As an accountant here, it would depend on a few things really:
- The size of your business, i.e. do you employ, do you have a large turnover with lots of small transactions, are you business transactions "complex"
- The nature of the business, is it a simple services business or more complex such as buying / selling a product?
- Do you need strong financial control, i.e. to keep track of debtors / creditors?
- Your personal expertise with IT software
If it's a simple business, I would recommend you open a separate bank account to keep your business transactions separate to your personal transactions, this makes analysis much easier.
Simple bookkeeping can also be done in Excel, although for bigger businesses which require a more sophisticated system to manage payments - Sage Line 50 may be more appropriate.
Have a look online, you'll find accounting spreadsheet templates here and there, and as long as you're consistent with what you do, and also record the main details (date, cost, nature of transaction, description), you can't go wrong 🙂
As a suggestion, try and save up some money to tie you over rainy days. I'm self-employed myself, work can be turbulent from year to year but I always make sure that I can survive for a good six months if the worst happened.
Also, going self-employed will be the best decision you will ever make 🙂
