Numbering the Chart of Accounts
You might wonder what is the rationale for the numbers in the chart of accounts? Certainly, in a manual system for a small business, there is no need to number the chart of accounts so the numbers were introduced when small business accounting went computerised.
Read More »The Fascination of Accountancy
Do you find accountancy fascinating? Some of my clients love it. I’ve met engineers, stock brokers, shop keepers, hoteliers and others who want to do as much of the work as possible themselves though they’ve never had any accountancy training. I enjoy training my clients and am happy to tell them as much as they want to know about Xero, accounting and tax but I sometimes wonder if it’s cost effective for business owners to take their eye off the ball and spend a lot of time on accounting rather than focusing on their own business.
Read More »Payroll in Japan
Payroll in Japan can get quite complicated with basic wages, overtime and bonuses less deductions for income tax, residents tax, health insurance, over 40 health insurance, pension and labour insurance, not forgetting the employer’s contribution to employees’ health insurance, pension and labour insurance. Then of course you not only do you have to pay employees their net wages, you also have to pay the income tax withheld to the tax office, the residents tax to the local tax office, the health insurance and pension to the health insurance and pension office and labour insurance to the labour office all by the due dates having filled out the correct forms. Finally, at the end of the year you must prepare the end of year tax adjustment and withholding tax certificate. So why would you want to make it harder?
Read More »Finding a Japanese Tax Agent
Most businesses need to engage a tax accountant to help them prepare and lodge a tax return at the end of each financial year. I also recommend that businesses with employees should generally get a Japanese tax accountant to prepare the employee payroll, or at least have a Japanese tax accountant on call for questions and the end of year tax adjustment. I have come across a quite a few Japanese tax agents with a various skills, services and fees so it pays to find one which suits your requirements. I recommend you consider the following when choosing a Japanese tax accountant:
Read More »WorkflowMax project management software
WorkflowMax is an integrated, online all-in-one project management software program. It handles the whole process from lead to quotes, job management, time-recording, purchase orders, invoicing and reporting all in the cloud. It’s a Xero product and so integrates well with Xero accounting software. Find out more at www.workflowmax.com or ask me for a demonstration.
Read More »The KISS Principle – Keep it simple, stupid
Business owners like to get into some overly complicated or even dodgy deals from time to time, which may be OK if you’re on your own but may not, in my opinion, be such a good idea if you employ staff. “Tone at the top” is what auditors call it: owners should be leading by example to encourage staff to work hard and to help prevent their staff from committing fraud and other unethical practices.
Read More »MYOB or Xero?
A few years ago I took a quick look at Xero and felt its accounting features were not strong enough to justify changing from MYOB. It was totally online but I didn’t consider the benefits of an online accounting program at all. In October 2012, MYOB released its online version and I was keen to use it. I then began to realize how amazing an online accounting program could be: it offers all the business owners, all the staff, all the consultants, all the tax accountants and in fact anyone who is given permission to access the data file from any internet connected computer from any location at any time. It makes local area networking methods completely redundant.
Read More »DD/MM/YY, MM/DD/YY, YY/MM/DD or HH/MM/DD
It amazes me that in this age where just about every piece of information on earth has been digitized on to computers that we have not standardized the date, which is absolutely critical to any accounting system, if not life in general. The British and the Australians say DD/MM/YY, the Yanks and Canadians say MM/DD/YY, the Japanese say YY/MM/DD. So if you are looking at a document with a date of 11/9/13, it could be the 11th day of September 2013, the 9th day of November 2013 or the 13th day of September 2011, depending who wrote it. But wait, in Japan it gets worse, they not only use YY/MM/DD but they also have their own calendar starting with the accession of each emperor. The Heisei period started in 1988 and so 11/9/13 could now be the 11th year of the Heisei period, the 9th month and the 13th day, which would be the 13th September 1999.
Read More »The trouble with banking & bookkeeping in Japan
There once was a time and place when making payments from your bank account also produced almost automatically a nice little booklet containing all the necessary information about such payments: date, payee, description and amount. This was called the cheque book system which, interestingly, has never existed in Japan as far as I know. As part of writing out the cheque, you also wrote out a cheque stub with all these details and ended up with little booklets of 25 to 50 cheque stubs which were a vital part of your bookkeeping records. At the end of each financial year, you could present all your cheque stub booklets to your accountant and off he’d go and happily prepare your accounts.
Read More »MYOB turns Japanese
In all the old versions of MYOB, it was impossible to enter Japanese characters, which probably didn’t bother most users in Australia but was a little frustrating for us in Japan. On the other hand, old versions of MYOB have tended to work better for us than in Australia as most new features were tax and payroll related which are of limited use in Japan. Well, MYOB has now been rewritten on a different code base to allow for future cloud migration which has brought with it some new features which will help Japanese users, not least that MYOB now accepts Japanese characters!
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