Yesterday I made a point about having to reference everything when it comes to online banking. Today, I’m once again both mindful and thankful of that point.

After 3 consecutive days totalling roughly 27 hours, I’ve come through the other side of the accounts and I’ll be making and collecting payments due from/to me tomorrow morning.

The downside is that I lost 27 out of 40 hours (I usually put in 40 hours at a minimum in the office) available to me this week, leaving just 13 for client work, the bulk of which will be a full day behind my regular desk tomorrow. This is valuable time lost on jobs that will have to be made up over the next week or so (and will be made up, I assure you of that).

However, I’m looking at it this way.

Say I pay myself an hourly rate of €15. My take-home wage on a weekly basis would be €600. If I’ve spent 27 hours doing accounts, chasing bills, invoices and documenting everything along the way, those 27 hours have cost me a total of €405, leaving me an effective take-home page of €195.

Last year my accountants fees were in four figure territory, not three, largely due to the fact that this kind of work wasn’t done. So if I’ve dropped €405 because I took three days out to review finances, I’ve likely saved in excess of €1,000 for making the effort.

I’m not an accountant by any stretch of the imagination but if you were to sit me down in the morning I can show you where everything came and went - purchases, sales, cash, wages, loans, taxes and more.

If you’re working for yourself I feel it is vital you both know and understand that kind of information - especially when it comes to filing your taxes at year end. I also saved money on using accounting software too - I started a series of spreadsheets in OpenOffice, made out all my formulas and references and got stuck in.

That said, I’ll still use an accountant at the end of the year to make sure everything is in order from a legal perspective, but I’ll have saved a lot of time, hassle and money in the process.

I can promise you, after these three days I will thoroughly enjoy the weekend.

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