Quitting The Day Job

Starting to Take Your Business Seriously

If you don’t take your business seriously, no one else will.  I haven’t been taking my business seriously.  Even though I don’t run a traditional business, I consider Internet Marketing a business.  I don’t sell my own products, but I spend money on promoting other products in order to make money. I would call that a business, and as well as all Internet Marketers. Plus the tax breaks from becoming a business are nice too.

I don’t do a very good of tracking my business finances.  In fact, I don’t track them at all.  My business finances blend with my personal finances into one big mess.  I started to take the step into separating them out by looking into becoming an LLC, but my home life got in the way of finishing it.  Until I can meet with a CPA to discuss the best options for me, I need to at the very least track my business expenses.  This lead me to download Quickbooks.

Quickbooks

This piece of software is from the biggest name when it comes to tracking finances, Quicken. When you run the program for the first time, you are asked to create a company profile.  This process is very straight forward, no awkward questions (like Microsoft Office Accounting asks).  After you create your company profile, you are taken to the screen showed below.  I love the way this screen is setup.  Start at the left with money coming in and flow to the right where money goes out.

The thing I really like about Quickbooks is that it basically tells you everything you need to do to get your business going without actually telling you to do it.  Start in the middle with your bank account.  You need to have a separate bank account for your business.  Add Vendors so you can pay them.  Add customers so they can pay you.  The down side of Quickbooks (the free version) is that you can only add 20 customers and vendors.  This means for most Internet Marketers, you will use close to that many by just adding your multiple affiliate companies.

The point of this post was to get myself and you guys serious about your business.  If you treat what you do as a business, you will take the work more seriously.  You don’t want your own business to fail, do you?  SO get serious about it, and start turning into a profitable business.