Simple Financial Statements for Small Businesses

A lot of small businesses start out without a lot of complicated accounting software.  They open their doors, they sell a product or service, they collect on their revenue, they pay their expenses, and if there’s money left over in the bank account, then they know that they’re making money.

While that may not be a bad way to start out, it’s not a great way to end up.  Eventually, it’ll get harder and harder to do your taxes, even with the help of an accountant, and you won’t have a scoreboard that can give you insights into how well your business is performing.  So sooner rather than later, you want to investigate accounting software that can help you prepare your financial statements quickly and easily.

There are lots of different accounting software applications that can produce financial statements for small businesses, but they can be very complicated and take a lot of time and expertise to get fully integrated with your other software.  What if you’ve never produced financial statements before and are just looking for something simple that will fit a small business?

Here are the top things that you want to look for:

Key Features

Any accounting software that produces financial statements should be able to produce a balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows for your business.  You always want the ability to view these statements historically, too.  For example, the balance sheet will show you your assets, liabilities, and net equity for your business at a given point in time.  It’s basically a snapshot at a precise moment, and that will usually be at the end of a month, quarter, or year.  In contrast, your income statement and statement of cash flows will show changes in income and cash accounts over a period of time.  So you’ll want accounting software that can easily show you those reports as of the end of the accounting period or over the accounting period that you’re interested in.

Key Integrations

Unless you’re an accountant, you aren’t going to enjoy putting together financial statements manually, so your financial statements need to link to your general ledger.  Once you record a transaction in your general ledger, your accounting software should be able to pull from your general ledger to produce your financial statements automatically.

One of the main integrations that you’ll want to make sure that you have is between your financial statements and your general ledger, on the one hand, and your expense tracking software, on the other hand.  For small businesses especially, tracking business expenses can be a royal pain, and you want to have an easy way to capture expenses from receipts and invoices and get them into your general ledger so that they flow into your accounting software.

Try Haven!

All of that might sound great to you, but what if you don’t feel like you’re tech-savvy enough to pull off even those few integrations?  Then try Haven!  Haven unites small business teams with a single, easy-to-use platform that includes all of your core business functions in one user-friendly interface.

With Haven, you actually don’t even need to go through the hassle of integrating different software applications because Haven is designed to have everything you need in one place.  Haven automatically updates your financial statements based on actions you take in Haven that get tracked in Haven’s general ledger.  For example, you can take a picture of a receipt using Haven’s receipt scanner, and Haven will turn that expense into a journal entry that you can approve and that will then automatically show up in your financial statements.  You can get a good first pass at your financial statements with barely any work at all, and your accountant or bookkeeper can access your Haven account to make more complicated entries and confirm that everything is correct, and you can spend less time managing your business and more time actually earning revenue.

Reach out to us today and schedule a demo!