Today and tomorrow I’m making time for accounts. I don’t mean accounts as in clients, I mean accounts as financial accounts, the ones and zeroes that add up to make a business tick and keep me in food and clothes.

So for the afternoon I’m surrounded by

• Bank statements from the past 15 months
• Credit card statements for the same period
• Phone bills for the same period
• Miscellaneous purchase and sales invoices

This process is one which will continue into tomorrow. Rather than try and squeeze everything into an afternoon, I’ve been planning this for some time. I figure the time and effort I put into it now will eventually save me a lot of hassle when it comes to dealing with our current accountant (I say current because you never know when you want or need to change accountant!). Plus, when we went to our accountant the first time around we ended up paying double the original quote as a lot of preparation work, such as what I’m doing now, wasn’t completed.

In preparation for this I have

• Contacted all clients I currently have open jobs with and declared myself unavailable for two days this week
• Switched off my office-hours mobile phone number, changing the voicemail to notify callers again that I am unavailable until Thursday.
• Used the vacation feature in Google Mail (I use Google Apps to drive my office email setup) to reminded those contacting me via email that I am unavailable until Thursday.

For the first few years of working for myself (in partnership), it seemed easy to divide and conquer when it came to accounting. This meant that we would divide the workload, I take all the design and leave the accounting to my partner in crime.

But, I believe that if you are serious about running your own business or working for yourself that you need to be well versed in every element of the business - including the accounting end. Sure, it’s grand to see that you’ve got money coming in and out of the bank but at the end of the day, where is it all going?

So my laptop is on and open (with Twihl and Juhu keeping me company throughout the day) and I’ve created a series of spreadsheets in Open Office to help me track all this paperwork.

Let’s see how it goes!

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