Be Careful when Delegating Your Financial Records...

Hey Friends!

First off, I apologize for missing last week’s newsletter. I had just landed in Portugal and was exhausted and jet lagged. My bad. (As an aside, this is one great reason that you should batch and post content BEFORE you go on vacation...)

Anyway, this week’s newsletter will also be short as it is Easter Sunday and I didn’t do much work on the business while I was in Portugal this past week. But I do have a couple of good nuggets to share.

Check in with your Bookkeeper

If you decide to hire a bookkeeper to help you with managing your financial affairs, it is vitally important that you check in with them on a regular basis. I recently fired mine. In part because I wasn’t getting up to date information on how the business was doing, and also because I’m trying to cut unnecessary expenses leading up to our move to Portugal.

And although I thought she was doing a great job, as I’m going back through the past several months to look at my books, I’m discovering that they are an absolute mess.

Now, not all of this is her fault, (I didn’t always get back to her with answers to her questions), but a lot of it was her fault. (She asked me an overwhelming number of questions, such as “what is Kajabi used for and how should I categorize this as an expense?”).

Rather than keep track of the answers to these questions and create rules in QBO, she asked me the same questions over and over. It made it so that I was so overwhelmed by the questions she asked me that I never had time to respond.

This is the definition of a broken system. And when it comes to financial records, having up to date records is an absolute must.

And in my opinion, bookkeeping should be easy. Especially with Quickbooks.

If you are using Quickbooks, you can download all of your transactions from your bank, Stripe and Paypal directly into your QBO account. From there, it’s just a matter of making sure that the transactions are categorized correctly and that your accounts are reconciled at the end of the month.

I’m grossly oversimplifying this, as well as the processes I follow to keep my records up to date. If you are interested in learning more about how I manage my books, I’m considering putting together a course on how to incorporate Quickbooks into your online business so that you can get a handle on your finances. Just reply back to this email and let me know what you think and what questions you have. If I get enough positive feedback, I'll add this as an upcoming project.

Do you fly a lot? It pays to be loyal.

On our flight home from Lisbon, my wife (who has Silver Elite status with United, the lowest tier of elite status), was upgraded to First Class. She was kind enough to let me take the seat because she wanted to stay with the kids and has flown in first class a number of times. But that’s another story for another day and one of the many reasons I love her.

The point here is that if she had not been Silver Elite status, we wouldn’t have received the upgrade. Apparently, this is a pretty frequent occurrence - getting a free surprise upgrade once you hit elite status.

There are a lot of considerations that go into deciding whether to pursue elite status with a given airline, but if you fly a lot and frequently take the same airline, then it might just make sense.

❤️ My Favorite Things

I didn’t get a whole lot of work done this week, so I don't have a bunch of new apps and tools to share this week. That being said, I did come across an app that works with Quickbooks to sync up your Stripe transactions. Downloading Stripe transactions doesn’t happen natively within QBO, so you must use a third party app to do it. This one is my favorite and it works seamlessly to get the job done and save you a TON of time.

I use Acodei to sync my stripe transactions. It is free to use for up to 30 transactions per month, and you can get historical data for $10 per month of data. It is also incredibly easy to use.

If you are using Stripe and QBO, I highly recommend checking it out.

🖋 Quote of the Week

Rich people play the money game to win. Poor people play the money game to not lose.

T. Harv Eker, The Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (affiliate link)

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