Welcome to the online instructions for the David Porthouse & Co bookkeeping system. These instructions contain information for both the paper-based system and the spreadsheet. We will also suggest how to use the two systems in parallel.

We offer both versions of our bookkeeping system freely to our clients and we encourage their use by offering discounts which you may calculate on our Get a Quote page. Briefly, there is a 5% discount for use of the paper system, and a 25% discount for use of the spreadsheet system.

For instructions on the use of the paper-based system, please click here. This system is printed on standard A4 size paper.

For instructions on the use of the spreadsheet system, please click here. This spreadsheet can be used with Excel 2007, 2010 or 2013.

You may start working with the paper system, and then switch to the spreadsheet system once you get used to it. Please click here for some suggestions on parallel working.

If you would like to know what we do with your records when sent in, then please click here. We use all-electronic or digital processing.

The spreadsheet system has been carefully designed to make it easy to enter transactions either one row at a time, or by the column. Click here to see videos showing transactions being entered quickly by the column.

We might mention that some businesses do not have any cash takings, are not registered for VAT and have no cash expenses. One option they have is not to keep any books at all, but to send us the bank statements and tidily-written cheque book stubs. We would use our own optical character recognition system to scan in the bank statements, and other fast methods to get information from cheque book stubs, before we continue with all-electronic processing as usual.

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