What should a business be doing on a monthly basis to stay on top of their accounting?

Well, it's important on a monthly basis to be able to produce what we call an income statement or a profit and loss statement. This is the document that shows your sales as well as your expenses and it's normally produced on a monthly basis. The main thing that you need to keep in mind is that for this document to be relevant you need to do a lot of the work, almost on a daily basis. For most companies, entering the bills as they receive them and also billing customers as the sales are made should be done on a daily basis if possible. On a weekly basis one should go in and look at the age of the receivable and also the age of the payables.

The older the payables are of course means that some of your suppliers will be after you to pay money so you want to keep on top of how old some of the bills are and on the other side of the coin you want to make sure that your customers are paying you on time. Checking the age of some of the bills outstanding on a weekly basis will make your financial statements that much more relevant than if you check them on a monthly basis.