Expenses, accounts, and reconciling them

The profit tile on the dashboard is gross profit: no rent, no wages, no electricity taken off it. To know what you actually made, the expenses have to be in. Until they are, the system will always show you more than you earned.

Entering an expense

On the expenses screen, add one: date, category, amount, and which account it came out of.

Do not skip that last field. Pay a 500-taka van fare out of the drawer and fail to record it as coming out of the drawer, and the day close will be 500 short with nobody able to say why.

What is an expense and what is not

There is one mistake everybody makes. Buying stock to sell is not an expense — it goes on a purchase consignment, and it is your cost of goods. Expenses are everything else: rent, electricity, wages, transport, tea, repairs, licences.

Entering stock purchases as expenses as well counts them twice, and your profit will read far worse than it is.

The accounts

One account per place money sits: the cash drawer, the bank, bKash, Nagad. Every sale and every expense lands in one of them.

What that buys you is an answer to "how much have I got" broken down by where it is — this much in the bank, this much in the drawer, this much in bKash.

Reconciling

Reconciling means checking the system's figure for an account against reality. For the drawer that happens daily, at the day close. For the bank and bKash, once a month is enough.

The job is simple: open the statement, open the account, and match them. What does not match is nearly always something that was never entered — a deposit, a charge, an expense paid straight out of the bank.

Do it monthly and discrepancies surface while they are small. Leave it six months and you are going through six months of statements.

Where the money went

This screen shows what you spent, by category, over a period. Look at it once a month — most owners find at least one surprise on it. Usually it is transport, or the "miscellaneous" line nobody ever opens.