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Hello. I wanted to talk to you today about expense reports and when to use them and how first off, as you know, through accounting, we will see all of the transactions that hit your business bank accounts and credit card accounts. So we don’t want to report those again, but you want to use an expense report to let us know about any other expenses where you may have paid cash for something or use personal funds or things like mileage that aren’t attributed to your bank account. So let me give you a quick demo. If you are using Xero for your accounting software, have an easy way that you can use Xero to report your expenses on your company’s homepage. You will see at the bottom a section for expense claims, you can choose to add a receipt.
And let’s say the year you went to Sam’s club today and you purchased a new computer monitor. Okay. We’re just going to put in the receipt from, from the vendor, the current date, let’s say that, that is the date. The reference number could be a check number if you used a personal account to pay that. And let’s say that the total was $200, just for a nice round number. I’m going to put in a description of the expense listed and the account number would go to office expenses. Okay? If you purchased anything more than $500, we’d probably have to capitalize that and you would want to pick the equipment account so that we can catch that. Alright. If you’d like to attach a copy of the receipt, you can do that by clicking on this paper piece of paper button up in the right corner, that will allow you to either upload a file.
Or if you have it located on a different computer or a different drive, you can pull it from there and add it. I’m not going to add that right now. I don’t have an example for you, but you could do that right there. Okay. So if we get clicks that save here, that will add it to your current expense report. And you’ll see, I’ve got a couple of other things in there as well. One other thing I want to show you an example of is how to record your mileage each month. You definitely want to do this at least on a monthly basis to make sure that your financials are up to date and that it doesn’t get out of hand. If you try to remember this for the whole year, it just won’t work. And you’ll miss lot of the deduction. So let’s say that for our mileage for the month.
And you would keep a log elsewhere of the detail of this, but you could just report how many miles you had. Let’s say that you had 240 miles for 2014. The rate is 56 cents a mile. At the time of filming here. We don’t have the 2015, right as yet. Okay. And that expense will go to automobile expenses. And that is it. That will total your expense report. And I forgot to put in my total up here that will pull it. Alright, once you’ve got all of the expenses listed in there individually. You can click them all and submit for approval. Once you submitted for approval, those will come through to the front. Oh, we have one that was incomplete here. So let’s just take that one out for right now.
We’ll submit for approval. All right. And now when you look back at your dashboard, you will see that these are awaiting authorization. When we pay those out, you will not necessarily have to take cash out of the business. We can post that against your distributions or draws account so that it just reduces the amount of money that you took out of the business. If you do not use Xero for some reason, or you would prefer to use this in a more manual way, we also have an Excel spreadsheet available to you. You can get this off of your portal and this will allow you to fill in those things individually. One other great option I’ll give to you though is there’s also a Xero touch app that you can use on your mobile devices. So either Android or Apple products that will allow you to take a picture of receipts.
I often, when I travel, take a picture of the receipt right then and there, it will store that for me, even if I don’t have time to enter the details of it right now, but that way I won’t forget the iTouch or the Apple touch app Xero touch app. I’m sorry, will also allow you to do things like check your balances. You could issue an invoice to a customer on the spot and check out your reconcile items as well, or search back to find out how much something was. So it’s a great app. I definitely recommend that you take a look at that and see if that will help you streamline your operations. So I hope this helps you understand expense reporting. If you have any other questions, feel free to let me know. Thank you and have a great day.
Donna Bordeaux, CPA with Calculated Moves
Creativity and CPAs don’t generally go together. Most people think of CPAs as nerdy accountants who can’t talk with people. Well, it’s time to break that stereotype. Lively, friendly and knowledgeable can be a part of your relationship with your CPA as demonstrated by Donna and Chad Bordeaux. They have over 50 years of combined experience as entrepreneurial CPAs. They’ve owned businesses and helped business owners exceed their wildest dreams. They have been able to help businesses earn many times more profit than the average business in the same industry and are passionate about helping industries that help families build great memories.