I am often asked when a business owner should set up accounting software for their new business. The short answer: the moment you decide to start a business.

The moment you decide to start a business you start incurring expenses; web domains, business licensing, logo design, product development, legal fees, etc. These start-up expenses must be tracked not only to get all those deductions on your tax return, but to know the financial facts about your new business.

Xero cloud accounting software has partner editions available for as little as $9 per month for start-up businesses. As your business grows there are subscription levels to grow with you. This also allows you to stay with the same software as your business grows and avoids the additional expense of converting to new software. Once you know how to use the software, your learning curve is limited to learning features newly added to the software or just now becoming important to your business.

Here’s something else to consider. The sooner you set up accounting software for your business, the sooner you build the habit of tracking income and expenses as well as building a budget and learning to read your financial statements.