Useful Tips & Templates

This template may be used to engage a person to help provide expertise and insight to you and your company. This is not an employee and they don’t have any employee rights. You may compensate them in any way you feel appropriate and can describe that compensation in the exhibit to this agreement. Every company should have trusted experts they go to for advice.

A Proprietary Information Agreement is signed between the company and any employee or consultant who may have expertise or intellectual property being developed for the company that you would not want to be used in another company. It is most typically signed by founders or the early employees and consultants of a company for confidentiality and to ensure any new ideas developed as a result of early work in the company are in fact assigned to and the property of the company.

Income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement in excel for a twelve month period. Your accounting system will produce these for you. However, if you are simply trying to understand what typical financial statement descriptions would include this is a good start. If you are trying to estimate what your first year of operations might be in a new venture this might also help you fill in some of the blanks or ensure you have thought through the various items to include. Not all categories are appropriate for all companies and there may be categories you need to add, so modify the template to meet your needs. The cash flow statement is largely set to calculate for you so long as you maintain the integrity of the income statement and balance sheet.

Allows you to input your fixed asset and equipment details along with your business rules and calculates your total fixed asset value and accumulated depreciation. The areas in grey are for you to input your specific values and assumptions. You will need a schedule of fixed assets for your tax accountants and your auditors if you ever need to have an audit performed. This will also help you track details often needed to dispute property tax assessments.

This document provides a consulting agreement between the company and an independent consultant. Some terms may not be appropriate and you may want to modify to meet your needs. The areas in grey are for you to input certain information and you will need to “un-grey” them before you use the document once you have your template set.

Offer letter for an employee including “at will” employment and non-disclosure language. Areas that you would need to complete have been highlighted in grey for ease of use. You would need to un-highlight and/or delete any of the areas not applicable to your business. Not all sections may be necessary, so modify the template to meet your needs.

A template you can use or provide to employees to report expenses for reimbursement. There are many examples of expense reports online so find one that works for you. This one tends to work pretty well for basic employee expense submissions.

When you have an office lease you are supposed to account for your monthly rent expense on a straight line basis or evenly over the life of the lease even though your payments may vary over the term of the lease. This schedule is designed to allow you to calculate the amount you should be charging to rent expense in your income statement and the accounting entries necessary to accommodate for the difference between cash payments and accounting expense. Not necessary to simply manage your business but if you are ever going to go through an audit your auditors will make you do this.

Cover sheet to be used to accompany backup for a journal entry made in your accounting system. If you don’t have a cover with description and approvals this will help you start that process. If your financials are ever audited the auditors will see this as a good standard control and helps you in reviewing the entries being made by someone else.

Non-disclosure agreement between you and the counter party you will be sharing confidential information with. Areas that you would need to complete have been highlighted in grey for ease of use. You would need to un-highlight these areas once you have them updated. Not all sections may be necessary, so modify the template to meet your needs.

Excel has a ton of templates available both online and in the Excel application itself. When you choose “new” file in Excel you have the option to select a template and there are mounds of them. There are also tons of options online. I like this one created by SpreadSheet123 because it provides a little more structure and is more robust than a simple Excel template. So if you don’t have an accounting system that generates one for you, by all means feel free to use this one.