Business Basics - 'Financial Tracking'
by Palyn Peterson

Keeping track of your finances is very important, and a lot of people don't do it! 

There are a variety of ways to do this.  I first suggest you look into getting software to manage your finances. Quicken for Small Businesses, QuickBooks and Microsoft Money are some.

If you use one of these pieces of software, try to not get behind on it, because once you start selling products and have finances going to and fro, it is much more difficult to integrate the financial tracking software after the fact. So try to do it from the start. The software should also help you keep track of taxes, how much and when to pay them, graphs, trends, etc.  It is a good way to go.

But, if you are like me, you'd rather keep it simple.

I created an Excel spreadsheet that is REALLY easy to use. Click here to download it, my gift to you.

It will automatically calculate profit when wholesale and retail prices are entered; it will automatically deduct merchant account fees from profits; and among other cool things, the most important feature is it automatically calculates how much federal and state tax should be put aside.

You may want to change the equation of how much tax it is telling you to set aside. Just click on one of the "total" cells, then change the percentage in the equation.

It has tabs for a Yahoo Store, Clickbank and Google. Feel free to change this howevery you like. If you create any major improvements, let me know!

Oh, and one more thing: do NOT email me with questions on how to use this. There are more than enough Excel tutorials out there.

The simplest way to set aside the money for taxes is to create a seperate savings account labeled "Taxes" and dump the money in there, not touching it.

Or better yet, put the amount into a mutual fund and earn high interest on it all year. When tax time rolls around, just take out the amount you need, and you'll have some "new" money left over.