The area that most entrepreneurs have a hard time with is accounting. This is especially true if you are a solo entrepreneur and traveling quite a bit.

Accounting is an area of business that all business owners need to master. As a solo entrepreneur you should 1) do as much of the accounting by yourself as you can 2) invest in a good accounting program 3) have an accounting system in place 4) learn to keep your personal and business expenses separate, 5) work to actively improve your accounting skills 6) get professional accounting help as required 7) understand your real operating costs and 8) keep track of your important accounting data, 9) Set a specific date to do your accounting.

Table of Contents

• Tip 1 – Do As Much Accounting Yourself While Traveling As You Can
• Tip 2 – Learn An Accounting Program To Help Your Business
• Tip 3 – Have An Bookkeeping System In Place Before You Go To Travel
• Tip 4 – Keep Business and Personal Expenses As Separate
• Tip 5 – Actively Improve Your Accounting Skills Even While Traveling
• Tip 6 – When Required, Get Professional Accounting Help For Your Business
• Tip 7 – Understand Your Real Operating Costs Even While Traveling
• Tip 8 – Keep Track of Important Data and Expensive While Traveling
• Tip 9 – Set A Specific Day To Do All Your Accounting – Even When Traveling
• Related Questions
  • What Are Some Home-based Business or Road Warrior Business Ideas You Can Start Today?
  • How Can I Travel and Run a Successful Business?

Here are our top 8 accounting tips for home-based or road-warrior businesses:

Tip 1 – Do As Much Accounting Yourself While Traveling As You Can

A lot of entrepreneurs do not like accounting. I admit that accounting is not my thing at all and I have to almost force myself to do it. Maybe because it is not my thing that I understand a few things about why it is important that anyone who is an entrepreneur and especially those who are running a home-based or road warrior business or doing a lot of traveling need to do accounting.

If you do your own accounting then you are going to better understand you own accounts and business. You will better understand your profit and loss.

As a small business owner, you just cannot afford to have people doing things for you that you can do yourself. So if at all possible, try to do the basic accounting and bookkeeping work yourself.

Tip 2 – Learn An Accounting Program To Help Your Business

There are many great programs you can get that will help you to do your accounting and basic bookkeeping. Some of them are free and others will cost you some money.

What program you decide to use may also be determined by where you live. For example, we use QuickBooks online and we are in Asia. There are a lot of USA tax features for the USA QuickBooks that we just do not need or want.

If you live and work in the United States one of the basic QuickBooks programs may be great for you, but if you do not, you may want to consider finding a program that will work well for where your business is located.

No matter what program you choose, accounting and bookkeeping will be so much easier with an accounting program.

Tip 3 – Have An Bookkeeping System In Place Before You Go To Travel

The one place a lot of people fail is that we push our bookkeeping back to do at a later date or they go to travel but have no bookkeeping system in place. Bookkeeping is the one thing you do not want to push back or it can all get really messy.

If you can have a system in place before your travel this will help you to stay on top of your bookkeeping. If you can say that by the 15th of each month you will have done all the accounting and bookkeeping for the previous month, meaning you have closed and reconciled the previous month, so to accomplish this you will spend a few hours each Friday doing your bookkeeping.

Having this kind of bookkeeping system in place before you travel will help you to keep on top of all your accounting needs.

Tip 4 – Keep Business and Personal Expenses As Separate

If you are running a small business where traveling, then one of the hardest things is to keep the business and personal expenses separate. This is where things can start to get messy.

But it is also important that you try to do this as much as you can and you clearly look at what is personal expenses or bills and what is business.

As more people start to work from home this is also one area of separation that will continue to be important. People are going to need to learn to keep their personal and business expenses separate or the accounting and bookkeeping could get extremely messy or just be inaccurate.

Tip 5 – Actively Improve Your Accounting Skills Even While Traveling

If you are not a CPA or you did not graduate with an accounting degree, the chances are that you will need to improve your accounting skills. Today so many YouTube channels give out some really great and valuable information. You can find some free training about accounting and bookkeeping on YouTube.

Read accounting and other blogs, even while you are traveling; they will help give you some good information. Find a way to increase your accounting skills and knowledge, because as an entrepreneur, this is an important skill to have.

Tip 6 – When Required, Get Professional Accounting Help For Your Business

There will probably be some accounting skills you will need to have a professional help you with. An example of this would be conducting a company audit.

So the rule of thumb for your accounting and bookkeeping should be that you do what you can do yourself and then you get the proper professional accounting help when and where you actually need it.

Tip 7 – Understand Your Real Operating Costs Even While Traveling

The area that a lot of small businesses and entrepreneurs have problems understanding the real costs to run a business. For a business to be a profitable business and not a hobby you need to understand your real operating costs. If you are making a product then your sale price should be your supplies, labor, overhead, and profit.

This is where a lot of entrepreneurs make an error. They may work out of their garage and not think about the overhead so they do not count it. Or worse yet they only count the supplies and never really think about their time and labor.

To be in business you need to understand what your real costs are for running the business. The reason this is so important is that if you ever want to expand your business and bring on an employee you are going to have to understand this very clearly as you will then have a salary and other expenses to pay. If your business is not profitable it will be really hard to expand in any way.

Tip 8 – Keep Track of Important Data and Expensive While Traveling

Learn to keep track of important data such as expenses, sales, net profit, and gross profit even while traveling. A lot of very good accounting programs will give you this and a lot of other data.

Good accounting programs can help you to really understand the general financial health of your company.

Tip 9 – Set A Specific Day To Do All Your Accounting – Even When Traveling

One of the important things to do while you are traveling is to still set a time to do your accounting. I like to sit down every Friday to do my accounting.

I have found if I do not have a specific day for my accounting then it can get pushed aside. So if you are traveling you still need to set a day to do your accounting so that you do not get behind.

I also find if I try to keep up with my accounting every day it also helps me. Sometimes you can forget exactly what was spent you do not do it immediately once you have spent the money.

Accounting is a very important aspect of any business. In fact, there are many who say that good accounting and cost analysis is at the core of any business success.

Related Questions

What Are Some Home-based Business or Road Warrior Business Ideas You Can Start Today?

We have listed out for you some of our top 100 plus home-based business and road-warrior businesses that you can start today. Many of these may be business ideas you have thought about and others may be some things you have never thought about. But we hope these suggestions will help you start a business today.

To find out more you can read our blog on 100 Plus Home-based Business Ideas You Can Start Today by clicking here.

How Can I Travel and Run a Successful Business?

We have outlined for you our top 10 tips to travel and still run a successful business. Our top tips are: 1) Make sure your business category works on the road, 2) fully know and understand all your legal issues, 3) have the skills you need to be successful already in place, 4) have a concrete plan, 5) make sure your data is digital, 6) have all the correct tools, 7) have any support or admin support you may need already in place, 8) do a short travel test run before going on a longer trip, 9) make sure you are healthy and 10) Have the income and money you need to travel already in place.

You can read more about this but reading our blog 10 Tips to Travel and Run a Successful Business While On the Road by clicking here.