Academy / Lessons / Getting the basics right
Getting the basics right
The four things to settle before the first ledger line: why you keep accounts at all, which business form you actually are, how to keep company money apart from your own, and how the chart of accounts is ordered.
- EP1
Who are your accounts actually for? One set of books, three readers
Bookkeeping is not homework your accountant forces on you. It is the most under-used piece of information in your business — and the same set of books gets read three completely different ways.
- EP2
Enterprise? Sdn Bhd? LLP? The five business forms, sorted out in one go
Enterprise, Sdn. Bhd., LLP on your name card is not just a label. It decides who carries the debt, how you are taxed, how the bank sees you, and what compliance costs you every year. One question runs through all of it: in the eyes of the law, are you and your business the same person?
- EP3
Company money is not your money: what mixing the two has cost Malaysian bosses
"The company's money is my money what?" — that one sentence puts bosses through back taxes, penalties and rejected loan applications every year. Here is where the line sits between a business expense and a personal one, and four things you can start doing today.
- EP4
Statements you cannot read? Start with the table of contents: the chart of accounts
Very often the problem is not the numbers, it is the classification. The chart of accounts is your ledger's table of contents: the five classes, and how the LTT standard goes right down to every address and every number plate. Get the classification right and the tax return is a copy job, and the numbers start speaking plainly.
- EP34
Accounting policies: one business, two profits, and neither of them wrong
Depreciation, the capitalisation threshold, stock valuation, when revenue is recognised, bad debts — which one you pick matters far less than picking the same one every year.