Increase Sales Blog

Tax time is looming and now is the time to carve out specific hours or minutes to gather all of your receipts and get them ready for the accountant, the bookkeeper or yourself.  Personally with the complexity of the tax code, I have found hiring an accountant to be the best course of action and the best use of my time. My accountant knows about tax breaks on home office, cell phones etc.

Using my simple accounting program – Quicken – I can quickly categorize business expenses. Also, I file receipts on a fairly regularly basis meaning with the wallet becomes too stuffed and have them all ready to go by early January. Yes this does take some time, but scheduling 10 minutes a couple times of week pays off in the end.

According to Catherine Mallers of The Office Grapevine, a virtual assistant who specializes in Quick Books, a lot of production time and profits are wasted by small business owners to independent contractors to sales professionals who “fail to schedule time to work on the business.” By just changing some bad habits such as keeping receipts all over the place such as, the desk, the files, the pockets, etc. into good ones such as placing all receipts into one file can make it far easier to reconcile accounts and expenses. After all, small business owners need to focus on getting clients to securing the perpetual goal to increase sales.

Sales Training Coaching Tip: Start the first quarter of 2010 with a promise to yourself, your accountant or your virtual assistance that you will make time to work on the business. By taking this action, you will probably save in your overall professional service fees and even have a cleaner desk unless of course you like living in chaos.