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The toolkit

Bookkeeping and invoicing basics

You will learn the bookkeeping work you are actually asked to do: capturing receipts, categorising expenses consistently, building and sending invoices, chasing payment politely, matching money received to open invoices, and reconciling a month against the bank statement. You will also learn the line you do not cross, because a qualified accountant advises and files while you prepare and organise. Nothing here is accounting or tax advice.

9
lessons
~65
minutes
12
exam questions

Free · No paid tier · No certificate fee

After this course

Everything, and what is in it.

What the job actually is

~7 min

Your side of the line

Bookkeeping support means handling the paperwork that makes someone else's accounting possible. You collect receipts, record transactions, keep categories consistent, prepare invoices, chase payment, and reconcile the month against the bank. What you do not do is decide how a transaction should be treated for tax, tell someone what they can deduct, or file anything with a tax authority. That work belongs to a qualified accountant or licensed tax professional in the client's country. Nothing in this course is accounting or tax advice, and you should never present your own work as advice. The line is not a limit on your value. An owner with clean, current, organised books pays their accountant for judgement instead of for cleanup, and you are the reason that is possible.

What lands on your desk

The work is concrete. A month of bank transactions exported to a spreadsheet, none of them categorised. A folder of phone photos of receipts, some of them sideways. Six invoices to raise from a timesheet and a rate card. A list of customers who have not paid, and the reminders that need to go out. A March bank statement to check line by line against the records. That is the shape of most bookkeeping tasks you will see, on this platform and elsewhere. None of it requires a licence. All of it requires care, because every number you type becomes the basis of a decision somebody else makes later.

The questions to ask before you start

Before you touch a file, you need six answers. Which records am I working in, and where do they live. What is the exact period. What is the existing category list, and can I see last month's finished version. What do I do with anything I am unsure about. Who signs off. When is it due. On AfterDesk these usually sit in the brief, and if one is missing you raise it with the operator rather than guessing halfway through. Working directly for a business owner, you ask once at the beginning and write the answers somewhere you can reread. Five minutes at the start saves an hour of rework at the end.

How this works on AfterDesk

On AfterDesk the payout is printed before you claim, so read the brief first and decide whether the work fits the price. Once you claim, the files come down with the task. Your questions go to the operator, never to the client, because you and the client never meet. You upload the finished file with a note explaining what you did, what you assumed, and what you could not resolve. The operator reviews it before the client ever sees it, and may send it back for revision. That review is not an insult. It is a second pair of eyes on numbers, which is exactly what bookkeeping needs. Working directly for an owner, you are the only pair of eyes, so you build the checks yourself.

Remember

  • You prepare and organise the books. A qualified accountant advises and files.
  • Ask the six setup questions before you start, not halfway through the file.
  • Every number you type becomes the basis of a decision someone else makes.
  • On AfterDesk, questions go to the operator, never to the client.

The words on the page

~6 min

Invoice, bill, receipt

Three documents get mixed up constantly, and mixing them up loses money. An invoice is a request for payment. When your client issues one, it is a sale and it sits in accounts receivable until it is paid. When your client receives one, the same document is a bill, and it sits in accounts payable until they pay it. A receipt is proof that payment already happened. A receipt is not a request for anything, and an unpaid invoice is not proof of anything. When somebody hands you a pile of paper and calls it all receipts, sort it first. Half of it is usually bills, and some of those may still be unpaid.

Payable, receivable and ageing

Accounts payable is what the business owes to others. Accounts receivable is what others owe the business. Both are lists, and both are only useful when they carry dates. Ageing means grouping those amounts by how overdue they are: not yet due, one to thirty days late, thirty one to sixty, sixty one to ninety, and over ninety. An ageing report is the single most useful thing you can hand an owner who feels vaguely worried about cash, because it converts a feeling into four numbers. You will build one in Google Sheets later in this course, and you will use it to decide who to chase first.

Income, expense, and the proof behind them

Income is money the business earned. An expense is money it spent to operate. Those definitions sound obvious until you meet the edges. Money that arrives is not always income: a loan, a refund, a transfer between the owner's own accounts, and a customer deposit are all money in, and none of them is a sale. Money that leaves is not always an expense: a loan repayment, money the owner takes out for themselves, and a transfer to savings all reduce the bank balance without being a cost of doing business. You do not need to classify these correctly on your own. You need to recognise them and stop, because these are exactly the lines an accountant wants flagged.

Reconciliation, and two ways to count time

Reconciliation means comparing your records against an independent record, usually a bank statement, and explaining every difference. It is the routine that catches what everything else missed, and you will do a full one in a later lesson. One more pair of words. Cash basis records income when money actually moves. Accrual basis records it when the invoice is issued or received, regardless of when it is paid. Which one a business uses is decided by its accountant and the rules that apply to it, not by you. You only need to know which one is in use, because it tells you which date to record. If nobody has told you, that is a question, not a guess.

Remember

  • An invoice asks for money. A receipt proves it arrived. Sort the pile first.
  • Payable is what the business owes. Receivable is what it is owed.
  • Money in is not always income, and money out is not always an expense.
  • Cash or accrual is the accountant's decision. You just need to know which.

Categorising expenses consistently

~7 min

Use the list that already exists

Every set of books has a category list, sometimes called a chart of accounts. Your first move is to find it, not to design one. Ask for it, or open last month's finished file and read what was used. If a list genuinely does not exist, propose a short one and get it approved before you start typing, rather than inventing categories as you go. Twelve to twenty categories covers most small businesses: rent, utilities, software, professional fees, travel, meals, supplies, equipment, bank charges, advertising, contractors, insurance. A long list feels thorough and behaves badly, because the more choices there are, the less consistently anyone picks the same one twice.

Consistency beats cleverness

The purpose of categories is comparison. An owner wants to see that software costs jumped from 210 dollars to 640 dollars between February and March. That comparison only works if the same kind of expense lands in the same place every month. This is why one slightly imperfect category applied consistently to all eleven payments beats eleven thoughtful individual judgements. One consistent mistake is one correction. Eleven scattered guesses are eleven investigations, and the accountant charges by the hour. So build a rule and hold it. This vendor goes to this category, every time, until somebody who owns the books tells you otherwise.

Write the rules down

Keep a rules sheet in the same file, one tab, three columns: vendor or description, category, and note. Every time you decide something, it goes on that sheet, and when you deliver, the sheet goes with the work. This does three things. Whoever picks up the file next month makes the same choices you did. The accountant can correct one rule instead of fifty rows. And you can defend every decision without having to remember it. In a spreadsheet, sort by description before you categorise. Identical vendors group together and you fill a block at a time, which is faster and far more consistent than working down the file in date order.

The unsure column

Never guess to fill a cell. Add a column called Status and mark anything uncertain as Ask, with a short note saying what you need. Then build the questions list at the end: row number, date, amount, vendor, and the specific question. Ten precise questions delivered with the file is professional. One vague message saying that some things were unclear is not. Do not park unknowns in a category called Miscellaneous or Other and move on, because that category is where clarity goes to die and it hides exactly the transactions that need attention. If the unsure pile is very large, that is information too, and you say so plainly in your note.

Personal, mixed and awkward

Some spending genuinely sits between business and personal. A laptop bought on the business card and used at home. A phone bill on one account. A meal that may have been a client or may have been Saturday. Whether these count as business expenses affects tax, which means the call is not yours. Your job is to isolate them, describe them accurately, and hand them over. Write what you can see, not what you assume: date, vendor, amount, and any detail printed on the receipt. Never label a transaction personal or business just to make a file look finished. Two hours over budget and honest is a better outcome than on time and quietly wrong.

Remember

  • Find the existing category list before you invent one.
  • One consistent mistake is one correction. Eleven guesses are eleven investigations.
  • Keep a rules sheet and deliver it with the finished file.
  • Mark unsure rows Ask and deliver a precise questions list.
  • Business or personal is the owner's call, never yours.

Receipts, capture and filing

~7 min

Capture before it fades

Thermal paper receipts fade. A receipt photographed in week one is still readable in five years, while the same receipt left in a drawer in June may be blank by December. So the rule is capture early, capture everything, sort later. When you photograph, lay the receipt flat on a plain surface, get the whole document in frame including the top and bottom edges, and check that the date, the vendor, the total and any tax line are readable before you move on. Google Drive on a phone has a free scan function that flattens and crops. Any phone camera works if you are careful. A blurry photo is not a receipt, it is a future question.

Name files so they sort themselves

Use one pattern and never break it. Date first in year, month, day order, then vendor, then amount, so 2026-03-14_MeralcoElectric_1240.75.pdf. Dates written that way sort chronologically by themselves in every system, which is why the format is worth the small ugliness. Spell each vendor the same way every time, capitals included, and keep the approved spellings on your rules sheet. One receipt per file. Never merge twelve receipts into a single PDF to save space, because the moment somebody needs the third one they have to open and scroll everything. Avoid spaces and punctuation beyond hyphens and underscores, since some systems mangle them.

A folder structure that survives

Keep it shallow. Year, then month, then everything for that month in one place. Deep folder trees feel organised and slow everyone down, and by month four nobody remembers which branch a receipt went into. If the business has more than one account or card, one extra level for that is reasonable, and that is the limit. Name folders the same way as files, with the year and month in numbers so they sort correctly. Then write a one paragraph note at the top level explaining the system in plain language. When somebody else takes over, or when you come back to the file after eight months, that paragraph is what saves the afternoon.

The missing receipt log

You will always have transactions with no supporting document. Keep a log: date, amount, vendor as it appears on the bank line, and what you already tried. Deliver it with the work. Never fabricate a receipt, never type an amount you cannot actually read, and never assume that a 47 dollar charge from a familiar vendor was the usual thing. If a receipt is only partly readable, capture what is there and note what is missing. The log is not an admission of failure. It is the difference between a file where the gaps are known and a file where they are hidden, and only one of those can be trusted.

Where the files are allowed to live

Receipts and statements live in the client's own storage, not yours. On AfterDesk the files arrive with the claimed task and the finished work goes back through the delivery upload, so nothing needs to sit on your machine after approval. Delete local copies once the work is approved. Client data never leaves the task: no uploading receipts, statements or customer lists to a third party service, an online converter or an AI tool, unless the brief says so explicitly. Silence is not permission. Never keep a copy as a personal reference, and never use real client documents as a portfolio sample, however well you blur the name. That rule protects the client, and it is also the only reason anyone trusts you with a bank statement.

Remember

  • Capture receipts early. Thermal paper can fade to blank within months.
  • Name files date first, then vendor, then amount. One receipt per file.
  • Keep folders shallow and write down the system for the next person.
  • Log missing receipts. Never fabricate one or type an amount you cannot read.
  • Client files stay in the task. No third party uploads, no copies kept.

Building an invoice

~8 min

What has to be on it

An invoice is a formal request for money, and a vague one is easy to ignore. It needs the word Invoice, a unique invoice number, the issue date, and the due date written as an actual date. It needs the seller's full business name, address, contact details, and any business or tax registration number the client uses. It needs the customer's name and address, not just a first name. It needs line items with a clear description, quantity, rate and line total. It needs the subtotal, any tax line the client's setup requires, the total, and the currency stated explicitly. It needs payment instructions and a reference to quote. Requirements vary by country and by the client's tax position, so use their template and their accountant's guidance, not one you found online.

Numbering and dates

Invoice numbers must be unique, sequential and never reused. A format such as 2026-041 tells you the year and the position at a glance. Never delete an invoice to free up a number, and never leave unexplained gaps in the sequence, because gaps look like hidden sales to anyone reviewing later. Terms are the second half of this. Net 15 or Net 30 means payment is due fifteen or thirty days from the invoice date, but do not make the customer count. Write the due date in full, as in Due 14 April 2026. An explicit due date makes the first reminder easy to write and removes the most common excuse for late payment, which is genuine confusion about when it was due.

Build it from evidence

Every figure on an invoice should come from a document, not from memory or from what feels about right. The rate comes from the agreement or the rate card. The quantity comes from the timesheet, the delivery log or the purchase order. If the owner tells you to bill something different from what the evidence shows, that is their right, and you ask for the instruction in writing before you change the number. Then check three things before it goes anywhere: the right customer, the right total recalculated by hand rather than trusted from a formula, and the right payment details. Wrong bank details on an otherwise correct invoice is the most expensive small mistake in this work.

Free tools, and the client's tools

Many businesses run accounting software such as QuickBooks, Xero or Zoho Books. If your client does, you work inside their account with the access they grant you, and you never open a personal or trial account to hold their business data. Where no software exists, the free path works fine. Build the invoice in Google Docs or Google Sheets from a template you keep clean, fill it in, then export to PDF. Always send PDF, never an editable file. Keep a numbered copy of every invoice in the client's own storage, and keep an invoice register in Sheets with number, date, customer, amount, due date and status. That register is what the ageing report is built from, and reconstructing it later is far harder than keeping it now.

Who presses send

Sending is not always your decision. Some owners want to review every invoice before it goes out, some want you to send from their address or their software, and some want to send it themselves. Ask once and follow the answer. Where you do send, use the business's own address and a plain subject line carrying the invoice number and the amount. Attach the PDF, restate the amount and the due date in the body, and keep the message short. On AfterDesk you send nothing to anyone. You prepare the invoice, deliver the file through the task with a note, and the operator handles everything downstream. You never contact a client or a client's customers.

Remember

  • An invoice needs a unique number, a real due date, and the currency stated.
  • Never reuse or delete an invoice number. Gaps look like hidden sales.
  • Every figure comes from a document. Only a written instruction changes a number.
  • Send PDF, never an editable file, and keep a register of every invoice.
  • On AfterDesk you prepare and deliver. The operator handles all sending.

Chasing payment without burning bridges

~8 min

Build the ageing first

You cannot chase what you cannot see. From the invoice register, build a simple ageing in Google Sheets: one row per unpaid invoice with customer, number, amount, due date, and days overdue calculated from today. Group into not yet due, one to thirty, thirty one to sixty, sixty one to ninety, and over ninety. Sort by amount inside each group. Now the work orders itself. The oldest and largest go first, because those are the ones most likely to become bad debt and the ones the owner most needs resolved. Refresh the ageing before every chasing session, because nothing looks worse than demanding money that arrived on Tuesday.

The sequence

A chase is a sequence, not a single anxious email. Three days before the due date, a short friendly note with the invoice attached and the due date restated. The day after it falls due, a brief message that assumes an oversight. At seven days, a plainer message asking for a payment date. At fourteen days, the same again, with the history and a question about whether the invoice was received at all. At around thirty days you stop and hand it to the owner with a summary of everything sent. Every step keeps the invoice attached, restates the amount, the number and the due date, and asks one clear question. Firmness comes from repetition and clarity, not from stronger words.

Words that work

Short beats long, and specific beats polite noise. A workable message reads like this. Invoice 2026-041 for 840 dollars was due on 14 March. It is attached again for convenience. Could you confirm the date it will be paid. That is the whole message. Do not apologise for asking, do not explain that you hate to chase, and do not threaten anything. Assume good faith for a long time, because most late payment is administrative rather than refusal. The invoice went to the wrong mailbox, the approver was away, a purchase order number was missing. A specific question uncovers those reasons. A vague reminder just adds another unread email to the pile.

Where your authority ends

You do not agree discounts. You do not agree payment plans. You do not write off a balance, threaten legal action, or tell a customer their account is suspended. Every one of those is an owner decision with consequences you do not carry. When a customer proposes something, your job is speed and clarity. Tell them you will confirm shortly, put the request to the owner with the ageing detail attached, and come back with the answer. That is not weakness. Answering within a day with a real decision beats improvising in the moment and creating a promise the business then has to honour.

Log every contact

Keep a contact log beside the ageing: date, invoice number, channel, who you reached, what they said, and any date they promised. Two things come out of it. Your next message can reference the last one specifically, which is what makes a chase feel serious rather than automated. And when the owner asks what happened with a customer, you answer in ten seconds with facts instead of impressions. If a customer promises a date, note it and follow up the day after it passes, without fail. Nothing weakens a chasing sequence faster than a broken promise that nobody noticed.

Remember

  • Build an ageing report first. It decides who you chase and when.
  • Chase in a sequence: before due, day after, day seven, day fourteen, escalate.
  • Assume good faith. Most late payment is administrative, not refusal.
  • Discounts, plans and write offs are owner decisions. Bring options, not promises.
  • Log every contact and follow up every promised payment date.

Matching payments to invoices

~6 min

A deposit is not a payment yet

Money arriving in the bank tells you almost nothing until you know which invoice it settles. Matching is that step, and it is the part most often skipped when somebody is in a hurry. Work from two lists: open invoices, and money received that is not yet allocated. Take each deposit, find its invoice, record the invoice number against the deposit and the payment date against the invoice, then move both off the open lists. A remittance advice, the note a customer sends saying what they are paying for, makes this trivial when it exists. When it does not, match by amount first, then by date, then by the reference on the bank line.

Four messy cases

Partial payment: record what arrived, leave the remainder open, note it. Combined payment: one deposit covering several invoices, so split it across them and confirm the total ties exactly before you close any of them. Overpayment: record the full amount received, leave a credit sitting on the customer's account, and tell the owner rather than deciding to refund. Short payment: 486 dollars arrives against a 500 dollar invoice, usually a transfer or currency fee. Record 486, leave 14 open, flag it. Whether the business absorbs that fee or chases it is a decision, not a formatting problem. The rule underneath all four is the same. Never mark an invoice paid in full when the money that arrived was not the full amount.

Unidentified deposits

Sometimes money arrives and nothing fits. No matching amount, no reference, no remittance. Do not force it onto the nearest invoice because it is roughly the right size, and do not delete it. Park it in an unidentified queue with the date, the amount and whatever the bank line says, and ask. Matching a payment to the wrong invoice creates two errors at once: an invoice that looks settled and is not, and a real payment nobody can trace. That is much harder to unpick in October than it was to ask about in March. The same applies to a deposit you suspect is a loan, a refund, or the owner's own money. Park it and ask.

Refunds, credit notes and corrections

A refund is money going back to a customer. A credit note is a document that reduces what a customer owes without any money moving. They are not interchangeable, and neither one is a licence to edit history. If an invoice was wrong, you do not open it and change the number, and you do not delete it. You keep it, and the owner issues a credit note or a corrected invoice that references the original number. This matters because a sent invoice already exists outside your file, in somebody else's inbox and possibly in their payables. Quietly editing your copy makes the two versions disagree, and whoever discovers that later will not assume it was innocent.

Remember

  • A deposit means nothing until it is tied to a specific invoice.
  • Never mark an invoice paid in full for a partial or short payment.
  • Park unidentified deposits and ask. A forced match creates two errors.
  • Correct a sent invoice with a credit note, never by editing or deleting.

The monthly reconciliation

~9 min

What you are comparing

Reconciliation compares the records the business keeps against a record it does not control, almost always the bank statement. The goal is simple to state. Every line on the statement appears once in the books, every line in the books appears once on the statement, and anything left over has a written explanation. When that is true, the closing balance in the books equals the closing balance on the statement, and the month can be closed. Doing this every month takes an hour or two. Doing it once a year takes days and finds problems too late to fix cheaply. That is why a reliable monthly reconciliation is one of the most valuable recurring services you can offer, on this platform or directly.

Set up before you tick

Half the work is preparation. Export the bank statement for the period as CSV where possible, and export or copy the book records for exactly the same dates. Put them side by side in one Google Sheets file, one tab each, with the same column shape: date, description, money in, money out. Force both date columns into the same format, because mixed date formats are the single most common cause of a reconciliation that will not close. Write the statement's opening and closing balances at the top of the sheet before you start, since those are the two numbers you are working towards. Add a match column to each tab. You will put a reference in it, not a tick, so every match can be traced later.

Tick and tie

Work through the statement line by line rather than the books, because the statement is the record you cannot argue with. For each line, find its partner in the books: amount first, then date within a few days, then description. When you find it, put the same short reference in both match columns, such as M-014. When you do not, leave it and keep moving rather than stopping to investigate. Sorting a copy of each tab by amount helps you spot pairs quickly, and it also exposes duplicates, which show up as two identical amounts on the same side within a few days. Mark, never delete. A row you delete to make things fit is a row nobody can ever check.

Timing differences and real errors

What is left over falls into two piles, and telling them apart is the skill. A timing difference is real and normal: a payment made on 30 March that clears on 2 April, a deposit banked on the last day that lands the next, a cheque not yet presented. You do not correct these. You list them, carry them forward, and expect them to match next month. A real error is different: a duplicate entry, an amount typed wrong, a transaction in the bank with nothing in the books, a payment recorded that never happened. Those get flagged, with the amount and what you checked. Editing dates to make a timing difference disappear is not reconciliation, it is hiding the thing the process exists to reveal.

What you deliver

Deliver three things. The reconciled sheet with its match references intact, so anyone can retrace your steps. A summary in plain sentences giving the opening balance, the closing balance per the statement, the closing balance per the books, how many lines matched, and the unmatched items with a reason for each. And your questions. If it does not balance, say so, and say by exactly how much and where you looked. A reconciliation that is out by 43.20 dollars with an honest note attached is a useful piece of work. A reconciliation that balances because something was quietly adjusted is worse than none, because it will be trusted.

Remember

  • Every statement line appears once in the books, and every book line once on the statement.
  • Fix date formats before you start. Mixed formats break most reconciliations.
  • Mark matches with a traceable reference. Never delete a row to make it fit.
  • Timing differences are carried forward. Real errors are flagged with the amount.
  • Out by a known amount with an explanation beats a balance you invented.

Flag, do not fix

~7 min

The line between fixing and flagging

You fix your own work. Typos you introduced, formatting, a column you mis-sorted, a formula you wrote wrong. You do not silently change a number that came from a source document, and you do not delete a transaction because it looks odd. The test is simple. If the change alters what the records say happened, it is not yours to make, so you write it up instead. This is not timidity and it is not pushing work back up the chain. Flagging is the higher skill, because it takes noticing that something is wrong, describing it precisely, and resisting the urge to make the file look tidy. Anyone can produce a file with no open questions. Only a careful person produces the right open questions.

What always gets flagged

Learn this list. A payment that appears twice with the same amount and vendor within a few days. A vendor you have never seen receiving a large amount. Any request to change a supplier's bank details, especially by email. Round number cash withdrawals with no documentation. Spending that looks personal on a business account. An invoice that appears to have been paid twice. A transaction dated after the period was closed. A missing document above whatever threshold the owner has set. And anything at all that you do not understand. Flagging costs one sentence. Not flagging costs somebody money, sometimes a great deal of it, and the sentence you did not write is the one they will ask about.

Bank detail changes and other traps

One pattern deserves its own paragraph, because it is how small businesses lose large sums. An email arrives from a supplier's real address, or one that looks almost identical, saying their bank account has changed and asking that the next payment go to the new one. The attached invoice looks completely normal. Replying to that email confirms nothing, because if the mailbox is compromised you are asking the fraudster for confirmation. The only verification that counts is a phone call to a number you already had, from before the email arrived, and the flag goes to the owner first. Slow is the correct speed here. No legitimate supplier has ever lost a client over one day's delay to verify a bank change.

Honesty under time pressure

The dangerous moment is not when you find something serious. It is when you are already over your estimate, the delivery is due, and three transactions will not resolve. Every instinct says to categorise them as Miscellaneous, close the file and move on. Do not. Deliver on time with those three listed clearly: amounts, dates, what you checked, what you need. That is complete work with a known edge. A file with the gaps papered over is not complete, it is dangerous, because everyone downstream will treat it as finished. Nobody has ever lost a client for delivering an honest unresolved list. People lose clients when a hidden guess surfaces six months later.

When you are asked to bend it

Sooner or later somebody asks you to move a date into the previous period, record a personal purchase as a business expense, delete a row, or just make it balance. Sometimes it comes from pressure rather than dishonesty. The answer is the same either way. You do not do it, you say so politely, and you put your reason in writing to whoever owns the books. On AfterDesk you leave the source data exactly as it is and raise the instruction with the operator in your delivery note. Nothing is worth your name on falsified records, and the practical reality is that these things surface during audits and disputes, when the person who held the pen gets asked why.

Remember

  • Fix your own work. Never silently change a number from a source document.
  • Duplicates, unknown vendors, changed bank details and personal spending always get flagged.
  • Verify a bank detail change by phone, on a number you already had.
  • Deliver on time with an honest unresolved list rather than a tidy guess.
  • You never backdate and never delete. You put your reason in writing.

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Everything, and what is in it.