Keep track of your book biz

[TLH]

It's a new year and I'd like to keep better track of my writing business.

Right now I keep track of sales by downloading spreadsheets and keeping receipts for expenses but there's got to be a better way to track monthly expenses and sales and royalties in a software that will make tax time next year a joy.

Any suggestions?

[angeleyez320]

I would like to know too since I have just been using a notebook. 

[JohnsonJoshuaK]

Don't the various sites send out tax information each year?

I'm not positive as I don't have anything up ye but I would imagine that would he the case.

If so, you would really just need to track expenses?

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[Alan Petersen]

Quicken works wonders vs. my old shoe box method.  

[TLH]

Thanks Alan. I was looking into Quicken. I wanted something that could help me track expenses for a home business and this seems to be the way to go.  Did you buy it or are you using the online one?

[Krista D. Ball]

I really like Trackerbox. I'm able to organize my single-sales, my trad royalties, and my self-pub stuff all into different folders.

[Edward M. Grant]

I've been using Gnucash, but it's hardly the most intuitive piece of software on the planet.

[Rykymus]

Quickbooks. Although it's got way more than you might need, you can track everything with extreme accuracy, and can make lots of nice charts and graphs. I've been using it for my computer business for years. And I'm using it now for my book business. It is a bit of a learning curve, however. And it's best to learn a bit about it before you set it up. I believe they have an online version that's pretty cheap.

[Terrence OBrien]

"Don't the various sites send out tax information each year?
I'm not positive as I don't have anything up ye but I would imagine that would he the case.
If so, you would really just need to track expenses?"

The vendors send out 1099s after year-end. However, depending on how much money you make, quarterly tax payments might be necessary.

[JohnsonJoshuaK]

The vendors send out 1099s after year-end. However, depending on how much money you make, quarterly tax payments might be necessary.

I see. I plan on leaving my earnings in a bank account until taxes are paid out so I guess we'll see how that goes. I might need to find an actual accountant lol

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[Alain Gomez]

I use Quickbooks for my (non-writing) business.  It takes a few days worth of headaches to figure out but definitely a time saver once you do.

[Crenel]

I also use QuickBooks for my non-writing business. Considering its price tag, I wouldn't recommend it for someone who is not making steady sales. If you're just getting started sales-wise and you haven't used any accounting software, I would recommend the (Free, open source) GnuCash, which I use for my personal finances. I agree that it's not the most intuitive, and there are some design decisions that drive me crazy, but with a price tag of $0 and considering the accounting muscle it offers (with support for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux), it really is worth a look. Even if you try it and decide you don't want to continue using it, you can export your data and move to something else without re-entering stuff.

[Alan Petersen]

Thanks Alan. I was looking into Quicken. I wanted something that could help me track expenses for a home business and this seems to be the way to go.  Did you buy it or are you using the online one?

I had the software version years ago but last year I went online and I like it. I can access it from anywhere and I don't have to worry about backing up the software. I was concerned about the online aspect of it but I already bank online, pay bills online, buy stuff online, etc. 

[TLH]

@Alan Yeah, I'm thinking the online way might be the way to go for me.

@Crenel, I hear you on the price. It's steep to buy it. A bit cheaper for the online version. I'm sure this is probably a write off. I'm also a freelance copywriter for my day job so the software would also be managing that as well.

[Crenel]

I'm not ready to put critical functions like accounting into "the cloud." IMHO, the "cloud" (Internet) isn't ready for that either. There are the obvious privacy and security issues, but also reliability -- what if you need access to something in your financial data but your network connection is down, or the cloud-based service is down? (It wasn't that long ago that Amazon AWS had a major problem, and I remember people at the time bemoaning their choice to put critical stuff there, especially without a backup.)

I haven't looked at Intuit's online offerings, so I don't know what kind of redundancy there is (if there's any at all), but if you decide to go that route I strongly recommend you research how to mitigate network/server outages.

[Alan Petersen]

I'm not ready to put critical functions like accounting into "the cloud." IMHO, the "cloud" (Internet) isn't ready for that either. There are the obvious privacy and security issues, but also reliability -- what if you need access to something in your financial data but your network connection is down, or the cloud-based service is down? (It wasn't that long ago that Amazon AWS had a major problem, and I remember people at the time bemoaning their choice to put critical stuff there, especially without a backup.)

I haven't looked at Intuit's online offerings, so I don't know what kind of redundancy there is (if there's any at all), but if you decide to go that route I strongly recommend you research how to mitigate network/server outages.

I know several folks and family members that have lost critical financial data when their computer hard drive crashed, spilled water on it (it really does fry it), had their laptop stolen. Then you have viruses, hackers, etc. So there is risk off the cloud too. Nothing is 100%. The key is to back it up but most people don't backup their data.

If you're using the cloud services of intuit they have a team of techies to respond to any problem. That's their bread and butter. Even Amazon, yea they went down but they took care of it quickly and there was no data loss. If you're a business hosting your website on Amazon S3 and it goes down you would freak but they had it back online fast. If those companies had their site on their own server then you have to have your own tech because servers go down. It's normal.

Access rocks. The automated reports are awesome. And it's so easy to use without having a resource hogging software on my computer.

You can tell I'm sold on the cloud.  

[Crenel]

Even Amazon, yea they went down but they took care of it quickly and there was no data loss. If you're a business hosting your website on Amazon S3 and it goes down you would freak but they had it back online fast.

What outage are you thinking of when you say they had it back online fast? I'm talking about the one last April that lasted for days. My Web provider reports server outages as "long" as 10 minutes. Not fully recovering for days is not "fast" by any cloud-relevant metric. And as for no data loss, a) I don't believe that and b) I think loss of business (as people were reporting) is a greater concern.

I'm (unfortunately) familiar with data loss related to local storage, but any such loss is 100% within my control. If I'm too dumb to back things up and have restoration verified and practiced, I have only myself to blame if I suddenly can't access my accounting records as I'm staring down an unmoving tax deadline. But if my network connection fails due to an upstream provider problem, or if the cloud-based service fails and does not quickly recover, and as a result I can't access my cloud-stored accounting records, I can point fingers at a lot of other people but it won't do me any good.

As I said, if you're going to use the cloud, you should research how to mitigate your risks in the same way that effective backups mitigate risks for local storage. Just trusting the cloud to be reliable is about as "sensible" as expecting your hard drive to not crash, or trusting your computer to not get infected with malware without actually taking any steps to prevent that from happening. Securing your business data should never be a matter of faith.