Businesses are required by statue to a set of accounts to support the tax calculation. Complex accounting systems are rarely appropriate for small business who normally choose between preparing accounts on a cash accounting basis or accrual accounting basis.
The date entered on the sales or purchase receipt is called the tax point. The tax point does not determine the spread of that transaction over the tax period which can be different when accounts are prepared on an accruals basis as opposed to a cash basis.
For the purposes of cash accounting the effective inclusion of the transaction in the financial records is the date the cash or bank receipt or payment was made. The tax point date on the document is not the deciding factor to include the item in the accounts. The date the amount was paid out or received into cash funds or bank account is the date to be used fopr inclusion in the accounts.
There are disadvantages to maintaining https://smallbusinessowner.io/ accounts on a cash basis in that records must be kept of all payments received and paid out and those records supported by the actual primary accounting documents to which they relate. That entails matching the financial documents to the payments and receipts records, a feature many small businesses might find onerous as record keeping ios often regarded by samll business as an administrative burden.
Virtually all professional accountants adopt an accruals basis for clients accounting purposes as it is based upon recording all financial information whether relevant to the tax period or not and then adjusting the management accounting profit indicated to produce the net taxable profit or loss.
By operating an accruals basis all financial documents are recorded according to the tax point date. If every transaction was paid or received within the year then the cash accounting and accruals basis would produce the same tax accounts.
The main adjustment a small business or the accountant might make to accounts prepared on the accruals basis is to first prepare the set of accounts according to the tax point of the primary accounting records and then examine those transactions and adjust them according to their relevance to the financial period for which the accounts are being prepared.