Five Tips for Keeping Track of your Business Expenses

Kandace Heller

January 14, 2014

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Your business expenses tell a story that you need to pay attention to each and every day. When you properly track your business expenses, you can develop spending habits that benefit your business and put more money on your bottom line. Tracking expenses can be easier when you have the right tools at your disposal and you use them properly.

Force Yourself To Be Diligent

Good business spending habits start with the desire to be diligent about monitoring your expenses. Each time you spend money for the company, get into the habit of asking for a receipt and then filing that receipt in the proper place. You can also ask your business associates to continually remind you to collect receipts and log expenses until it becomes second nature. Another piece of being diligent is sticking to the monthly budget. If you have a certain amount of money allotted for marketing expenses for example, stop spending money on advertising when you reach that monthly allotment.

Have A System

The easiest way to get into good expense tracking habits is to have a system for everything. Log your daily driving miles in a notebook that you carry specifically for that purpose and have a process in place for generating a purchase order. When you have a system for everything, it becomes easier to track your spending. You can easily use spreadsheets or budgeting tools to keep track of all your spending and expenses. Many tools can even linkup to your budget and total so that you don't have to do the math about how much you have left for each month.

Online Services

One of the best ways to keep track of your expenses is to utilize an online service such as Telematics. This is the kind of service that can help trucking companies to monitor their activities, but it is also a website that can generate reports to be used in expense tracking. Online services such as this are portable and powerful, and they make great allies in the fight to lower expenses. It's hard to keep within your budget if you don't know how much you are spending, so online tools are a great way to track each expense.

Become Accountable To Someone

Tracking business expenses becomes more urgent when you have to be accountable to someone for reporting your spending. Whether it is your business partner or you get your spouse to help you out, you give yourself a sense of urgency when you are accountable to someone else. Make sure that your employees are accountable as well. Don't let people get away with failing to report charges to company credit cards or other orders. You do not want to get into the habit of allowing expenses to go unaccounted for.

Close Out Each Day

If you want to create a bottleneck in your business expense tracking, then let everything just carry over from one day to the next. The best approach is to sit down at the end of the day and close out your activities in full and make sure that all of your expenses are accounted for. This way, there are no surprises at the end of the week or the end of the month. If you wait until the end of each month to balance your expenses, you may already be far outside your budget by the time you even notice.

By analyzing your expenses, you can determine ways to lower your costs and save your company money. That is why it is so important to develop a successful system for tracking your business expenses.