Business Expense Tracker: 5 Tips to Track Small Business Expenses

A business expense tracker is critical for small business owners. From helping you prepare for tax season to help you maintain a profitable business, there are many important reasons that make tracking business expenses a critical aspect of small business management. Fortunately, learning how to track business expenses doesn’t have to be difficult. By following a few simple tips, you can start accurately tracking your business expenses today. Let’s start by answering some common questions you may have about business expenses. Then, we'll look at why you need to track your business expenses and what tips and mobile apps you can use to do it effectively. If you want to learn how to track small business income and expenses, this article is exactly what you were looking for!

Why You Need to Manage Business Expenses

There are several advantages to learning how to track your business expenses accurately, ranging from tracking tax deductions, helping you manage business expenses, and understanding your finances.

Manage Your Business Finances

As a small business owner, it’s imperative to know how your business is spending each and every dollar. Small business expense tracking can help you create a more accurate small business budget, perform a breakeven analysis, and much more.

Tracking your expenses will help you effectively manage your small business finances and plan for the future.

Maintain Profitability

Ultimately, the goal of running a small business is typically to become profitable, meaning to make more money than it takes to pay for all business-related expenses.

Part of maintaining profitability is minimizing your business expenses. By tracking your expenses, you can identify ways to cut spending and increase your small business profits.

Tax Benefits

Like it or not, everyone has to pay taxes. But, unfortunately, one of the mistakes many business owners make is not maximizing their tax deductions.

Several business-related expenses can turn into tax savings, for example:

💲 Office supplies

💸 Business lunches/dinners

💵 Office rent

💰 Utilities

🤑 Phone data

By keeping a detailed list of your business expenses, you’ll be able to maximize your deductions during tax season.

These reasons, among others, are why you need business expense trackers.

How to Track Business Expenses: 5 Tips

If you need help learning how to track business expenses, follow these five simple tips to get your company’s finances back on track.

1. Open a Separate Business Bank Account

To accurately track your expenses, you should make sure to open a separate bank account for your small business.

Many business owners make the mistake of using their personal accounts as their business accounts. However, this makes it difficult to keep track of the money flowing in and out of your business.

2. Collect Receipts

As mentioned, one of the biggest benefits of small business expense tracking is being able to maximize your tax deductions at the end of the year.

When you make deductions, you may be required to provide proof of the expenses. The easiest way to do this is by providing a receipt. As such, you should be sure to collect and store all of your receipts in case you need to provide proof of expenses on your business taxes.

3. Track Transactions at Time of Sale

Keeping track of business expenses can be difficult, especially when you don’t record expenses on time.

To prevent expenses from piling up and becoming unorganized, be sure to record transactions when the transactions occur. This will help ensure that your accounting records are up to date and that you have a clear picture of your business's financial status.

4. Use Accounting Software

Fortunately, small business owners don’t have to rely on old-school methods for tracking expenses, like spreadsheets or ledgers.

Instead, many great financial apps and online services help businesses keep track of their expenses. For example, services like QuickBooks will help you track and categorize expenses in addition to helping you track your income, pay your taxes, and more.

#CaminoTip Using budgeting software can be a great idea too.

5. Use Business Credit Cards

Corporate credit cards offer many benefits. They offer easy access to financing for daily business operations, generate rewards, and can help you build your business credit.

Additionally, business credit cards will help you track your expenses by recording them in real-time and keeping them separate from your business income.

By utilizing these tips, you can easily learn how to keep track of expenses today.

Business Expense Tracker: Top 5 Small Business Expense Tracking Apps

If you want a business expense tracker, several apps can help you, but it can be hard to determine which ones are worth your time.

Using an app might be the best way to keep track of business expenses.

What is the best business expense tracker app? Unfortunately, there's really no right answer to that question. It depends on exactly what you need and what app what the right tools to help you achieve your goals. Here are a few of the best business expense tracker apps for your iPhone or Android device:

1. QuickBooks

QuickBooks is one of the most popular payroll management apps available; it's also great if you want to track spending. This handy app will help you track, categorize, and manage business expenses. It can also help with record income, track deductions, track miles, generate invoices, and much more.

QuickBooks for small businesses starts at just $12 per month and is available for both iOS and Android.

2. Expensify

Expensify is a very easy-to-use business expense tracker for business owners and sole proprietors. It's great for organizing receipts. Simply take a picture to upload receipts and record the expenses. You'll be able to organize it by merchant, date, and amount.

Expensify starts at $5 per month per active user and is available for both iOS and Android.

3. BizXpenseTracker

BizXpenseTracker is a business expense tracker app designed specifically for small businesses. This app allows you to track expenses, mileage, and time worked. In addition, it lets users generate expense reports. There are also business expense tracker templates to help you keep track of the information required by your accountant.

BizXpenseTracker costs $6.99 and is only available on iOS.

4. Smart Receipts

Smart Receipts is one of the tops small business expense tracking apps. It's easy-to-use and reliable and works great to scan receipts. In addition to tracking receipt data, Smart Receipts allows users to generate customizable PDF and CSV custom reports, which you can share with your accountant.

Smart Receipts offers a free version or a paid version for $9.99 per year and is available on both iOS and Android.

5. Certify

Certify offers a user-friendly interface, allowing you to use it as a business expense tracker, generate reports, track invoices, and more. The app also has a travel booking tool, making it easy to book travel and record travel expenses.

Certify costs $8 per user per month and is available on both iOS and Android.

If you haven't used any of these expense tracking apps, then you're in for a great surprise! They will help you strengthen your finances as soon as you start using them!

Small Business Expense Tracking Just Became Easier

Learning how to use a business expense tracker isn’t as difficult as you might’ve thought. By following these tips and using one of these useful apps, you can accurately start small business expense tracking. Smart Budgeting Tips for Small Businesses   At Camino Financial, we operate on the motto, “No Business Left Behind.” That’s why we offer small business loans with friendly terms, small business tips, and other resources to help small business owners like yourself get ahead.