If you own a small window cleaning business, you are most likely earning enough to make ends meet but not enough to employ a permanent accountant. You still need a rudimentary book keeping system in order to file your tax and VAT returns and to know if you’re making a profit or not. Below is some more information about basic book keeping for small window cleaning businesses.

To start off with you need an invoice book and a receipt book. The invoice book is if you should provide credit to some of your customers. You then issue an invoice and make then sign on the invoice. The receipt book is meant for cash sales, which should hopefully cover the bulk of your work.

Your next step is to file all documents pertaining to company related expenses. If you buy cleaning material and pay cash, keep the cash slip! The same goes for petrol, maintenance of your delivery vehicle et cetera. For wages you need a wage register where the employee can sign for the receipt of his weekly pay.

At the end of the day you will then need a cash book, an accounts receivable register and an accounts payable register.

The cash book is for all cash income and expenses. Use the receipt book above to enter all your cash income on one side, and the expense vouchers you kept to list all your expenses on the opposite side. You also need a column reflecting the total amounts, and then columns indicating the type of income or expenditure it was. This way you can easily add them up at the end of the month and see how much you earned from customers during the month, and how much you paid for cleaning materials, wages, petrol et cetera.

If you had credit sales, the invoices from your invoice book should be entered in the accounts receivable register in numerical order. At the end of the month you will be able to get a total for credit sales therefore. The same is true for items you bought on credit, which goes into the accounts payable register.

If you bought anything on account during the month, e. G. Cleaning material, which hasn’t been paid yet, this has to be deducted from your gross profit because obviously once you’ve paid it you will have less in the bank. Similarly, if you gave credit to one or more customers and they haven’t paid you yet, you must add that to the profit for the month shown by your cash book.

The above describes very basic book keeping for small window cleaning businesses. Although not sophisticated, it will give you a very good idea of whether your business is generating a profit or not.

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