The eight jobs behind every hour you bill.

A small firm’s finances are not one job, they are eight small ones, from the hour you record to the books your accountant opens. Here is each of them — what it is, why it exists, and what it costs when it gets skipped — and then how Summarly handles it.

TRACK

Write the hours down while they happen

An hour you worked and did not record is an hour you will not bill. Memory is generous on the day and stingy at the end of the month: the call that ran long, the evening spent on a draft, the ten-minute favours that add up. Record time as it is worked, against the client it was for, and the invoice is written from a record instead of reconstructed from a calendar.

In Summarly

Start a timer from any page, on your phone too, or log hours against a project for each customer on a week or month calendar. Each project shows what is still unbilled, so nothing you worked goes unnoticed.

INVOICE

Bill the work, and the retainers

An invoice is the moment work becomes money you are owed. A late or vague one gets paid late or queried, and a retainer someone has to remember to send is a retainer that is sometimes not sent. The discipline is a clear invoice on a rhythm the client can rely on.

In Summarly

Turn a project's unbilled time into a draft invoice in one click — hours × rate, with every entry on a second page if the client wants to see them. Send it now or schedule it, and let a retainer's fee bill itself every month.

GET PAID

Know who owes you, and since when

Sending an invoice is not being paid. Most small firms notice a late client when the cash runs short, not when the due date passes — and by then the conversation is awkward. Knowing what is outstanding and what is overdue, every week, keeps it a reminder rather than a dispute.

In Summarly

Invoices show what is unpaid and what is overdue at a glance. When a payment lands on your bank statement it is offered against the invoice it settles, so the status follows the money.

CAPTURE

Keep the evidence, not the memory

A receipt is proof that a payment was for the business. Without it a bank line is just money leaving — your accountant can see the amount but not the reason, and a tax authority can disallow the expense entirely. The discipline is to capture at the moment of spending, because a receipt in a coat pocket in March is a receipt that does not exist in June.

In Summarly

Snap it with the iPhone Shortcut from the lock screen, drop a PDF in, or forward the email to your workspace's own receipt address. Summarly reads the merchant, date and amount off it and lines it up with the payment it belongs to.

IMPORT

Get the bank's own record in

The bank statement is the spine of the month: it is the one record neither you nor your accountant can argue with. Everything else is an attempt to explain the lines on it. Import it whole rather than typing in the transactions you remember — the ones you forget are the ones that matter.

In Summarly

Drop in a CSV or statement file from any bank. Columns are mapped for you, re-imports are deduplicated, and foreign-currency card fees are linked back to the purchase that caused them.

CATEGORISE

Say what the money was for

A category is what turns a payment into a figure on a statement: travel, equipment, subcontractors. Get them consistent and your accounts mean something month to month; get them ad hoc and every report is a new opinion. Consistency matters more here than precision — the same vendor in the same place every time.

In Summarly

New transactions are categorised from your own vendor history, onto a chart of accounts your accountant will recognise. Rules key off the vendor, not a fragile text match, so setting one once holds.

RECONCILE

Agree with the bank, to the cent

Reconciling is proving that your books and the bank tell the same story — that the closing balance you have is the closing balance the bank has. It is the check that catches the transaction imported twice, the one never imported at all, and the fee nobody noticed. A month that reconciles is a month you can stop thinking about.

In Summarly

Balances are carried from the statements you imported, so a period that does not agree is visible rather than discovered later.

HAND OFF

What your accountant opens

The last step is giving the numbers to the person who files them: the VAT return each quarter, the year-end, the tax return. What arrives decides what you pay for — a shoebox is billed as bookkeeping, clean books are billed as accounting. The seven steps above are the difference between the two.

In Summarly

Invite your accountant straight into the workspace, where their questions reach you as requests, or export a bundle with every transaction, its VAT columns and its receipt attached. Your VAT position updates as transactions land, and in Cyprus every tax and filing deadline sits in one checklist with what it will cost.

Hand over the admin.

Track your time, and bring your receipts and bank statements. Summarly runs the rest and asks you only what it can’t know.

Get started — free