I’ve had a quiet week, turned down work opportunities, stayed home, and put in some major hours to make sense of my paperwork backlog. (about 3 years of business records) I haven’t been keeping proper records about my business income and expenses and it’s a big job sorting them all out. There’s a few reasons for this, one is that I’ve really struggled with phobias about money and admin that have left me very overwhelmed and muddle headed. Another is that it’s taken me this long, several courses, (including a cert 3 in home businesses), and help from an accountant before I’ve been able to set up a simple system for record keeping that suits my business. Most of the systems or advice I’ve been offered have been needlessly complex, full of terms I barely understand, and I’ve been utterly confused. I now have a physical folder in which income and expenses are printed and filed for that financial year. It’s less environmentally
friendly, which I hate, but it works visually, which is how I work. It’s easy for me to see what’s happening and check on things filed. I am using an app called invoice2go which generates my invoices, concerts them to pdf, and emails them for me much quicker than I’ve been doing manually using an excel document, and all from my phone if I wish. I have a simple sheet for income, and a different simple sheet for expenses. Generating profit and loss forms from these is child’s play. So I’m finally making progress.

I’ve been scouring the house for all those pockets of paperwork, random collections of receipts stuffed into tins, boxes, drawers, envelopes, and other ‘safe’ hidey holes. Even worse, I’ve been finding, printing, and cross referencing every previous attempt to input this data using much more complex forms. At some point I’ve scanned a couple of months worth of receipts and collated them, then lost both the original and scanned versions of the receipts. That’s giving me a headache. I’m looking forward to all this being over and moving on to running my new studio with a simple, relevant, accurate method of data collection in place. It’s going to be a huge weight off me! I have learned a hell of a lot!

So it’s happening. This is one of my biggest bogey men, a thing that has been hanging over my head for years, stressing me constantly and filing me with a chronic sense of guilt, frustration, inadequacy, and dread. I jumped into a business with enthusiastic support from people around me, but far before I was ready for this side of things, and it’s been a burden since then. I’m so glad to be finally sorting it out, facing the debts, and moving on. It’s a good feeling!

Tonks has been loving sleeping in my boxes of paper, so I accommodated and began using her box to store paper I no longer needed. This seems to be like cat nip, she migrated back to her box shortly afterwards.

Good music and good company, sure helps when doing paperwork!