Bev

One of the things I like about it is that you can play around with a fake company while you learn – it works exactly the same but you don’t risk stuffing up your real accounts!

@Lucy, I see they have a free trial. I may test it out. I’m particularly interested in the payables piece. I just starting hiring writers and I need a way to keep up with their payments in the same place as everything else. I’m not particularly interested in linking to a bank account, but maybe that piece is optional.

@Jenn, I treat it as a nice little break from writing – which, as much as I love it, I can sometimes get enough of. I’m like you when it comes to finances, just a little too controlling (and cheap) to put it in the hands of someone else.

Tax time is my motivation. I don’t want to scramble around at the last minute trying to get everything together.

It also helps to have an accountant in the family

Taxes are definitely something I can write about in an upcoming blog. Saving for taxes is easy once you commit to it. Figuring out how much you owe (and then avoiding a heart attack when you do), is harder.

These tips were simple, easy and will really make a difference in the management of one’s freelance business such as with an accidental slob like myself.

I would love to see a blog post about saving/subtracting taxes from earnings, too! I think this is a good thing for freelancers to hear about and I am curious to hear what you’d both have to say.

Thanks for keeping up with all the goodies!

Accounting is something I was good at (and actually enjoyed a lot) in college, but I guess there’s something more satisfying about worrying about someone else’s money instead of your own. That passion never translated to my own self-employment.

I like the idea of a very simple spreadsheet. As of now I pretty much do what you mention (jot down income and expenses to get net income for for the month), but I keep them on little index cards for each month — which I lose often, and end up re-doing when I want the info again. I’m terribly unorganized about such things. I’ve been playing with various accounting software for a few years, and could never find a package I was comfortable with — they always seem to be so unnecessarily feature-filled that it’s rarely easy to just do what I want and be done with it. Before that I kept ledgers by hand (and I actually lean towards doing that again). But I think I’ll give the spreadsheet a try.

Maybe creating some simple financial templates is in order around here. Happy to hire you to put a couple together if you want to and if you think they’d be useful to readers.