Small Business Saturday: Keep Track of Business Expenses, Automatically

Small Business Saturday

Hello and welcome to another edition of Small Business Saturday. As you all know tax time has come again and for small business owners this usually means organizing zillions of receipts and editing an Excel spreadsheet. I have been using Excel to manage my expenses for the last three years, it has definitely worked however it has required me to work like crazy around tax-time to organize all my income and expenses.

This year was by far the most extensive and complex year for me and included an all-nighter putting together my P/L statement. I know, I know, you’re supposed to balance your books at the end of each month, but for many small business owners like myself, wearing many hats means this might not happen until the end of the year.

So this year I’ve pledged to find an automated solution and I’m excited to say, I’ve found it! The service is called Outright and it resides on none other than Outright.com (always love to see a one-word .COM in use like this!)

outright

Outright works a lot like the popular personal finance service Mint.com by allowing you to enter all of your accounts into the system. At this point it imports everything from your bank account, credit card, etc. and automatically categorizes everything coming in and going out. While it’s not always 100% right the great thing is you can update a category once and it applies it to all of those line items in the past and going forward.

Here’s an example. Like most Domainer/Developers I have some heft hosting fees that I pay every month. I simply categorized these as “Hosting Services” once and it went back and applied this category to all of those expenses in the past, and all the new expenses in the future.

Along with automatically keeping track of your expenses the service also provides you estimated quarterly taxes and allows you to run a ton of great reports quickly and easily. So if you’ve been looking for an easy way to automate the accounting-side of your business give Outright a try, it could save valuable time so you can focus on bringing in the bucks!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton