Getting Organized for the New Year

Happy New Year! I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday and you’re ready to hit the ground running in 2018. I’ve said before how much I absolutely love a new year – clean slate and all that, and one of the best things about that whole clean slate concept is that it’s the perfect time to get organized with your business. Now maybe you’re like me, and you already have a great system for keeping track of your expenses, your mileage, your emails, your business supplies…if so, good for you – feel free to share them in the comments. BUT if you’re like most, there are one or more of these areas that you could use some assistance in, so read on for some of my personal tips in this area.

Expenses

Nobody likes doing taxes, tracking expenses, etc. but the fact of the matter is, if you own a business, this is a necessary evil. For the longest time, I used a simple spreadsheet I created in Excel that had categories for different types of expenses, such as your website expense, catalogs, travel to convention, etc. This worked well for many years, but a few years ago I upgraded to using a software called TaxBot, which allows you to digitally keep your receipts and enter your expenses into all those same categories. At tax time, you can print out a summary of all of your expenses, by category, for the year. LOVE!

Mileage

This one has traditionally been a huge PITA for me. Generally I would try to guess how many miles I had on my car at the beginning of the year, how many I had at the end…it was basically one big guessing game and was absolutely NOT a win. Enter MileIQ. This app automatically starts tracking your drives, based on your phone being in the car with you, and then you classify each drive as to whether it was personal, or business, and which category it would fall under if it was business. The caveat to this is if you do decide to use this app, be sure to stay on top of classifying your drives, because it’s really easy to forget two months later what was business and what was personal.

Emails

This one is a huge fave of mine. It drives me insane when I hear from friends that they have 12,000 emails in their inbox. Ahhhh!!! How do you survive?? I have a ton of subfolders and drop the emails I need to keep into whatever subfolder fits them, that way I always know where I need to find anything business related. For example, I have a folder for each month of the year, and under that folder, I have a folder for each event I have going on that month (whether it’s a party, vendor event, conference, etc.) Any relevant emails having to do with that event will be kept in that folder, that way when I need to look something up about a vendor event coming up in July, I know right where to find the information. I also have a folder with my company name on it, and underneath that, subfolders for shipping notifications, home office leads, online orders, company newsletters, and several others. You get the idea. Any type of correspondence that a) you get often, and b) you want to hang onto, should have it’s own folder or subfolder.

Business Supplies

This one can be tricky, because it’s going to be very individualized as to how many of something you keep on hand at any one time, depending on the volume of business you do. Personally, I kind of buy “in bulk” with my non-company branded items, so that I don’t have to buy them often. By this I mean, the folders I use for my hostess, recruiting and new consultant packets, the post cards I order off Vistaprint for my customer follow up, hostess happy mail, and new consultant happy mail, the fun things I send through the mail to all these people, the envelopes I send them in, etc. I keep a stock of several months worth, at least, of all these things, and re-order well before I am going to run out. Everything I’ve mentioned here is part of one of my on-going business systems, so it’s crucial to me that I never run out of these key pieces that help my business run more smoothly. Whatever components make up your own systems for your business, now is the time to determine how your supply of them is for at least the first quarter of the year, and make sure that where you are storing them makes sense for you and allows you to put your hands on them all quickly and efficiently when you need to.

Y’all ready to kick some booty in 2018?? What area of your business do you need help organizing? Shoot us a note and we will see if we can cover it in a future post!