Here’s a cool free service I recommend everyone check out. Phil Tanny has launched his site Bookkeeper For You.

It’s an online service similiar to QuickBooks Online that allows you to track your income and expenses for your business and access them anywhere. Don’t expect all the bells and whistles QuickBooks offers, however as a free service, this can’t be beat if you’re using paper or a basic spreadsheet to keep track of everything.

Go check it out: http://www.bookkeeper-for-you.com/

I picked up this idea while reading an article at Performancing addressing blogs, but the points are the same for regular non-blog sites. Andy, who wrote that article, found his inspiration from a WebmasterWorld post on this topic. I’ll allow you to browse his article for that link (it’s only fair to him!)

When you die and leave this earth, what do you have planned for your websites and online business? Will your family be able to take over the reins in stride, or will they not even know where to begin? (more…)

For my third, and final post for the series “How to Manage Your Business Finances” (Part 1 - Part 2), I’ll discuss the current system that I use to manage my affiliate business finances.

I want to be upfront that what I use does cost a monthly fee (~$20 US) and is not for the faint at heart. If you’re just getting started in this business, I recommend that you wait a little while before jumping into this option.

To manage my income, expenses, taxes, and payroll I use a service from Intuit called QuickBooks Online. If you’re familiar with Intuit’s or QuickBooks’ other products, then you’ll already know that they are top-notch.

Why Do I Use QuickBooks Online? (more…)

In Part 1 of How to Manage Your Business Finances, I discussed a simple notebook and envelope system for keeping track of income and expenses. I recommend that you read that article first (it will open in a new window), as I’ll touch on issues from that piece here.

For this article, Part 2, I’ll discuss a slightly more complicated, but much more powerful, method of keeping track of these items. This will involve the envelopes from before, but this time we’ll substitute a spreadsheet program for the paper notepads. My personal favorite is Microsoft Excel, and it’s what I used before upgrading to my current system (I’ll explain that in Part 3.) If you don’t use Excel, then some of my instructions below and sample spreadsheet may be different for each respective program.

Just a quick update for today. Tomorrow, Part 2 of my 3 part series on How to Manage Your Business Finances will be posted.

Included will be a free download to help with managing your business finances; you don’t want to miss it.

In the meantime, browse the rest of the site and read Part 1 of the series if you haven’t gotten around to it yet.

For people just getting started as a sole proprietor with an online business, I generally recommend that they start simple when tracking their finances.

But the concept for doing this is far more important than the tool used. By tracking your inflow and outflow of funds it’s easier to make economical decisions, such as which sites deserve extra attention to get their earnings level more inline with where you want them to be.

The simplest tool is: (more…)