so I've renamed the original column to paper receipt ID and then I've got a new column that now says e receipt ID and then I've just added all of the entries in there that I show told you before I've tried to keep them vaguely in date order but it doesn't really matter that much if they're not as long as you've got the tax year correct at the end here everything should kind of work itself out if at a later date you want to have a look at all of your e-receipts and just double check that you've got everything you just need to do a filter you can do a filter to show either empty or not empty sales so if I do empty cells then we're only going to see our list of paper receipts and if I filter by not empty cells then we should only see our list of e-receipts dead straightforward and then at a later date if you ever get audited you send this spreadsheet over to hmrc and they might say Okay I want to see the invoice for this thing here for 920 pounds so you cross reference it on your spreadsheet you can see it's paper receipt number four you go to your file and you can find it straight away so folks I know there's a lot to take in there but it really is straightforward keep your receipts nice and organized and keep a log of everything so that you can find the receipts that you need if you get audited and of course you can do everything electronically where you take photographs of the paper receipts and then Chuck them in the bin if you do go down that route just make sure you've got good backups I personally use acronis for my online data backups and I find it works really really well I'm going to be making a separate video all about that but if you do want to check that out there's a link to acronis down in the description below off the top of my head it's less than 100 quid a year and it just gives you that peace of mind that stuff is being backed up remember if you become a member of the small business toolbox website you can get access to a whole load of spreadsheets for things like invoice templates quote templates basically everything we've talked about on this channel including the spreadsheet that I've been showing you today to track all of your income and expenses I do update it from time to time so if you haven't downloaded the latest version get yourself onto the site and get the latest one and don't panic about remembering everything I've told you in today's video I've put together an article on the small business toolbox website that basically has all of the links all the resources that we've talked about today there's a link to that in the description as well let me know in the comments how you prefer to record all of your business expenses and income have you found some really good apps that you just can't live without do you use accounting software or do you prefer to use spreadsheets if you do use accounting software what do you use and is it any good for now folks if you're new to the channel don't forget to hit subscribe there's loads more to come keep working hard and all the very best of luck on your small business Journey take care folks I shall see you next time tati bye