• Bookkeeping can be hard. Unless you have an accounting degree, you won’t automatically know the first thing about basic accounting practices. You have to learn it.
• Bookkeeping usually isn’t fun. It’s all about cold hard facts — the truth. When you see your business expenses racking up and little income trickling in, it can hurt.
• Bookkeeping can be very time-consuming (especially if you’re new at it.)
• With bookkeeping, it’s easy to make mistakes, and mistakes can be costly.

The survey didn’t mention payroll, which tends to complicate matters for small-business owners. Payroll is an increasingly complex task, with unemployment tax rates changing all the time, state and local taxes to contend with, and tax-filing deadlines to remember. If you mess up your federal payroll taxes, you will be hearing from the government. It can be a real pain for small-business owners in particular, who are more likely to be handling these tasks on their own.

Like it or not, the state of your business books may very well determine whether your business lives or dies. Forget to pay a bill, and there goes your credit. Fail to keep track of receipts, and you miss out on all kinds of business-tax deductions. Lose track of your invoices coming in, and you’ll lose money.

Have I scared you yet? Good. You need to find a bookkeeping method that you can depend on, whether you keep a meticulous handwritten ledger, use accounting software or decide to just hand off all the work to an outside accountant.

Keeping track of your business finances is a vital part of owning a successful business. In fact, nearly half of the business owners in the study said that if they could give one piece of advice to new entrepreneurs, it would be to create a well-thought-out business and financial plan.Don’t ignore your business finances. Start right now. Find an accounting method that works for you and start keeping track of your money — before it gets away from you.