One of the difficult aspects of first starting your own business is the fact that you alone will perform the vast majority of duties.  There is no Admin Department to handle internal paperwork.  You are the Admin Department.  In this article, we are going to take a look at a few administrative items that you will be responsible for until you can afford to hire an administrative employee.  Understanding the particulars of these administrative duties will certainly help you become better at operating your business.

Accounting

You are going to be working on accounting day in and day out.  It is easy to let the accounting numbers get away, and tempting to only look at them once in a while, especially when you are busy with other business duties.  But money is the lifeblood of your business.  And you will be surprised how easy it is to lose track.  If you stop tracking your accounting for a month, you could find that your expenses got out of control, and you didn’t even know it.

So when your company purchases an item, it is important to hold on to the receipt and also to write the expenditure into your accounting book.  Many small businesses use accounting software such as QuickBooks.  When you record all these expenditures, at the end of the fiscal year, you can account for all your receipts along with your expenditure data.  A key reason to keep track of this data is taxes.  When you are trying to file taxes, you will need to have proof of purchase of each expenditure item that you are trying to claim on your taxes as a business expense write-off.  Keeping proper accounting on these expenses makes your tax preparation that much easier.

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Next, you will be responsible for keeping tabs on all of your client invoices.  If you work in a service job, and you invoice customers each month to get paid, you need to have all of that paperwork on hand and printed out for end-of-year tax preparation.  This paperwork will prove how much you made in the previous year from client work.   Income from other sources must be declared as well.  For example, advertising revenue.  If you are running a website for your business, you may have advertisers paying you for space on your website.  These payments count as business earnings at the end of the year.  So it is very important to keep tabs on this income as well.

Inventory

Managing inventory is complicated.  Not only do you have to forecast how much product you need to supply to your customers, you have to handle the costs of storing and protecting your inventory.  This means constantly keeping tabs on what you are selling, how much you have left, how much you need to order. If you’re working as a service provider, you want to keep a list of all your clients and what services you are providing to them.

Scheduling

Setting up a schedule is very important to keeping you organized, allowing you to see when you have meetings, when you need to invoice your clients, what happens on a day-to-day basis with your operations, and numerous other items that cannot be summarized in one article.

There are options out there to help you as necessary.  You can certainly hire out a contractor to handle scheduling and other administrative duties.  The only downfall to this is that a third-party hired contractor knows all the ins and outs of you business.  If you choose this route, it is very important to get a contract in place, particularly with a non-disclosure agreement, so that the contractor knows what they are going to be doing and that they will be held responsible for all of their actions.

Administrative Frequency

No doubt when it comes to running your business, administration is crucially important and likely consuming some portion of each day.  Regardless, I recommend keeping everything updated at least once a week.  This includes your weekly schedule, filing receipts, invoicing clients, and paying out invoices.  This will allow you to alleviate any headaches at tax time as you will have everything in front of you and ready to go.

Joshua Kelly is a 13-year United States Navy Veteran. Joshua holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Natural Science and Math. Along with several military decorations, Joshua was certified as a Community College of the Air Force Instructor. Joshua is currently self-employed with Dakota Weather Consultants.

“I am passionate about the military way of life and also the self-employed way of the future, and of course, the weather. You will find me, every day, running my weather consulting firm when I am not spending time with my family. I enjoy sharing information by writing to help others prepare themselves and learn from my experiences”. Joshua Kelly

SSGT NICHOLS: Serve Your Country.