Being your own boss holds a lot of appeal, after all. Start as early or as late as you want, take breaks of any duration, keep all the profits for yourself — it’s a good situation in principle.
Every silver lining has a cloud within it, though, and the difficulty with running a home business is the scale and scope of the workload. An office is typically filled with employees carrying out regular duties, but a home operation is either a solo operation or staffed by a skeleton crew. How are you supposed to manage?
Well, the key is to use software tools to make arduous tasks much simpler, freeing up time and saving money. In this piece, we’re going to look at some tools for helping with tax and finance, two issues that can be tough to deal with. Let’s get started:
If a mortgage broker seems like an odd choice, here’s the explanation: having a great mortgage is important enough if you’re just living somewhere, so it’s absolutely essential if you’re also using that place as the base of operations for a fledgling business. Money is right in the startup world, and Breezeful makes it easy to find and compare mortgage options so you can set off on the best possible financial footing. And since it provides advice even after you’ve secured your mortgage, you end up with a valuable resource to support you as you grow your company.
There’s no shortage of accounting tools out there, but in this case I’m recommending GoDaddy Bookkeeping. Why? Because of its tight-knit integration with three main sales platforms (Amazon, eBay, and Etsy) as well as the PayPal portal. Home businesses often work in sales, and in the event that you use one of those platforms, you’ll find handling your finances significantly easier if you have this tool in your toolkit.
If your accounting work is going to prove fruitful, you need all the source data to be accurate, and that means keeping track of all your receipts and expenses — something that’s particularly onerous if done using manual data entry. Expensify has various integrations with popular apps, allowing it to automatically import data on things like hotel stays or travel charges, and uses them alongside a robust receipt-scanning system. Usefully, it’s inexpensive, and you can even pick up an Expensify card that will automatically log payments made through it (this can be a huge timesaver, as you can surely imagine).
Expensify concentrates on business receipts, but when you’re working from home, it’s easy to get your personal and professional spending mixed up. Goodbudget uses the envelope method of splitting your spending into distinct categories: for instance, you might have one category for food, another for entertainment, and a third for home maintenance. It’s excellent for seeing exactly where your money is going, and there’s a solid free plan so you can trial it.