Accounts, mess and Black Books

Paperwork piles are like quicksand - the deeper they get, the more dangerous they are . . .

The last few days I’ve been up to my ears in numbers, getting some accounting done. Ironically, last night I was watching the first episode of Black Books, when a desperate, drunken Bernard is trying to do anything to avoid doing his accounts.

Accounts are pretty straightforward when you’ve just started a company, but they can easily go rogue and try to kill you if you don’t stay on top of them.

If you keep your receipts in a bag, have no other record of sales or purchases and don’t look at them until the end of a year, your accounts are going to eat you alive.

But instead of having a fight to the death and then turning your receipts into a fashionable rug or stylish pair of boots, you could just set a little time aside each month to get things in order.

Even something as simple as keeping payments and receipts in separate piles and in date order is going to help you enormously. And at the end of the month, you can go through your bank statement and tick each item off, without spending 4 hours searching for the receipt for The Red Porcupine where you all went for lunch to celebrate the invention of the pint.

And if it’s too late, if your paperwork is already piled too high for you to possibly cope, don’t go out and insult a bunch of Millwall fans in the hope they’ll put you out of your misery, try and find yourself a Manny instead – that is, hire someone else who doesn’t mind keeping things organised.