Traditional businesses: records your accountant can work from

Traditional Business: Records Your Accountant Can Work From

Yemi runs a building services company. Twelve or so jobs a month, each one quoted, invoiced and paid by bank transfer. No card reader, no online store, no marketplace. Every payment arrives in full, against an invoice, into one account.

On the face of it his records should be simple, and the individual pieces are. What he cannot do is answer a question in the middle of the year: was last month any good? The invoices are in one place, the supplier receipts are in a folder and the van's fuel receipts are in the van. The last profit figure anyone produced was for a year that had already finished, and it arrived eleven months late.

That is the traditional business position. Nothing was taken off in transit. The problem is that the pieces are scattered, and nobody looks at them until the year end forces it.

What organised actually means here

Income recorded as it happens, by what kind it is. Client sales and invoices, project fees, retainers, maintenance and support contracts, professional practice fees, rental income, grants, insurance payouts — the income type list covers the traditional side properly, and each type carries a country-neutral tax line. So a record is structured at the moment it is entered, not sorted out later by someone charging by the hour.

Costs recorded against the right thing. Materials, subcontractors, vehicle costs, tools, insurance, rent and rates, professional fees, use of home. Costs that were incurred for a particular kind of income attach to it. The rest sit as business-wide overheads, which is what they are.

A profit figure available in the middle of the year. Not an estimate someone produces after the fact. Income minus costs, for a month, a quarter or the year to date, with charts showing the trend, where the revenue came from and where the spending went. Busy and profitable stop being the same answer.

A file that is already in order when it is needed. Export a CSV in Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or FreeAgent format, or plain exports of income, expenses and net profit. Whoever does the filing starts on the work rather than on the assembly.

Money taken out of the business

This is where records in Yemi's position most often go wrong, and it matters more than it sounds.

Yemi takes money out for himself. Depending on how the business is set up, that is either Owner's Drawings or a mixture of Director's Salary and Dividends Paid. It is not income, and most of it is not an expense either. If it is recorded as either, the profit figure is wrong and so is anything built on it.

PlatformTaxHub takes the business structure from your profile and offers only the types that fit it. A sole trader gets Owner's Drawings and Capital Introduced. An incorporated company gets Director's Salary as an expense, plus Dividends Paid, Director's Loan and Share Capital. Alongside those sits a Not Profit & Loss scope: tax paid or refunded, transfers between the business's own accounts, deposits held and returned, loan movements. Those are recorded so the bank lines can be matched and nothing looks unexplained, and they are excluded from every total — income, expenses, profit and every export.

The effect is that the bank reconciles and the profit figure stays a profit figure.

Working with your accountant

If an accountant or bookkeeper files your return, the useful thing about keeping records this way is that the handover stops being an event. The records are already categorised, the profit figure already exists, and the export goes straight into whatever they use.

Some practices go further and use PlatformTaxHub with their clients directly. If yours does, they will send you an invitation link and set you up as a client of the practice — you pay nothing, and they see a filing readiness view showing what is still outstanding before they begin. If yours does not, the CSV export covers it either way.

If your income mix changes

The moment part of the business starts taking money through a card reader, Stripe, PayPal, Square or a marketplace, something changes that is worth knowing in advance: the money that reaches the bank will have had a fee taken off before it arrives, and often a refund netted against it as well. What you sold and what you received stop being the same number.

That gap is what most of this product is built to close, and it is covered in the mixed income case. If you are weighing up whether to start selling that way, the Platform Fee Calculator will show you what the fees would take before you commit. It is free, runs in your browser and needs no account.

Scope, plainly

Records come in as CSV text that you upload — payout reports, expense exports, bank statements. There is no PDF import, no receipt capture from a photograph and no bank feed. Evidence, meaning the receipts and invoices themselves, stays with you rather than being uploaded here. There is no invoicing or invoice chasing.

Income tracking is not limited by country. Tax estimation is a separate product, live in the US, the UK and Nigeria — check your country.

To see the profit picture and the charts behind it, that is Net Profit & Financial Insights.