Accounting: It Can Be Fun!

Who knew?

(Long excited rant follows:)

I get a fair amount of enjoyment out of organizational challenges, and a nice spreadsheet has its appeal. But I've just discovered something even better ... an easy app!

Some of you may know I've been getting into this web design thing more lately. More organizational thrills, woohoo files! The hosting service I like (Wix) has a bunch of apps that they vet and recommend. I like the vet bit (no kitties involved). And my bank manager has also said the app is legit, no funny business.

So I'm getting two main ideas in organizing your small business: time and money.

And that you track them so you know what the heck you are doing.

We're all pretty familiar with a calendar. That's good. Good tool. And you can do pretty well with something like Google calendar, and have notifications sent to your phone. Now for time & money together - that can get a little intimidating ... but fear not!

Wave reads your bank account info. Read only - so it has no power to transfer your dosh elsewhere. Then you can tag transactions as this or that category, just like the nice tax people are going to ask you to report at the end of the year.

My joy is writing out invoices (please pay me) (thank you!), and knowing that, righto, everything is nicely official, the computer will keep tabs on what is paid or not. It will send out nice professional reminders, my logo is on there, all the other important info is on there automatically. It's like having a secretary!

And, see... it's even on my phone!

So I can send an invoice from right there, last day of the job. (Wherever "there" is). And when the check clears my bank account and shows up in my transactions list, I click the little arrow to the right, and link it as the invoice payment for (click, click) that invoice. Ta-daa!

Now, I have done some teeth gnashing. It took me a little bit to get the connectivity straightened out, and I had to remove then re-attach my bank account. Which annoyed me. And I do suspect that this thing can do so much more and it will take me a while to figure it out properly.

But its FREE.

And if I really need to get everything sorted out I can cough up a little money and get help. I'll see. Maybe Ill do a couple of months where I upgrade ($10/month will get me phone support), get sorted out, then go back to free.

Yes. I'm raving. I know. I'll stop.

But watch this space, I'm sure I'll have more exciting fun things to say about this later.