Sunday, October 24, 2010

I've been an organizing manic over the last few weeks. It started when my old Quicken started to act funny and we had to buy another program. QuickBooks came to mind and was endorsed by our accountant so we picked one up at Costco and started entering data. That was a task that forced me to really organize all expenses. No more "put it on the business card and pay it back later". QuickBooks does not have a category for that. In order to enter everything, we had to get all the files in order, something we normally do when we're working on taxes later. So now, everything thing is entered up to date and I can check our profit/loss and see exactly where we are.

Next, I finally decided to listen to Dave Ramsey and get our finances in order. We started by pulling out the money to cover his recommended cash expenses and getting a rudimentary budget going. This is a little painful because we are in the relatively slack part of the year so but getting the order installed has been so liberating and empowering.

Next we came up with a baby step for turning over some management responsibilities to one of our guys who has been with us a while and has an interest. In order for this to work, we came up with a little routing form to follow to make sure all the steps are done. We mocked up a Google calendar and database that we can all access. It has entirely straightened out our procedure setting up jobs that has worked for 17 years but wasn't something we could easily turn over to someone.

Feels good to be in charge of these areas of my life.