What is Pre-Accounting? Why Is It Crucial for Your Business?

This is a very familiar scene in small businesses: revenue is not bad, orders come in, the team works hard. But when payments line up on the 28th of the month, the expected cash is simply not there. No one embezzled money; it's just that no one tracked which invoices were collected and which ones were overdue from a single place.

Basic bookkeeping is precisely what fills this gap. It's not a complex discipline, but rather the habit of regularly recording daily cash flow.

What is basic bookkeeping?

Basic bookkeeping is the recording and tracking of a business's daily commercial transactions. The invoice you issue, the collection you receive, the expense you pay, the items leaving the warehouse — everything is logged here.

Properly maintained basic bookkeeping answers these four questions without hesitation:

• How much money do I currently have in cash and in the bank?
• How much do I have to collect from whom, and when is it due?
• Where did I spend the most money this month?
• How many items of which product are left?

If you have to call people or shuffle through folders to find the answers to these questions, you have basic bookkeeping, but it isn't working.

Basic bookkeeping and general accounting are not the same thing

This is the most common point of confusion. Your financial advisor handles general accounting: legal books, tax returns, and official notifications. You handle basic bookkeeping and generate the data that goes to your advisor.

They are not rivals; they are sequential. If your basic bookkeeping is messy, your advisor spends more time, you pay more fees, and the margin for error increases.

What does basic bookkeeping cover?

While it varies from industry to industry, five main topics are nearly the same in almost every business:

• Invoices and receipts: Issuing sales invoices, processing purchase invoices and expense receipts.
• Current accounts: Debt and credit status of customers and suppliers. For details, you can check our current account tracking guide.
• Cash and bank: Cash and account movements, transfers between accounts.
• Income-expense: Categorization of expenditures. An expense without a category is an expense that cannot be analyzed later.
• Inventory: Product entry-exit and remaining quantity.

If you are a service business, you can skip the inventory part. The remaining four are necessary regardless of scale.

The cost of not keeping records

Postponing basic bookkeeping initially seems like it saves time. You issue an invoice, set it aside, and say, "I'll enter it later." Then you never do.

The bill for this usually comes from four places:

• Uncollected receivables. If no one remembers the overdue invoice, the customer won't remind you either. Collecting it months later when it is finally remembered is much harder.
• Incorrect pricing. You raise or don't raise prices without knowing which product actually yields a profit. Both are risky.
• Tax return panic. Carrying documents in bags at the end of the month means the risk of both delays and missing declarations.
• Lost time. Searches for "where was that invoice" waste a few hours a week, and those hours never come back.

Is Excel enough?

The honest answer: it's enough up to a point. For a solo business issuing 10-15 invoices a month, a properly set-up Excel spreadsheet will do the job.

The problem arises when growth begins. A second person starts touching the spreadsheet, three different versions of the file circulate, formulas get accidentally deleted, and no one notices. Also, once the e-invoice obligation kicks in, the spreadsheet alone isn't enough; you need a system that transmits documents to the Revenue Administration (GİB).

If you are considering a transition, our article on migrating from Excel to basic bookkeeping software explains the data migration sequence step by step.

How to set it up from scratch?

Don't try to do everything in the same week. The sequence works as follows:

1. Enter opening balances. Write down whatever is currently in the cash register and bank, whatever you are owed, and whatever you owe as a starting point. If this step is skipped, every subsequent figure will be wrong.
2. Open current account cards. A single card for each customer and supplier. Match them with tax numbers to avoid opening the same company twice.
3. Move invoicing here. The day you start issuing invoices in the system, current balances start updating automatically.
4. Process collections and payments daily. Five minutes a day is better than struggling one day a month.
5. Review reports at the end of the month. The income-expense summary and overdue receivables list are the first two reports to look at.

The first month will feel messy. Starting from the second month, the figures will fall into place.

Where does Qolay.App fit into this?

Qolay.App is a cloud-based basic bookkeeping application. Invoicing, current account tracking, cash-bank, inventory, and reporting are all in one place; e-invoice and e-archive submissions are also done from the same screen. It is designed to be used without requiring an accounting background.

The free plan covers all features up to 500 invoices per year, with no limit on the number of users and companies. For details, check out our article on free basic bookkeeping software.

Frequently asked questions

Is keeping basic bookkeeping a legal obligation?

There is no direct clause stating "you must keep basic bookkeeping." However, keeping your records orderly is practically mandatory to fulfill your book-keeping and document-issuing obligations. Consult your financial advisor for your specific situation.

I already have a financial advisor, do I still need to keep it?

Yes. Your advisor gives you the official table of the past period; basic bookkeeping shows you the state of today. Your advisor won't tell you whose debt is overdue.

Is it necessary for a solo business too?

Especially so. If you are the only employee, there is no second person to remind you of forgotten collections. If you are a freelancer, the article on income-expense tracking for freelancers is a more suitable starting point.

Do I need to enter records from past years as well?

No. Setting a cutoff date and starting with that day's balances is enough. Trying to retroactively process the past gets left half-done in most businesses and kills motivation.

Basic bookkeeping is not a tool to grow your business, but a tool to avoid losing control while growing. If you know the money in the cash register and the overdue receivables today, the rest will follow.

By opening a free account on Qolay.App, you can issue your first invoice today.