Finance management

[DomenicasFineFashion]

Hi everyone!
What do you use to manage the financial side of your business? My system currently involves a shoebox-full of receipts and piles of post-its. Not very effective. I'd like to find some program or software that allows me to enter in my sales and expenses, show me at a glance where I am at for the month as far as profit/loss, and maybe let me itemize my expense entries to make it easier at tax time. Quickbooks seems very expensive. Any suggestions? How do you all keep track?

[dorsetclothing]

I'm pretty boring and use excel. I have one file for sales and one for expenses, and a monthly tally where I can put my sales/expenses up against the year before and see how I'm going.
It's not amazing, and I do go through periods where I get busy and then have to catch up on a month of paperwork, but it works for what's required of me for tax.

[Former_Member]

I use some very simple Excel spreadsheets.

One sheet tracks all of my supply orders and the items that I make.

The other sheet tracks all of my listings and sales.

My sales tracker spreadsheet includes columns for the following:
1) date listed
2) cost of materials
3) selling price
4) shipping charges
5) date sold
6) buyer name
7 ) ship date
8) Etsy listing fees
9) Etsy selling fees
10) paypal fees
11) actual shipping charges
I keep one spreadsheet for each month with tallies, and one additional sheet that is a summary of the totals by month.

Part of my processing of each sale is to update the information on the spreadsheet so I'm always up to date.

From that information I can pretty much do my taxes in about an hour.

[Woodticks]

I use outright.com. So far so good. It links my other shops as well as etsy and paypal. It's great for categorizing all expenses too. They have a free version.

[ThoughtfulRoseSupply]

I like Outright. They try to sell you on their paid version to make tax time easier, but I find it's not difficult to get all the info you need for taxes from the free version.

I can't imagine entering data into a spreadsheet after every sale like Crochetgal does--that would require a degree of discipline that I don't possess. lol

The only information I track on a daily basis is: the dollar value of all items listed that day, and the dollar value of all items sold (totals across all four shops). Of course, I do also record all my supply purchases, but that's not a daily thing.

[DomenicasFineFashion]

Just wanted to say thanks to all who replied. I had a friend help me get set up on spreadsheets and I think it's going to do exactly what I need it to!