Accounting processes and workflows are at the core of any business. Sadly, 82% of businesses fail due to bad or negative cash flow.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
At Process Street we recognize the pivotal role small business accounting has for survival, profitability, and growth. We have therefore utilized our checklist approach to organize key accounting processes into a series of dynamic, efficient, and clear process templates.
All of these are free to use, ready to go, and can be edited to your needs, so there’s no reason to leave the failure of your business’ accounting up to chance.
This post will provide you with the following templates:
- Environmental Accounting Internal Audit Checklist
- Cash management process
- Small Business Budget Process
- Financial Plan Template
- Financial Planning Process
- Financial Audit Checklist
- Tax Preparation Checklist
This template pack can be used in conjunction with our other accounting processes template pack.
Let’s dive right in and organize your small business accounting.
Environmental Accounting Internal Audit Checklist
On 6th of April 2018, Mark Carney, the governor of the bank of England stood at the International Climate Risk conference and accentuated the financial instability climate change will cause.
Our economic and environmental worlds are not separate but intertwined. A nudge of change in one will ripple consequential effects in the other. Damage our environmental system, and we damage our economic system. The economic system in which your small business lies and relies upon. As a business, you will have to adapt, to soften the blow from our changing climate.
Accounting as a practice is a fundamental branch influencing the growth of your small business. Therefore, adapting your accounting processes is a good place to start to prepare your business to account for the current climatic changes.
Process Street’s Environmental Accounting Internal Audit aims to manage environmental risks and support your small business to be sustainable.
By using Process Street’s Environmental Accounting Internal Audit, you will obtain a final report detailing your business’ achievements and targets for improvement to reduce your environmental costs and impact. Process Street’s add variable function is used to assemble all your relevant entered data for rapid production of this final report.
Click here to get the Environmental Accounting Internal Audit Checklist.
Cash Management Process
82% of small businesses fail due to poor cash flow. As an accounting procedure, cash management is broad, covering cash collection, handling, and usage. The ultimate goal of cash management is to ensure your small business has enough cash to keep afloat.
Many small business owners fail to plan for the future when it comes to cash flow and spend management. For example, buying excess inventory early on in your small business’ lifetime freezes that vitally important flow of cash. Considered as the working capital at the heart of any business, stop the flow of cash and your business will stop.
Ensuring that the cash flowing into your business exceeds the cash flowing out of your business avoids taking on debt, allows you to maintain full control over your business processes, and evades insolvency.
Process Street’s Cash Management Process has been designed to ensure your business has enough cash flowing into your business to offset the cash flowing out. Our Cash Management Process uses Process Street’s dynamic due date feature for you to consistently review set targets aimed to improve your business cash flow, a critical action which ensures target completion and a healthy flow of cash within your business.
Click here to get the Cash Management Checklist.
Small Business Budget Process
The journey of managing your own business starts with the pre-planning phase for you to obtain a clear picture of what waits ahead and what resources you will need. Budgeting is a vital part of this pre-planning phase. Get your budget wrong, and your business journey will come to an abrupt end.
Budgeting in business is seen as a prerequisite for success. Despite its clear importance, 61% of small businesses did not create an official, formally documented budget in 2018. Going back to that 66% figure mentioned at the start of this article, that is, 66% of businesses fail in the first ten years, it makes you think, could there be a link between the two?
Process Street’s Budget Process has broken down the budgeting procedure into a set of quick and efficient steps that you can follow to create an accurate budget plan.
The Budget Process integrates the results from Process Street’s Financial Plan Template and Financial Planning Process to create a forward projecting budget plan for your small business.
Click here to get the Small Business Budget Process checklist.
Financial Planning Process
Social changes, changes to government policies, new business ideas, and environmental changes (as mentioned before), are all factors that can alter the economic climate in which you operate. But often these are changes that you can plan for. By producing a financial plan, you can obtain a better financial understanding of your business and increase the resilience of your small business to such changes.
Process Street’s Financial Planning Process guides you through the process of gathering the required information and data for you to produce a financial plan. Changes to the business environment are accounted for in this process, whilst using your historical financial data to forecast key future financial parameters.
The process of gathering data for your financial plan can be a complex one. Many stages are involved to produce various financial models, each with alternative assumptions. Having a checklist to guide you through such a time heavy and potentially complicated process simplifies such processes, naturally reduces human error and increases the process’ efficiency.
As a checklist, Process Street’s Financial Planning Process does just that. By utilizing Process Street’s features, such as conditional logic, the Financial Planning Process is a dynamic guide, which tailors to your needs in real time in accordance with the data you enter.
Click here to get the Financial Planning Process checklist.
Financial Plan Template
78% of small businesses fail due to the lack of a well-developed business plan, 77% fail due to incorrect pricing, and 79% fail due to starting out with too little money. These are failings that can be avoided with a well devised and developed financial plan.
Process Street’s Financial Plan Template is the next stage, after the financial planning process mentioned above, of producing a financial plan. The Financial Plan Template is to be used in conjunction with the Financial Planning Process, using the information from the latter to produce your final financial plan.
Utilizing both Process Street’s Financial Planning Process and Financial Plan Template will produce a comprehensive evaluation of your current and future financials.
Like Process Street’s Financial Planning Process, the Financial Plan Template utilizes our conditional logic feature for you to adapt your financial plan to meet your specific business needs.
Click here to get the Financial Plan Template.
Financial Audit Checklist
Defined as an independent and objective evaluation of an organization’s financials and financial reporting processes, financial auditing is a prerequisite when it comes to running your own small business.
Internal audits act to solidify your business operations. For FTSE 350 companies, regular financial audits have aided the continual improvement of the companies’ financial reports and processes – with 56% of audit results classified as either good or requiring limited improvement in 2011/12, rising to 81% in 2016/17.
As the above evidence suggests, regular internal financial audits can play a pivotal role in your business success. To achieve success you should take the time to conduct regular internal financial audits.
You can conduct your own internal financial audits using Process Street’s Financial Audit Checklist, and make sure your business financials run within the required guidelines.
Process Street’s Financial Audit Checklist acts as your guide, enforcing precision, accuracy, and reliability during your internal financial auditing process.
In addition to this, at the end of the Financial Audit Checklist, all the required data is compiled into a final report, which can then be emailed to relevant stakeholders using Process Street’s email widget. The final report can also be automatically exported as a PDF or Google Document as you prefer.
Click here to get the Financial Audit Checklist.
Tax Preparation Checklist
The preparation of your own and your small business taxes can be a daunting process involving many steps.
These steps must adhere to obligatory guidelines and regulations put in place by the IRS. Failure to follow these guidelines, or omission of paying your taxes entirely, will have damaging repercussions for yourself and your business.
It’s important to use an accurate source to help guide you through your tax preparation process. Process Street’s Tax Preparation Checklist has combined information from official sources to formulate a step-by-step guide that helps you prepare your own individual and small business taxes.
But taxes are personal and change in accordance with your unique circumstances. This is why Process Street’s Tax Preparation Checklist adopts our conditional logic feature, to let the process adapt to the information entered into it.
Click here to get the Tax Preparation Checklist.
Don’t leave your success up to chance
There you have it! Process Street’s complete small business accounting template pack, designed to rocket your business to success.
Documented checklists let you organize your processes and ensure that everything is done right every time, which is vital in small business accounting where the slightest mistake can cause a huge error in your cash flow records.
Here’s to never making those mistakes again.
If you’re looking for more resources or guides then check these out:
Are there any small business accounting processes that you would like us to cover which we have missed? If so, please let us know in the comments below. We always love to obtain feedback and find out about the processes you want to see in our next template pack.
Jane Courtnell
Hi there, I am a Junior Content Writer at Process Street. I graduated in Biology, specializing in Environmental Science at Imperial College London. During my degree, I developed an enthusiasm for writing to communicate environmental issues. I continued my studies at Imperial College's Business School, and with this, my writing progressed looking at sustainability in a business sense. When I am not writing I enjoy being in the mountains, running and rock climbing. Follow me at @JaneCourtnell.