Ditch the Shoebox

By Tiffany Keeping

SINCE IT’S NEARING THE END OF 2020

I definitely feel ready to say goodbye to this year, I wanted to discuss starting the New Year off on a new organized foot.

I have had many people approach me since I’ve started my business Awen Bookkeeping to discuss how to catch up on filing their taxes or tackling the backlog of bookkeeping for their business.

They Want The Process To Be Simple And Easy,

where they feel comfortable, to be engaged in the financial side of their business or personal life.

I’ve been in the accounting field on and off for 20 years. It took me until this year to really embrace my passion for being a “bean counter”. My goal is to ease my client’s stress and anxiety surrounding filing their taxes and keeping their books. From my personal experience, a lot of people get overwhelmed with bookkeeping and taxes and just shove all their receipts, invoices, etc in a “shoebox” and put it somewhere to deal with later.

How will you know if your business is growing in the right direction if you don’t know where you are exactly? Imagine, if you will, that you were going to drive to Disneyland. You wouldn’t just jump in your car and start driving, right? You would pack for your trip and

enter Disneyland in your navigation system so that you make sure you are going in the correct direction. The same principle applies here. You need to organize your documentation and create a plan to get your business or life headed in the direction you want to go. You won’t know your profit margin or if you are overspending on expenses without a plan. The goal is to make your business as profitable as possible and if you aren’t aware of what is coming in and what is going out this goal can’t be achieved. The same principle applies to your paycheck and life expenses.

It’s time to talk about the preverbal “shoebox full of receipts”.

From my personal experience, there are a several reasons people create a “shoebox of receipts”:

They get really busy and just designate one spot to put all their receipts and keep telling themselves they will deal with it later. Believe it or not, this is really great, because at least everything is in one place even if it isn’t organized. However, if you are failing to track your income and expenses you can find yourself in a cash flow crunch very quickly. Also, it hinders your ability to apply for financing should you need to do so in the future.

2. They don’t know how to organize their accounting information or they don’t know exactly what to keep or what to throw away. I have some tips and tricks that I teach my clients to help deal with organization and what needs to be kept for tax purposes.

3. They have an emotional reason why they don’t want to organize or deal with the information in their “shoebox”. They don’t want to know what their business made for income or they don’t want to know what their business expenses have been this year. I can’t stress this enough. YOU NEED TO KNOW YOUR BUSINESS’S NUMBERS! Accounting just isn’t their thing and they don’t want to deal with it and that’s ok. That is why you hire a professional like me, so your books can be kept up-to-date and you don’t have to worry about it.

Here are a couple of suggestions to ditch the shoebox for good:

If you find yourself struggling to keep up with your books consider hiring a professional to organize and enter your accounting information for you before year end. It becomes significantly more expensive if you leave it for a full year. Consider using accounting software that allows you to snap receipts and track mileage. There are several apps that I find helpful with this task that you can download right on your phone. Bonus: this way if you lose a receipt you have a digital copy as well. If you are absolutely in love with your shoebox accounting process Pinterest has some amazing ideas to transform your shoebox. You can find some of them here.

Are you ready to ditch the shoebox for good and have a system that works for you? One that is less stress and less costly at the end of the year?

Call me today at (780) 264-0860 or book a consultation here and let’s see how I can help you ditch the shoebox for good!

Tiffany Keeping

Awen Bookkeeping Connect with me here