When you start a business, you’re typically your only employee and payroll is about as simple as it gets. But as you grow, you hopefully find yourself in the position of needing to take on more employees. Before you know it, what was once a very straightforward task becomes a giant undertaking that’s sucking up most of your time. This is when it makes sense to outsource your payroll. While this is yet another cost to consider, it’s actually a great idea that easily pays for itself. Here are the ways outsourcing your payroll can help you: 1. Free up your time In…

From calculating taxes on online sales to inventory management to figuring out shipping logistics, running an eCommerce Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) business comes with a whole host of challenges and considerations. Your bookkeeping and accounting solution needs to be able to keep up. As experts, we at Fuel Accountants want to help our clients by ensuring their books are clean so that you can run your business efficiently.

If you ask 100 business owners what they like least about running a business, chances are good that bookkeeping will rank high on the list. It's an annoying and frustrating chore that takes up a lot of time and is easy to put off until tomorrow. Avoiding your...

Still Doing Your Own Payroll?  Here’s 3 Reasons Why You Should Stop At face value, it seems like a great idea. If you’re a small business owner with just a few employees, you probably think that hiring a payroll specialist is an expense that you can avoid. You feel...

If you've just started working with Xero, it is normal to make a few mistakes while you’re learning. We see mistakes that are quite common - and unfortunately costly - so you should be aware of them if you want to get the most out of Xero’s powerful cloud accounting...

We have lots of clients who do their own bookkeeping in Xero. Here are our Best Practices for managing your own bookkeeping:

• Keep your personal transactions out of the business bank account.  If you need to spend on something personal transfer funds to your personal account and pay from there!  The transfer to yourself (and any personal spending you do include) is Drawings/Shareholder Loan.
• Add your expenses as Bills or Spend money as you incur them.  This will avoid missing things.  Use Xero’s Email to Files or Email to Bills feature to get documents into the queue, or for more powerful features talk to us about Receipt Bank.

This article is re-posted from the xero.com blog.
I’m not a huge fan of the Super Bowl, but I love seeing the ads. They’re always the highlight of the whole event for a lot of people. This year there was a great ad by BMW that showed a clip of two TODAY show hosts from 1994 who was reading an email address out loud. It was obviously the first time they’d done so. They didn’t know how to pronounce an ‘@’. This led to the perplexing duo questioning “what is the internet anyway?”