There are two types of bookkeeping: External and internal. External bookkeeping is what you do for the government / IRS to determine how much taxes you pay. Dep

There are two types of bookkeeping: External and internal. External bookkeeping is what you do for the government / IRS to determine how much taxes you pay. Depending on your company type and country this can be quite complex and personally I would never attempt to do it myself as you can get a tax accountant / lawyer to do it for you for a reasonable price and learning to do it yourself will take many months or even years. Also, if you go through a tax accountant you can transfer a part of the legal risk of bookkeeping to them, which is one thing less you’ll have to worry about (there are enough other things to keep you awake at night as an entrepreneur so you really don’t want to also worry about your tax declarations; I’ve been there myself). If you are a one-person business it might still be manageable but even then I’d say your time is better spent thinking about your core business instead of worrying about bookkeeping. For internal bookkeeping you can do whatever you want and you don’t have any legal restrictions, you would typically make use of this to measure the performance of your company and make sure you don’t run out of money. If you’re a small company I would use the data your tax accountant provides to you and simply put it in a finance plan in Excel to see how you’re doing. The core metrics you’re interested in are probably revenue, cash flow, cost and profit I’d say (current, past and projected future values ideally). There are many guides available on the Internet for this, look e.g. for business planning as a keyword.