Keeping Track of Business Finances

With Tax Day only a couple of days away, hopefully you aren’t stressing out thinking about filing your personal or business taxes. I hope you already have it done! Of course, if you are just starting out in your business, or if you are starting to transition from having a hobby into having a business, then you might be wondering what is the best way to keep track of your finances.

Hopefully you’ve already been saving receipts from things like supplies, booth fees, and application fees, and hopefully you are keeping track of mileage to and from craft fairs, and keeping track of expenses like business lunches, advertising fees, and printing costs for things like packaging and business cards. If you aren’t doing this, consider now a good time to start.

I’ve recently discovered a website called Outright,  which I am using for my bookkeeping needs. It is a very user friendly site, and best of all it is totally free. I am sharing this with you because I think you might find it beneficial to your business (not because any one at Outright asked me to!).

This site allows for easy input of both income and expenses and gives you reports on your profit or loss for the year to date. It even has a “ticker” on the home page which shows your profit or loss for the current year, so you know where you stand at all times with your business.

It also has a feature which is probably most valuable if you’ve never owned your own business and never had to worry about paying your own taxes. The taxes feature will tell you the estimated amount of taxes you should pay on your income each quarter. This is very beneficial so that you aren’t surprised at the end of the year with the amount of taxes you might have due.

I know this post is short and sweet, but I don’t want to give tax advice or anything I’m not qualified to do. All I want you to know is that there is a free resource out there ready for you to use, so I hope you’ll take the time to check it out.

If you already have a bookkeeping site you use (especially free ones!) please share them with us. Do you have any tips or tricks for keeping your craft business finances organized? It’s hard to operate on a budget if you don’t keep track of what you are spending, so I’d simply like to challenge you to start keeping track! Let me know if you’ll accept my challenge!