My Bookkeeping Process and Why I Don’t Outsource It | EP 791

My Bookkeeping Process and Why I Don’t Outsource It

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler:  Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast i’m Tim Strifler and my co-host David Blackmon is traveling he is at some airstream conference in Maine and uh yeah so it’s just gonna be me flying solo for a little bit longer, but i have some awesome episodes continuously being planned. So hopefully uh if you don’t mind listening to just my voice you’ll still be able to enjoy the podcast . So um today we’re talking about my bookkeeping process, and why i don’t outsource it. And so uh bookkeeping is one of those things that people will typically outsource, they’ll outsource it to uh whether it’s strictly a bookkeeper or their cpa or you know whoever. And um because it’s really boring it’s not fun it’s not sexy and uh a lot of times people think that their time is better spent elsewhere and while i am definitely a big proponent of outsourcing different tasks um in general, like for example i will never do my own taxes, um that is definitely best done by a professional. Um however bookkeeping first of all it’s pretty easy when you have the good process, and i’m going to share my process in a little bit, but also as web designers we don’t have a ton of transactions like other types of businesses would have . And so i find that it’s more helpful to do it myself for a couple of reasons. Mainly i want to see every dollar that goes through my business and the way i see that is by having to manually approve everything and make sure it’s properly categorized in my bookkeeping software. Right, and so uh and kind of going along with that i want to have a very deep focus on profit, Right, so many uh maybe not web designers but online business owners i see out there that are usually trying to sell something some sort of program or whatever. You know they always brag about revenue and and this is typically companies that are uh selling something through paid advertising. Right and really revenue knowing someone’s revenue is almost pointless unless you know what their profit is, what they actually made from that, right you know you might have ten million dollars worth of revenue but if you’re spending nine million nine hundred thousand 000 to get that 10 million in revenue, well you’re not really doing all that hot um with other costs on top of that too. So um by doing bookkeeping myself and looking at all of the transactions that are going through all of my expenses i can analyze on a monthly basis where i’m spending money and whether or not i need to continue spending money. And so um if i don’t do that then the bookkeeper just constantly you know approves the transactions and ads categorizes them into the bookkeeping software. And then you don’t really have a chance to really go through everything maybe if you run reports and you kind of look at it that way, but i find when you do the bookkeeping yourself you’re constantly reminded of those charges and you can uh you can stop them rather than having to wait until you get to you know the year mark, when you’re looking at all your numbers for the year or whatever. And so, um so that’s my advice do the bookkeeping yourself. It’s easy. My process is, i use Quickbooks Online, they make it super super easy and so once you kind of get the chart of accounts set up of you know the different categories and stuff, then you can um what i find kind of my process is i just do things in bulk. Right, so it’s like if i’m paying for like google ads right, i run a lot of google ads for my product business, well i can just do a search for google and see all of the transactions for all of google all at once, and then i can approve them in bulk all at once and make sure they get they get categorized properly. And then you know maybe i have uh all my income coming from Stripe, right online payments well i can go and and search Stripe have pull them all up and then within a minute i can approve all of the Stripe transactions all at once. And those all get categorized the same way. And so all of those kind of more repetitive transactions you can just squash really really quickly, and so doing your bookkeeping doesn’t take more than 30 minutes a month when you follow that process but it still allows you to kind of look at everything see everything that you have coming in um you know those individual charges that you have to manually approve. You’re able to to see it and and squash it if it’s something that no longer needs to be there. So that is my process for bookkeeping and why i don’t outsource it. Um that’s just my opinion the way i like to do things, um if you’re someone who likes to outsource and you’re still able to say ultra stay ultra profitable then more power to you. So tune into tomorrow’s episode, we’re gonna be talking about how to design simple images without using photoshop and it’s not what you think i’m just gonna say that right there. So until then take care bye.