Fearless Money

For as long as I’ve had any business, I’ve done my own accounting. After all, I have a decent accounting program (MYOB FirstEdge ) and I understand the basics of accounting.

In a way, it is like programming or a particularly boring board game. You learn the rules and apply them to the inputs: receipts, bills, invoices and expenses. But all the time I find myself delaying and avoiding keeping my books up to date.

The final straw was me realizing on Thursday that I hadn’t been treating PayPal properly. I’d been treating it as “undeposited funds”, when really I should have been treating it as a bank account. It wasn’t a big deal before I started getting a flood of payments via PayPal primarily from my overseas clients . So, I downloaded my past year history and entered all of it that way.

Of course, that meant I needed to correct (with journal transactions), all transactions I’d entered inappropriately as petty cash or undeposited funds. Laboriously, line by line, I got it all to balance and be understandable. Like I said, I can do it, but it makes me want to pound my fists into the desk in bored frustration and irritation at the time this is taking.

Bleah and bleah again. I’m definitely outsourcing that job as soon as possible. I’ve got an interview with a bookkeeper this Thursday. It will be money well spent not to waste my time on stuff I find so incredibly boring.

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