Keeping a cash book: The basics of cash book accounting

You should document the operating income and expenditures of your company well, not least because doing so helps to assess its success and financial state. At the end of the fiscal year, the HMRC also needs a detailed final balance sheet for your company in order to determine the amount and type of your taxation. But how do daily account dealings look? To be able to document your cash payments in accordance with regulations, you need a cash book. But what exactly is that? And who is required to use cash book accounting? Here, we outline the most important fundamentals and explain how to correctly keep your cash book.

Many business owners now earn their money through cash-free payments (such as transfers, direct debits, credit card payments, etc.). But cash payment is still fairly common. To make sure that the HMRC receives all of the information required for each transaction, you need to record your cash receipts. This is done using the cash book.

The cash book is one of the most important additional books for business accounting. You don’t even need to be an accountant to understand the fundamentals of proper cash book accounting. In general, you just need to focus on the following principle:

Expressed simply: Accounting, including the cash book, serves as a tax base for companies. Because of this, each cash book entry (receipts, expenditures, document numbers, tax rates, etc.) needs to be understandable and comprehensible to the tax authorities.

To avoid issues when being audited, the HMRC has a comprehensive list of recommendations for recordkeeping - when in doubt, just keep it all. Holding onto any and all supporting business documents will keep you from getting caught in the trap of unsubstantiated claims on your tax returns. It’s also recommended to keep all of your records neatly organised in chronological order and according to the type of income or expense. The following table provides an overview of the documentation recommended by the HMRC:             

The following video will help you better understand the interplay between your cash drawer and the balance sheet:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkbCHQKxXXY

Cash book accounting isn’t required of everyone. You only really need to keep a cash book if you operate using double-entry accounting, which is never legally required in the U.K. However, it is recommended for larger businesses.

If you run a small business, or simply choose not to use double-entry accounting and stick to simple accounting rules instead, you don’t necessarily need to keep a cash book. In this case, the HMRC just needs a profit calculation in simplified form of cash-basis accounting.

At its core, cash book accounting is fairly simple: Everything that you take in or give out in cash needs to be entered into the cash book, chronologically and completely, and a profit calculation needs to be added up at the end. Once you understand the process, you’ll quickly develop your own routine. But before you start getting familiar, you should first know exactly how a cash book is built.

To be able to neatly document your cash business, you need a consistently structured cash book. All entries need to contain the following information:

Date of the transaction
Receipt number for clearly assigning the document to the transaction
Booking text (short description of the transaction)
Receipt and currency of the cash revenue or expenditure
Applied tax rate (VAT rate)
Current cash balance and debit balance

With the right cash book template, you can start right away with your cash book accounting. Simply enter the required information into the corresponding fields, according to the instructions. Be sure to balance your cash journal every day, and carefully enter all of the data along with the relevant documents. When creating a cash book entry, note the following points:

The cash book may only contain cash transactions.
Enter the exact date as well as the opening balance of the previous day, month, or year.
Cash income goes in the “Revenue” column, and cash out goes in “Expenditure”.
Enter all cash transactions chronologically. Subsequent modifications are not allowed.
At the end, check whether the debit balance corresponds to the actual value of the cash count.
Make sure that your cash balance never displays less than 0 pounds.

Thanks to professional software solutions, cash book accounting has become relatively simple. Entry into an electronic cash book means not only less effort but also more safety when it comes to the annual audit. Then, in the case that tax authorities are unclear about something, you can quickly answer all of their questions without having to first go through your cash book. Above all, it’s important that your cash book meets all of the requirements of the tax office. It doesn’t so much matter whether you’re creating your cash book based on an Excel table or with the help of a professional finance software. Professional finance software allows you to keep your books in an efficient, time-saving, and accurate manner. It reliably stores all cash book entries and directly creates the corresponding documents. All of the documents required by the tax office are available for download. For example, if you operate an open checkout in your company, you can create a cash report with just a click and forward it directly to the tax office. At the same time, you always have an accurate overview of the financial situation of your company. In general, there are three different types of cash book accounting software:

Depending on how big your business is, whether it’s accountable or not, and how much your business operates with cash transactions, a special cash book software will make more or less sense for your business. For businesses or associations that aren’t accountable, cash books in the form of simple Excel spreadsheets are perfect, while large companies that do require bookkeeping benefit substantially from the many features of cash book software.

Errors in the cash book indicate improper financial accounting and aren’t accepted by the HMRC. If there are violations that break the law or policy - i.e. due to missing information or subsequent changes - the tax office can penalise you. The best way to avoid penalties is by filing payments on time and ensuring that they are accurate. If you file your tax return and later realise there is a mistake, it is your duty to notify the HMRC of the error. An overview of tax penalties is available on their website. Depending on the range and severity of the violations, you could face the following penalties or criminal proceedings:

• Extra tax due
• If a penalty arises because of a lack of reasonable care, the penalty will be between 0% and 30% of the extra tax due
• If the error is deliberate, the penalty will be between 20% and 70% of the extra tax due
• If the error is deliberate and concealed, the penalty will be between 30% and 100% of the extra tax due
• Penalties based on foreign jurisdiction (in the case of offshore penalties)
• Criminal prosecution for tax evasion

It is important to keep in mind that penalties can be reduced by helping the HMRC correct the errors, so it is always in your best interest to notify the tax office if you catch a mistake in your tax records.

Please note the legal disclaimer relating to this article.