Welcome to the How of Business with Henry Lopez and David Begin, the podcast that helps you start, run, and grow your small business.

And now here are your hosts.

Welcome to this episode of The How of Business.

This is Henry Lopez.

And this is a short episode

on the topic of financial review, looking back to last year and reviewing our financials,

cleaning them up and preparing them to turn over to our CPA or our tax preparer so that they

can prepare our tax return for last year. If you don't, if you're one of those

business owners and you're not alone that doesn't have any kind of a system like QuickBooks

to manage your financials, like I said, you're not alone, so don't let that to be a source of

too much frustration, although I know it will be, but use this as the opportunity to change that.

Get yourself organized. Get yourself using a tool like QuickBooks so that it makes you that

much better at managing and puts you in a position to better grow your business.

QuickBooks comes in all ranges and sizes and types. I use, for example, the online version of

QuickBooks, the basic online version for my wife's travel consulting business. It's a pretty

simple business as far as the transactions go. And for $20 a month, we get an online cloud

hosted solution that works great, has electronic integration with our bank accounts.

So it's very easy to pull those transactions down and get them accounted for.

So I encourage you, if what you've got is a stack of receipts and maybe some bank statements,

hopefully at a minimum, what you've done, and if you haven't, this is the year to do it.

Hopefully you have a separate business checking account and at least a separate debit card

against that checking account.

...