Keeping your books without an accountant: the 15-minutes-a-week method

The auto-entrepreneur status exempts you from bookkeeping in the classic sense: no balance sheet, no income statement, no journal, no tax package. It asks one thing of you: being able to justify your payments received, because that is what the tax is computed on, and that is what the ceiling is assessed on. A register of payments received, with the matching invoices, and you are in order. That register takes fifteen minutes a week, provided you never skip a week. Here is the routine, step by step, and what it changes at quarter time.

The Friday routine, in four steps

1. 1Record the week’s payments: who paid, how much, when, by what means (transfer, cash, cheque, card, payment link). Match each payment to its invoice. A partial payment is recorded as partial; a withholding is recorded with its amount.
2. 2Check overdue, unpaid invoices. Decide for each: reminder, call, or nothing yet. The reminder schedule is decided here, not in a hurry.
3. 3Record expenses with a photo of the receipt. They do not reduce your auto-entrepreneur tax, but you will know what you really earn, and they will be useful the day you set up a company.
4. 4Look at two figures: revenue received since January against the ceiling, and the amount outstanding. The first says where you are going, the second what you are owed.

Why Friday

Because a payment left unrecorded for three weeks becomes a riddle: was it invoice 0041 or 0043? A cheque for 4,000 MAD or 4,500? Weekly, everything is still fresh, the bank statement is short, and mistakes are fixed in a minute. And on a Friday, you know what you are going into the weekend with. The day matters little; the regularity does.

The quarter becomes a formality

If the register is up to date, the quarterly return comes down to reading a total: revenue received over the quarter, per category if your activity is mixed, and the resulting tax (1% for services, 0.5% for trade, industry and crafts). You enter the amounts on the national register portal (rn.ae.gov.ma), or at a Barid Al-Maghrib counter, before the end of the month following the quarter: 30 April, 31 July, 31 October, 31 January. What takes a day for those rebuilding three months of statements takes you ten minutes.

The zero quarter

No payment received over the quarter? The return is still compulsory, at zero. Forgetting it costs surcharges and, repeatedly, removal from the register. Put the four deadlines in your calendar once and for all.

What to keep, and for how long

• Every invoice issued, in number order, credit notes included.
• The payment register, with the date, amount and means of payment of each.
• Cash receipts, which attract more questions than transfers: a receipt signed by the client is a good habit.
• Withholding certificates, if any.
• Accepted quotes, which prove the claim if an invoice has to be recovered.

Keep everything for several years; ten years is the prudent reflex, the retention period for commercial documents. One CSV export a year, archived in two places (a drive at home, an online space), and you are at ease.

The three mistakes that break the routine

1. 1Mixing personal and business accounts. A dedicated account, even without a special banking status, halves reconciliation time.
2. 2Recording invoiced revenue instead of received revenue. Tax and ceiling are computed on what is received; an unpaid invoice does not count yet.
3. 3Postponing to “when I have time”. A quarter’s register rebuilt in April always contains a mistake, and it is often a cash payment that was forgotten.

And the accountant?

You do not need one to keep this register. You may need one for a precise question: a contract with an administration, a mixed activity to classify, the move to a company. In that case, a clean register exported as CSV saves them the hours they would have billed you. The article Invoicing in Excel or with software explains from what volume the spreadsheet no longer keeps this register properly.