Want to ask a quick question about an Excel formula or stuck with something in your spreadsheet and need some help getting moving again?
JOIN THE SPREADSHEET USERS SUPPORT GROUP COMMUNITY
I see you, with the carrier bag full of receipts under your desk, that all year you've been meaning to type up in to something so you can work out the numbers that should go on your self-assessment tax return for running your business.
Your accounts aren't complicated, you don't need an all singing, all dancing bookkeeping package, but you do need some organisation.
...and I get it. Every year I help people just like you to get their paperwork in order, produce a profit and loss account and give them the right numbers for the boxes on the form.
I haven't quite got enough time to help everyone though, so I thought I'd give you the exact system I use to produce a profit and loss account quickly, and it's this spreadsheet.
This tracker is designed for self-employed freelancers under the VAT threshold, usually having to fill in the short supplementary self-employment form on your tax return (SA103S)
You can decide what expense categories you want to use that make sense for you and your business and we'll just go through them and link them to the HMRC categories.
You record your income in one worksheet. You then add in your expenses on a separate worksheet, either typed or copied and pasted from a .csv file downloaded from your bank. Next you choose which account each line belongs to using a dropdown selector. There's columns to write your receipt and invoice numbers so you can match it with your paperwork later.
Once you've done that then the profit and loss statement is produced automatically and you'll see the numbers to be entered in each box of the SA103s return.