book keeping
MyCake Inspires – Order from Chaos
In this MyCake Inspires video, Sarah shows off how she keeps her receipts in order despite of a messy desk. How do you do yours?
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MyCake book-keeping update
For MyCake users here are a few recent updates to the book-keeping side that may be useful:
email marketing
You can now intergrate MailChimp into your book-keeping and send highly targetted emails to your customers. Take a look under settings/external services. There is no charge from this end and you can get a FREE MailChimp account if you have under 2,000 customers and send less than 12,000 emails a month.
Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet
For a while now you’ve been able to create lists of products below a Sales Type. For instance you may have had a Sales Type called “Widgets”, and then a list of products underneath that: Blue Widgets, Green Widgets, etc.
The way the reports look has also been improved…
You can click anywhere on a line in these reports to drill down in to the detail. When you hover over a line you’ll see an icon appear to the right that lets you open the drill down in a new window.
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Have fun with images in MyCake book-keeping
The guys behind the book-keeping section of MyCake have been up to some cool stuff…
Gravatars
When you view a customer or supplier record, book-keeping now checks to see if the email address provided is registered with gravatar.com. If they are registered then we retrieve the avatar image that they have uploaded. If you don’t want to be freaked out by pictures of your customers and suppliers appearing then you can disable this function in Settings -> Advanced Settings
Invoice Background Images – different formats
To date, you’ve only been able to use JPEG images as background files for invoices. We’ve now improved the system to support other formats such as PNG and Gif. PNG’s can give a much nicer-looking invoice as the image isn’t compressed in the same way that it is with JPEG images. This setting is accessed in Settings -> Invoice Options -> Display Options
Custom Payment Buttons
You can now create your own custom “Pay Now” buttons and have them shown on the PDFs created for unpaid invoices This allows you to upload your own image for use as the payment button and define your own link. This feature would usually be used by fairly technical users to integrate with a payment service This is set in Settings -> Invoice Options -> Payments and Discounts
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MyCake: asset register
We now have an Asset Register so you can keep track of all assets (vehicles, computers, etc) that your business purchases. The Asset Register also automatically works out depreciation for you and makes the relevant accounting entries.
Assets can be divided into different categories. These categories are set up in Settings -> Asset Register Categories
You can view the Asset Register and add items to it under the Tools & Reports tab.
If you have recorded purchases and set the outgoing type to a nominal code that’s configured as a Fixed Asset then the Asset Register will try to be clever by flagging this up and making it easy for you to add the purchase to the register.
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Sales vs. Grants … income defined
What does your income look like and can you see what is at risk re public spending cuts?
Various folks have said they’d like to see how their income splits out between grants and sales. So in order to help you do this we’ve added in a few categories to the standard set of nominal codes in Kashflow and we’ve also added it as a line in the benchmarking side.
Now you can clearly see your income streams and the amount coming through from public funds that may be at risk as the new Government gets to grips with its spending.
If you’d like a hand working out how to make this separation in your own figures so that you can track the vissicitudes and variations in this area then please do have a look at the benchmarking forms or drop us a line …
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Configure your overview page in bookkeeping
You can now choose what sales data you want to see on your bookkeeping overview page within MyCake. To do this, look for the spanner in the bottom right hand corner of the sales graph and make your selection from the following:
- Sales growth over the last 12 months
- Profit and Loss for the past 6 months
- Income by Source for the past 6 months
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Attaching files to purchase receipts
You can attach a file to your MyCake receipt. Once you’ve created a receipt look for “Attached files” which will appear under payment details.
This is useful if you create one MyCake receipt from multiple receipts or if you have to send original receipts to customers.
Also useful for keeping a record of online transactions such as flights, train tickets and all these online purchases.
You can attach most file format (jpegs, words, excel, etc).
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Car Expenses & Buying hardware … how to represent these in your books
As there are a lot of folks doing their self-employment tax returns at the moment we’ve decided to do a few posts in answer to commonly raised questions (so if you have questions send them over 
We’re pleased to be collaborating with Kirsty Andrew of Frank Alice (as she’s a chartered accountant and we’re not!).
Q1 – What do I do about things like car costs and petrol where only a proportion is due to the business?
Ok, lets split this into a couple of more specific questions a) should I put in the whole invoice or just the percentage? and b) what proportion do I allocate to the business?
a) Frank Alice recommends that you just put in the percentage. If you want to keep track of the whole amount then you can of course put this in the notes or the details on your system (for MyCake there is a ‘details’ section to enter text in for every purchase)
b) When it comes to cars the best practice is to keep a log of all the miles you drive for 3-6 months and separate out your business miles from your personal miles. Assuming that these six months are representative of your usual habits you can then reasonably apply the percentage split between personal and business to all your petrol and car related costs.
Q2 – How do I ‘depreciate’ the value of capital items e.g. computers, cars etc?
Firstly it’s good to be clear on the difference between how these are handled vs. direct and indirect costs. Things like computers and cars (also production tooling or equipment) are whats known as ‘fixed assets’ in that you achieve benefits from them across several years not just in the year they were bought. This means that you need to be able to represent their value (albeit decreasing each year as they wear out … there are fixed ways of doing this which we’ll get to in a moment) over several years. This is done on a ‘balance sheet’ rather than a ‘profit and loss’.
The upshot of this is that you will claim 50% of the cost of the item (as a cost, offset against income to the business) in the first year and then depending on what it is claim the remaining percentage in the follow two to four years. This is known as claiming the depreciation of the fixed asset i.e. as you reduce the value on the balance sheet, this reduction is posted as a cost in the P&L so you are able to phase the cost of buying the asset over its life time.
It won’t surprise you to know that there is all sorts of detail behind this short post so if you need more advice we suggest you book yourself a place at our event at the CUBE on 20th Jan from 6.30pm-8.30pm where Kirsty from Frank Alice and Lisa from Boogles will both be there to work with you to get your books into shape for your tax return. Contact Araceli at the CUBE direct to book a place.
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Allowable expenses for Tax
rather than re-invent the wheel on this one we suggest you look at this piece which is very comprehensive
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Setting up Suppliers in MyCake
We suggest that you set up two types of suppliers … the generic ones for things like ‘train’ and ‘accommodation’ where the actual supplier doesn’t really matter (is there a difference that matters between Virgin Trains and SW Trains?) and then the specific ones …e.g. freelancers you subcontract to, your landlord.
You’ll end up with a list that looks something like this:
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