Keeping an income ledger for tutoring

An income ledger is the register where a private tutor records, in order, every payment received for lessons. For a micro-entrepreneur in France, keeping one is not a matter of taste. The law requires it, and it is the first document the tax office asks to see during an audit.

What the law requires

Every micro-entrepreneur has to keep a day-to-day income ledger, the "livre des recettes". Tutoring income falls under non-commercial profits (BNC), and the rules are exact:

• pages are numbered, with nothing erased or crossed out;
• each payment is entered on the date it was received, not the date of the lesson;
• cash is recorded separately from other methods (transfer, cheque, card);
• each line references its supporting document (an invoice or receipt).

You log the money when it arrives, not when you teach. A ten-hour package paid on 3 September goes down on 3 September, even if the lessons run into November.

One rule captures the whole point: one line per payment, in date order, with something to back it up.

The columns to keep

A useful ledger fits in a handful of columns:

• Date the payment was received
• Client name (the student or the parent who pays)
• Amount received
• Payment method (cash, transfer, cheque, card)
• Reference of the matching invoice or receipt

Services paid by private individuals can be entered as a single daily total when each one stays under 76 €. In practice a one-hour lesson often costs more than that, so most tutors keep one line per payment anyway, which is clearer.

The ledger feeds your filings

The total of your receipts over the period is exactly what you use to declare your turnover to URSSAF each month or quarter. That same total, carried to your income tax return, triggers the flat 34 % allowance applied to BNC income under the micro regime.

Two figures worth remembering for 2026: the micro-entreprise ceiling for services and BNC is 77,700 €, and your receipts have to match, to the euro, across the ledger, the URSSAF declarations and the tax return. A gap between those three is precisely what an audit looks for.

Supporting documents

The ledger does not stand alone. Every line rests on an invoice or a receipt. Issuing a clean invoice per payment, even for a private family, makes the match instant. An invoicing tool that numbers invoices and ties each one to its payment saves you from rebuilding all of it in December.

Keep the ledger and its documents for at least six years, the window the tax authority can reach back into. If you are unsure which rules apply to you, the official page on the micro-entreprise tax regime sets out what BNC tutors have to do.

Paper, spreadsheet or dedicated tool

Three formats are allowed, as long as the content and the order hold up.

The paper book

A notebook with numbered pages is legally enough. It costs nothing and needs no screen, but you retype every total by hand at filing time, and a mistake means redoing a line.

The spreadsheet

More flexible, it adds up the totals for you. The risk is human: a line skipped on a busy evening, a shifted column, a file overwritten. Running your business without a spreadsheet usually comes down to closing those gaps.

The management tool

When every scheduled lesson and every payment received lands in the same place, the income ledger fills itself, in order, with the invoice reference already attached. The URSSAF-ready total is one click away. That is what a tool like Kadrella does by linking scheduling, payments and invoicing.

In short

The income ledger is the backbone of a micro-entrepreneur's bookkeeping. Keep it current as payments come in, rather than in one painful session at year-end, separate cash clearly, and hold a document behind every line. When an audit comes, or simply a quarterly filing, the numbers are already there.

Sources

• Micro-entreprise tax regime – Service Public
• BNC special reporting regime, accounting obligations – BOFiP
• URSSAF
• Auto-entrepreneur portal – URSSAF
• impots.gouv.fr