Creative Business and Bookkeeping

Hope you're having a great week so far. As for me, I'm drowning in numbers and paperwork at the moment and I'm telling you, save yourself - don't be like me! 

I totally dropped the ball this past year and didn't keep up with my bookkeeping. It's April 13th now and guess what? I haven't filed my taxes yet - yikes!

So in the middle of reviewing my paperwork in preparation to file my taxes, guess what I did? I took some time to reflect and make a short list of things you can do to prevent being in my shoes next year come tax time again.

Keeping your creative business tax-ready in 4 easy steps

1. Schedule some time on a daily or weekly basis to update your records and keep track of all your income and expenses. Get in the habit of doing it often so that you find yourself at the end of the year looking back, wishing you did.
   
   
2. If you are a part-time designer, just getting started in your stationery venture, you don't need to invest in any fancy software. A simple spreadsheet will do.
   To log your expenses, include a column to track the date, vendor, amount, description and category for each transaction. For income, include columns to record the date, amount, client name, description and payment method.
   If you have a tax preparer or accountant, they are way more qualified than I am to advice and suggest a method that will work best for you and your business, so please follow their advice in this area before mine. I used Quickbooks when I was designing full-time out of my home-based wedding stationery studio. Nowadays, I hear a lot of good things about Freshbooks too.
   
   
3. Always use ONE credit card for ALL of your business transactions. This way, if you ever lose a receipt, there will also be a record of your all your transactions on your monthly credit card statement. 
   
   
4. Create email folders each year to file that year's income and another for that year's expenses. Every time you receive an email receipt for an expense, or a payment notification for a PayPal transaction (cha-ching!), move that email into the corresponding folder so that you may record the transaction in your spreadsheet or bookkeeping software at a later date.

And there you have it. It's so simple, but for the same reason that it's such a simple task, it's easy to set aside when your focus is on keeping your customers happy. But you know what? You gotta keep the IRS happy too.

Well, duty calls...gotta get back to those numbers and spread sheets, but I'll be back next week with a few stationery design tips so stay tuned! I'll also be back in the "Training Field" with my Bootcamp students, ready to answer your questions and release a couple of new lessons - yay! 

Have a great week. 

Your Design Coach,
Dio Perez

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