Francois Marais

Google sheets are ideal for small and micro businesses for writing up a cashbook / creating a summary of your bank account for a financial year. The reasons why it is ideal is:

• Free
• Easy
• Backed up in the cloud
• Easily shareable with your accountant

You can also use Microsoft Excel but that is not free nor is it automatically backed up in the cloud unless you subscribe annually to Office 365.

Your first step would be to download your bank statement in CSV or excel format.

It will look like this:

Next you add an allocation column. See below:

Once you start going the typing becomes quick as Google sheets like excel make use of predictive text meaning you can quickly allocate your transactions for a financial year. For most businesses in South Africa a financial year starts on 1 March and ends on the last day of February. The 12 months ended 28 February 2022 is the last financial year for which most small businesses will be busy preparing accounting records for their accountants.

Your accountant needs to know the opening and closing balances of your bank accounts and the summary of the transactions inbetween. This summary can easily be obtained by. sorting data or by using pivot tables. I can assist with your pivot tables. I can also assist by setting up your Google sheet so you can type faster by for example using the concatenate function so the full date is typed quickly. Don't worry about the nitty-gritty details and be scared of new words like Pivot Tables and Concatenate. ( I have to do some work as well.)

See below an example of a Pivot table:

Writing up your books when on a tight budget need not be expensive. It will require your time. I can assist f you are too busy but if money is an issue I can help you to do most of the "donkey" or routine work yourself.