Author: Mindy Lamont

Mindy Lamont earned the CPB designation from CPB Canada and became a QuickBooks Advanced ProAdvisor after 15 years working for the family business. In her early days as an "accidental bookkeeper" and financial controller, she made every mistake possible. With the help of many trusted advisors, she learned valuable (and expensive) lessons by unraveling the mess. With this unique upbringing in the accounting profession, she developed a great knack for knowing how to soothe the sore spots of other business owners. Today, she shares her practical and approachable methods with other accidental bookkeepers to help them avoid all the needless suffering and make their businesses more profitable.

Demystifying the TD1 Form: Understanding Your Obligations for Employees and Employers

As a Canadian employee, you may have encountered the TD1 form at one time or another. The TD1 form is a crucial document that helps the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) determine how much income tax should be deducted from your paycheque. Let’s start with the employee’s responsibility. What is the point of the TD1 form? […]

The 5 Steps to Setting Up Your Business Bookkeeping [A Complete Canadian Guide]

A Complete Guide for Canadian Business Owners The 5 Steps to Setting Up Your Business Bookkeeping Catch Up – Get control of your receipts and invoices Keep Up – OHIO (Only handle it once) Get organized once and for all Go Paperless – Never lose a deduction Take it to the cloud – Cloud bookkeeping […]

How to organize invoices and receipts electronically [A review of the top 3 receipt capture apps]

Paper filing systems might have been fine for the Flinstones, but today’s smart business owners should be using apps to digitize their receipts and invoices. In this roundup, I’m going to talk about the best way to organize receipts and invoices electronically and give you the pros and cons of the top receipt capture apps out there.

How to Use Dext to Digitize Your Business Receipts [4 tips for taking better pictures]

Digitizing your receipts using a receipt capture app is the best way to manage your business receipts and automate your bookkeeping. These amazing apps will at a minimum help you easily find your paperwork, but can also be leveraged to automatically extract the data from your receipts and automatically enter them into your bookkeeping app like Xero or Quickbooks Online.

Desktop vs. Cloud Accounting Apps: 5 Benefits of Cloud Bookkeeping

Desktop accounting software has been around for decades. Business owners have been stuck pecking away, painfully entering receipt after receipt for just as long. Leveraging cloud technology to automate your bookkeeping is a game changer for businesses. Sage Accounting and QuickBooks have historically been the two most popular desktop accounting programs in Canada. Every experienced […]

The Art of the Chart [Two Secrets to Setting Up Your Chart of Accounts]

Two Secrets to creating an awesome chart of accounts The chart of accounts is the breakdown of all the financial transactions of your business into subcategories of assets, liabilities, equity, income and expenses. A well-designed chart of accounts is the underpinning of your financial reports in QuickBook. Reports are what help you to digest how […]

What Business Paperwork Do I Need to Keep? [How Improper Record-Keeping Can Cause Big CRA Pain]

For new business owners, figuring out what you have to do to keep CRA happy can feel like a full time job. What is a source document? What business paperwork do I need to keep? And what paperwork do my customers need from me are all questions I’ve heard from our members this week. In […]

The 7 Big Business Mistakes [Secrets of successful business owners]

I can’t even count the number of books I’ve seen claiming to be “the only book you’ll need to run a successful business”. If all you had to do to be a success was read one book, no business owner would ever have to declare bankruptcy. No business owner would ever have to lay off […]

3 Ways Employees Can Kill Your Business

The difference between being self employed and being a business owner is an employee. Being your own boss, setting your own hours, and choosing your own customers are some of the big draws for Self Employment. But if you intend to grow from being self employed into being a business owner then employees will form […]

What the hell is workflow, and why should I care?

The systems you use to run your business can either help you, or hold you back. What is Workflow? According to the Oxford Dictionary, Workflow is:”the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.” Basically, it’s how things get done. Every business already has […]

Pivot to Succeed [How bookkeeping can save your business]

Knowing your numbers is key to your businesses health. If you’re working with real time data, and really paying attention to what your numbers are telling you, you’ll know what changes you need to make. You can start to track how long each of your services takes to complete, what customers are the easiest to […]