Bookkeeping for Small Business Owners

Event description

Most owners start keeping books the day the first sale comes in. By then, months of legal fees, equipment and pre-opening marketing have already gone unrecorded, and the tax treatment that came with them may be gone too. This workshop starts the records where they belong: before the business opens.

The session separates the three stages of spending in a new business (discovery and exploration, start-up, and operating) and explains why only the third counts as ordinary business expense. It maps each form of ownership to its federal return, from Schedule C with Form 1040 for sole proprietors and single-member LLCs to Forms 1065, 1120S and 1120. It covers the taxes owners overlook, including the 15.3% self-employment tax, Maine's 5.5% general sales tax and personal property tax on business equipment, plus why a separate account under an EIN matters and how a business credit card quietly turns into expensive debt.

A worked example, a part-time business making custom leather phone cases, shows that small scale does not shrink the accounting. From there the session compares manual records, spreadsheets and entry-level cloud software, and lays out the five account groupings behind one equation: assets minus liabilities equals equity.

You leave able to read a balance sheet, an income statement and a cash flow statement, choose a system that will still fit in two or three years, and follow ten working rules, starting with cash is king and ending with the reminder that tax consequences always matter.