Financial Record Keeping Tips
Record keeping is one of the most important aspects of maintaining a business. The financial records you keep help ensure that you are safe from IRS audits, employee lawsuits, and more, and job records help you maintain consistency in your commercial screen printing business.
We gave you the IRS recommendations for how long you should keep certain kinds of information in our last blog. Here are several more categories, with advice on how long you should hold on to your records.
If you own business property, then the IRS recommends that you hold on to your records until the limitations end, from the year in which you disposed of the property. These documents help you calculate applicable depreciation, depletion deductions, amortization and more, and will help you determine loss or gain on your property. If that property is a vehicle or real estate, you should keep the title or deed in a secure, safe spot until the property is sold or properly disposed of.
Bank account information and statements should be held onto for about seven years minimum. If they are supporting documents for tax returns, however, you may want to keep a copy permanently.
Regardless of the kind of information, your software solutions for business should provide a place for you to store them indefinitely and in one, secure place. Your apparel software shouldn’t just keep track of your jobs and orders, but it should also help keep track of your finances and business history.
As a rule, make sure you keep important documents indefinitely, keep documents with conditions that expire until those terms have expired, or four years after, and keep most other documents about seven years.
