Organization: It's Best Done Right From the Beginning!

In 1985, when I started my first "serious" business, I was not terribly well organized.

Certainly, I was organized enough, but as soon as things started to get busier, I found myself wasting a lot of time "reverse engineering" my organizational and bookkeeping system... and felt like I was eternally "playing catch-up."

Even after several years, I never really felt caught up... and it always felt like I needed spend more time than necessary trying to locate records I needed.

Of course, some people might make the argument that you don't really know what you need to organize and keep track of, until the business has been up and running for a while.

The experience, however, taught me the importance of sitting down and figuring out what it important to you to record and manage, before you start your business/project.

Ironically, I didn't really learn the value of good and accurate record keeping until aforesaid business went bankrupt, after 13 years!

What happened then was that we were court ordered to submit accurate months financial statement to the bankruptcy court... so there was no more "box of receipts and papers" method of filing things!

Of course, it was a horrible and unfortunate way to have to learn, but it has stood me in good stead, ever since.

Alas, many "entrepreneurial types" are much better at the creative and inventive parts of business, than they are at the bookwork and record keeping.

I find myself writing these words as a bit of an adjunct to starting in on preparing our business tax returns for 2022... and with that, feeling a fair amount of gratitude to myself for being as well organized as I now am.

As I started gathering relevant numbers together, I was grateful not only for the organization, itself... but also for the fact that I have time time to write myself instructions about what I need to gather, and where I can find it.

The thing about most taxes is that you only have to do them once a year, so it's easy to forget the process and end up feeling like you're starting all over.

The upshot of which is that I can now spend about 3-4 days and have everything ready to go... rather than 3-4 weeks of trying to chase down badly organized chaos!

And that's definitely something to be grateful for!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Do you consider yourself a well-organized person? Have you ever been in charge of the record keeping and accounting for a business? Do leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 2023.04.04 23:52 PST
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