Income Articles

As a small business owner, you need to balance income with your expenses. When you track patterns in your spending and earnings, you are looking at your business’s cash flow. Sometimes, your cash flow is negative. What is negative cash flow?

You’re a business owner, not an accountant. But, you probably handle some of your accounting tasks. You need to know some basic accounting terms to manage your books. An important term to understand is net profit. What is net profit? Net profit is an important figure on your income statement.

It’s critical for a new company to know how much money they spend each month. And, startup owners need to know how long their capital will last before revenue needs to pick up. How can you manage startup capital spending? You can find and track your business’s burn rate.

As a small business owner who accepts cash payments, you must protect your business from counterfeit money. There are millions of dollars in counterfeit bills in circulation. Learn how to tell if money is fake before you accept counterfeit bills.

As a business owner, you need more incoming than outgoing money to keep your company afloat. How much money you have left over after you pay expenses is known as profit. You should measure your business’s profits, which is known as profitability. Understand profit vs. profitability to analyze your company and make financial decisions.

If you accept check payments from customers, you need to know that the checks might not always clear. A customer might not have enough in their bank account to cover the check amount. Learn what to do with checks that bounce.

When you offer credit to customers, you may need to write off unpaid receivables as bad debts. However, you could end up collecting debts you write off in your accounting books. If this happens, record the money as a bad debt recovery.