Enhance Your Digital Sales Process for Accounting and Tax with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

hi friends welcome back to the channel I am super excited for today's video because I'm bringing on a very special guest that I think you guys are going to love and you're going to get so much value out of this because today we are talking all things on the financial side of running your own business this is something I get tons of questions about all the time just everything Financial whether you're running an Etsy shop or any kind of Small Business Online it can be so confusing so I'm really excited to bring on this guest today her name is Janet LeBlanc and she runs at paper and Spark and she is a certified public accountant or CPA and I love her take on things because she actually has a background herself of being a maker and a small business owner and selling handmade Goods so she gets it coming from that creative and maker side so I'm going to go ahead and bring her on and let her introduce herself to you guys so hey Janet welcome to the video today so glad you could be here yeah thank you for having me yes well I'm super excited to dive into all of these juicy Financial questions but first can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you currently do sure so like you said my name is Janet I run paper and Spark I started paper and Spark back in 2014 and I got started working in public accounting straight out of college a long time ago and uh it ate away at my soul I was not cut out for a cubicle job so I started looking for a creative Outlet a way to use my right brain I think it's the right brain right I think creative I always get that messed up um and so I taught myself how to make handmade jewelry that was like the easiest thing that I could figure out how to do and I opened an Etsy shop called lazy owl Boutique in 2011 as like my creative side hustle um lazy owl Boutique is like a really terrible name for a business also side note realize later right yeah who wants to buy jewelry from an owl that is lazy I don't know that's when owls were really big right so yeah yeah right I get that yeah so I loved being a maker I sold jewelry for almost a decade and um sold locally where I lived in Houston at the time I just really loved being a part of the handmade Community I loved being an entrepreneur um and I but I just kept getting called back to the accounting side of things there were so many questions and so much confusion from other makers that I met about like am I supposed to be charging sales tax on this or how to how do I pay myself how how do I track this in my books am I just a hobby I don't understand how I'm going to be taxed so many questions and there wasn't a lot of information out there at the time especially for physical product sellers for handmade sellers on how to answer those questions so I really didn't want to because accounting is just not the most Glam thing but I'm so glad that I did decide to start paper and Spark in 2014. my goal was really to bridge the gap between my County knowledge and the maker community so that other creative entrepreneurs could get the information they needed and feel good about it and move on to doing the stuff that really lights them up that they love to do and be able to pay themselves for their time and their work and feel confident that they understood the financial side of running a business yeah definitely well I'm so glad you did too because I I know I personally have found myself in a spot of like so much confusion before over the years being on Etsy like all things taxes every kind of tax the estimated quarterly sales tax it's just like it can be overwhelming for someone that's creative that is going into this thinking oh it'd be awesome to like start my own creative business and they you know they like to make things they like to create whatever it is that they're making but it's like the financial side of things is a totally different Beast to tackle and it almost seems like the more you start to try to like research it the more like down the rabbit hole you get and it just gets more and more confusing so um there's not many people that I have like talked to that seem super confident and that they know exactly how their shop is supposed to be run financially um so I'm so thankful for people like you that do understand it and can just like make it plain for the rest of us so that's my hope is that today we can kind of clear up some of that confusion um can you tell us like why first of all just kind of like an overview of why the financial side of things is important and why it's important not to just let's say you're starting an Etsy shop or an Etsy business to go into it just kind of like willy-nilly and like oh you know I'll I'll pay myself a certain amount and like not really put a lot of thought into what you're paying yourself or your bookkeeping or accounting or taxes why is it actually really important that we take you know know what we're doing going into it from the beginning right it's understanding your numbers and understanding your financial responsibilities it's important for several different reasons some of them are like fear-based reasons um which I don't really like to focus on but those are things like you know if you're not operating properly if you're not filing the appropriate paperwork you risk fines being audited getting in trouble like that sort of thing so there's always that aspect of why it's important to do it but beyond that numbers are facts you know especially as creatives we run by our gut a lot our intuition our feelings there's absolutely nothing wrong with that but I've seen a lot of business owners you know get to the end of year one get to the end of year two it felt like I was doing well I had orders I was making things I was shipping stuff but why do I have no money left in my bank account why don't I have enough funds to buy this piece of equipment like I thought things were going well or they are backtracking to do their taxes for April 15th and they're like man I had no idea like I spent almost everything that I made um so knowing your numbers getting in the habit of tracking especially your spending I mean track your sales too but know how much you're spending get in the habit of doing that the earlier on you Embrace that side of running your business the better off you're gonna be no matter what understanding your profit margins so that you can pivot more quickly like hey I'm making sales but I'm spending most of what I'm making it's time for me to increase my prices or change my product line um or charge for shipping you know maybe it's something as simple as that knowing those things and learning those lessons that your numbers are waiting to teach you earlier on means that you're going to be more profitable for the long term means that you're going to be able to pay yourself for your hard work you're not going to get burnt out as quickly it's just really key to becoming a smart sustainable business owner yeah definitely I I totally agree you would rather do it on the front end and really take the time to research it and figure it out rather than finding yourself caught in a hard spot later when you haven't done what you needed to do and then you end up not having the profit that you thought because you're having to pay off all these taxes that you didn't realize or you know fees that you didn't take into account and things like that so I'm mostly interested in taxes for our conversation today because that seems to be the area of the financial piece that people get really hung up on so can you give us kind of an overview of for a handmade like small business it doesn't have to have to be handmade but like anything online a small business online if someone is just beginning what types of taxes you know if they're considered self-employed what types of taxes are there that they should be thinking about and just kind of an overview of how taxes work so there are really two main types of taxes that any online small business owner should be aware of um they are sales tax which are governed by your State uh so it varies by state and there are income taxes and Most states also have income tax but the federal government the IRS really is overseeing income taxes that's the tax form that you're already filing for April 15th and when it comes to income tax just to be really clear what types of taxes we also have self-employment tax as part of your income taxes and you may be pre-paying your income tax bill and that's what estimated quarterly taxes are called that that applies to some people but not everyone but those are the main two big types of taxes that you want to be aware of that you want to be prepared for and that you want to make sure you understand as business owners do you want me to dive into an explanation yeah let's um let's tackle the income tax first we'll do sales tax in a minute but let's tackle in income tax right so income taxes are Federal and or state tax that's applied to your net profit so that's going to be your sales minus your expenses equals your net profit and the actual tax rate that you pay on that net profit will vary depending on lots of other stuff but the important thing to remember there is that's why it's good to keep track of your books that's why updating your numbers monthly if possible is ideal because you have to file your income tax form once a year and I see a lot of people backtracking an entire Year's worth of transactions once their taxes are due and that's very stressful a lot of times you don't remember what you paid for 11 months ago and you want to be able to accurately have those expenses tracked because their deductions they lower your net profit so that your tax bill is lowered as well income taxes for probably like 90 of online business owners handmade sellers um are going to be filed on what's called a form Schedule C so this is if you're a sole proprietor if there's one of you running your business if you haven't like Incorporated um even if you're an LLC which I know a lot of people get that LLC registration you're usually taxed as a sole proprietor so you're filling out this income tax form called a Schedule C it's two pages you can go Google it getting familiar with it is really helpful it lets you know what you should be keeping track of in your books but that schedule C goes with your personal tax return so it's not a separate filing for your business it goes with your personal taxes they're all due together on April 15th you will enter your sales you subtract out your expenses those are called tax deductions your net profit whatever it is Will Travel over to your personal tax form and it actually you're not taxed in a vacuum it will get lumped in with if you work a day job and you get a regular W-2 paycheck if you're filing with a spouse and they get a W-2 paycheck it gets lumped in with all of your personal financial stuff basically so um if you get refund if you get credits or take the standard deduction or anything like that that can lower your tax bill as well um that's why I say your business is never taxed in a vacuum uh so that being said that's how income tax the schedule C works if you make a profit on your schedule C of more than four hundred dollars so sales minus expenses is more than 400 then you'll also be paying self-employment tax on that profit as part of your income tax liability self-employment tax we can think of if you if you ever have worked a regular payroll day job before your employer was likely withholding some tax money from your paycheck every week every month whatever um they were paying things like FICA Social Security they're withholding that kind of thing from your paycheck as self-employed people nobody is withholding that from our profit right we're just keeping all the profit all the time so that's why the IRS has self-employment tax they're like hey we need you to pay into Social Security and FICA and all this stuff so we get hit with that tax at tax time it's not a lot of self-employed people think it's like a penalty for being self-employed but it's really just putting us on more even playing Ground I guess with uh typical day job employed people so that's what self-employment tax is and then if you think and this applies for your personal income taxes as a whole it's not really specific to self-employed people but if you are going to owe more than a certain amount Like A good rule of thumb is more than a thousand dollars if you believe you're gonna owe more than a thousand dollars on April 15th to the IRS or to your state government for state income taxes um it's ideal that you prepay your tax bill throughout the year so if if I'm if I think I'm going to owe more than a thousand dollars April 15 2023 then I may prepay my tax bill over the course of 2022 there are certain due dates for those prepayments but that's what people refer to as estimated quarterly taxes I'm just prepaying what my April 15th bill is going to be which is a little difficult because you have to kind of guess what you think your April 15th bill is going to be but though that is income tax in like a five minute nutshell yes that was amazing thank you for breaking that down because yeah there's so many different pieces that go into it so just kind of digging in a little bit further a couple questions so uh really just two questions I thought of so self-employment tax you said that's for people that make 400 or more right so if you make you don't have to pay that until you make a net profit of 400 or more correct yeah if you had a loss then there's no profit for it to for you to apply the taxes okay too um and if it's less than I I don't for some reason they just have a threshold of 400 that's for self-employment tax specifically there's not any sort of threshold for filing a Schedule C for having to pay income tax right okay so everybody has to pay income tax no matter what if you make 400 or more you have to pay self-employment tax yeah which is currently 15.3 okay and then beyond that the quarterly or estimated taxes come in you said a general rule of thumb if you're just starting is like if you predict that you're going to be making over a thousand dollars is it like for this current year or the next if you think you're going to owe more than a thousand oh okay so it's not making a thousand it's If You Think You're Gonna oh yeah more than a thousand a lot of people try to figure that out right there's a there's a form called the form 1040es okay that you can work through to try and predict if you will owe but it's it's basically like doing a guesstimated tax return um for that next year so it's very challenging because again your business isn't taxed in a vacuum like your business could do well um but depending on what's going on on the personal side you may end up not owing what a lot of people will do when they first start out the first few years of running a business is if they work a regular W-2 job or their spouse that they file taxes with Works a W-2 job they might just increase their tax withholding from their paycheck and that increased tax payment helps cover their business profit does that make sense because it's all lumped together at the end of the day the IRS just cares about all the money you made and all that you've paid into your tax bucket so far that year if you didn't pay in enough taxes so far that year when whether that be from your W-2 withholding from your regular paycheck or whether that be your pre-paying those estimated quarterly tax bucket payments if if those aren't big enough then we're going to owe at tax time if you overpaid then we get a refund at tax time um okay the goal is to get to zero which is very tough but you cut so you kind of have to a lot of times you can look at like what happened last year did I if I got a refund last year nine times out of ten I don't need to be worried about estimated quarterly tax payments the next year unless my business is going to go from like zero to bananas yeah and I'm gonna have all this new profit right right um yeah so the good rule of thumb is If You Think You're Gonna owe over one thousand dollars in taxes then it might be time to start prepaying your tax bill okay it's usually not something unless you're really profitable right off the bat it's usually not something most uh handmade business owners have to worry about in the first couple years of running the shop will will a business owner be penalized for not paying those estimated taxes if they needed to if you owe too much on April 15th and too much can like vary depending on your tax situation it's possible that they will like basically make you pay interest on what you should have prepaid it's usually very minimal like one percent um but it is possible to be penalized yeah okay so if someone is just starting and they don't really know but they think they might need to pay these quarterly payments how do they do that and how do they figure out for each quarter what amount to pay the best thing to do to start would be to fill out that form 1040es it's not something you submit it's something you print that helps you figure out what you think you're going to owe and you can take that amount and divide it by four and pay four equal payments um if you search for um search the IRS site for estimated quarterly taxes they'll tell you the deadlines it's not once a quarter it's it's weird numbers I mean weird dates uh but it's certain days of the year where each quarter's payment is due by and you can set it up to do it online you can write a check to the IRS there's lots of different ways that you can actually pay it okay the worst thing that could happen is that you pay it when you didn't need to and then you just get that money yeah back at tax time so you know government refund yeah okay well yeah so that breaks it down and then you know year by year is like you can look at what you made the previous year to help you be a little more informed each year right about like what you can expect or what growth might be coming the longer you've been in business the easier it gets to the easier it is to start predicting these things um and you can see you know like I'm halfway through the year things are going a lot better than last year so maybe I need to increase my payment or start paying when I wasn't um or things are not going as well as I thought so I don't need to be prepaying so much uh data is always the more data the better informed decisions you'll be able to make right yeah for sure one last question on this before we move to sales tax um is so so the quarterly estimated taxes are a federal thing is there anything on the state side that is happening too yes state state income taxes work almost exactly the same as Federal and you know not every state has income taxes but Most states do but you can be doing the exact same thing you can prepay your state income taxes as well because if you if you owe too much the exact same thing will be happening like at the federal level okay so to do that what they need to just look up their their specific States website yeah starting at the State Department of Revenue is always a good idea yeah okay awesome wow so that was just like so much great information I mean I feel like this is exactly the stuff that I wish I had had just like laid out for me in the beginning um so that kind of covers like the income tax side of things but let's move over to sales tax because we know this is a thing as well when you're selling something um it can be confusing when you're selling online as opposed to selling like a brick and mortar store or something how does sales tax work specifically for people selling on a platform like Etsy all right great question sales taxes is in my opinion a lot more complex because number one the state governs it so we have I mean there are also some states that don't have sales tax but every state does things a little bit differently um so always start at your State's Department of Revenue for for resources on that just to make sure that you understand how your State's dealing with it um but in general terms sales tax is a tax that the end user of a product should be paying so it's the last person to buy the thing basically is paying sales tax what that means is that when you sell your product to a customer your customer is paying you sales tax you are just holding on to that sales tax collected and then remitting it or paying it over to your State's your state government unlike income tax if we're doing it right sales tax should not be money out of our pocket okay who are holding on to it after our customer pays it and we're giving it over to the government when it's due so keep that in mind um things to consider with sales tax is your product subject to sales tax if you're selling a physical tangible product it's usually subject to sales tax some states will have exceptions for Necessities like clothing sometimes or certain types of food but most of the handmade physical products we're selling on marketplaces like Etsy are going to be subject to sales tax um lots of changes have been made to Nexus about the concept of Nexus in the past few years so how it used to be and how it still is it's just more than this but how it used to be was that you had to charge sales tax to any customers in a state in which your business had a Nexus and Nexus was defined as a physical presence so if I'm a brick and mortar shop and you're coming into my shop I'm physically located in that state so I'm charging everyone who's buying stuff from my brick and mortar shop my State's sales tax right that seems easy for online sellers with physical presence Nexus even if you're just selling online we still have a physical presence in that state so I used to live in Texas my feet were in Texas anytime somebody bought a product from me earrings from me and they were even if it was an online order if the customer was also in Texas I charge that customer the Texas sales tax rate so that still applies that physical Nexus that physical presence Nexus still applies so that what that means now is most of us still if your product is subject to sales tax we need to get a sales tax permit with the state in which we are physically located even if we're only selling online and in general terms we need to have our website set up to where we're charging our in-state customers the proper rate which can be a whole like complicated question in and of itself is figuring out what your sales tax rate is um but when I was selling earrings if someone from Florida or South Carolina or Washington State ordered from me I didn't charge them any sales tax right they're not I don't have a Nexus and well I think I'm picking all states without sales tax I didn't have a Nexus in South Carolina that's where I am now so I know we have sales tax so I didn't charge South Carolina South Carolinians my Texas sales tax rate or any sales tax rate right so fast forward to about 2018 all the brick and mortar retailers are like annoyed that online business people don't have to charge sales tax most of the time because they only have a physical presence in one state and so there's a lot of you know people theoretically ordering online because they're saving on having to pay sales tax so all the states are like let's get on more equal footing with online retail we're missing out on our sales tax dollars so sales tax rules started to change and now we have this idea of marketplace facilitators and we also have economic Nexus so you can think of this as like two more ways that sales tax could end up be charging for Etsy sellers the marketplace facilitator rules are really what are is impacting us now so now almost every state that has sales tax over the past four years each state has kind of dripped this out one by one but now Marketplace facilitators which are big websites that host sellers so we're talking Etsy eBay Amazon those are like the big three they are required since they have such a high volume of sales they are required to charge each State's sales tax to that State's customers on behalf of the individual sellers so over the past four years it started dripping out state by state by now every state that has sales tax is doing it except I think Missouri is the last one but by the beginning of next year they're going to start too so by the beginning of next year it's safe to say your state if it has sales tax Etsy is charging sales tax to your customers for you they are collecting it for you they are theoretically remitting it for you as well so it has it has graduated from on Etsy being in the seller's hands you can't go into your shop settings anymore and set up your sales tax rates you can't go into your shop settings and change who you want to charge sales tax four or two Etsy is doing all of that for us now and they're collecting and remaining for us now that usually means it definitely means if you're selling anywhere else other than Etsy you still need your sales tax permit for your own State um and usually even if you're selling only on Etsy you still need a sales tax permit for your own State what it means is that for all of your in-state Etsy sales they're not subject to you don't need to pay sales tax on them when you file that form anymore so when you get your sales tax permit the state is going to tell you okay file your sales tax forms with us every month on the 20th or they may say every quarter or they may say every year the the deadline will vary based on you and your state so make sure you note how often they tell you to file when you file that form whenever it's due your Etsy sales are basically non-taxable because they've already been subject to sales tax and Etsy is paying that on your behalf so you still need to file when due it doesn't mean that you don't get to file sales tax forms anymore they'll come after you even if you owe zero dollars it just means that your Etsy sales since their Marketplace facilitator sales now are going to be non-taxable or exempt and every State's form will have a different place for you to put that in some of them have updated their forums to say like hey tell us your Marketplace sales and some of them will just have a place for you to mark them as exempt okay yeah so if they're going on to file that sales tax form and let's say it doesn't have a specific place for that to input the marketplace do they need to include that amount when they're reporting how much they've made or they don't even need to include the amount usually there's a place where the sales tax forms Most states will have a place where it's like tell me all your sales even if they were out of state even if they were out of country even if they were on a Marketplace just like total sales and then taxable sales so usually you'd include them in that total sales area but the the end goal is that you don't want to pay sales tax on your Etsy sales because Etsy has already done it for you so however you need to properly report it to where that's what's happening that's what you want to do I have a lot of sellers in the past few years who are like oh man I've been paying sales tax on this stuff the past three years because that's how we used to do it and they didn't know like they they didn't realize now we're like double paying because as you're paying it and we're paying it yeah yeah for sure so just to make sure we're super clear so Etsy is doing this on our behalf as Etsy sellers is there anything that we need to do on our end as far as the shop set up now for sales tax I think the only thing that you may have the ability to be able to do is Mark I don't even know if you still have the ability to do this Mark whether your product is subject to sales tax or not okay they might have taken that away too I think that um it's it may just be important when you're categorizing what your product is when you list it for the first time because I believe that's how Etsy is determining whether they're going to tax your customers or not and I know they're still kind of working out the Kinks with digital products because I sell digital products on Etsy now and they're only subject to sales tax in certain States okay but I think they're still kind of figuring out how to apply that across the board so for digital products that was something I was going to ask about too if they're only subject to sales tax in certain states do you ask the seller need to figure that out or does Etsy just automatically yeah I mean I'm not going to tell you that Etsy is always doing it right but it's etsy's responsibilities to figure it out they have taken away pretty much everything that you could do you used to be able to do because I've been on Etsy since 2011 so I'm I'm familiar with like what you used to be able to input in the settings we used to have control over like you can't change it even if you wanted to at this point and then yeah yeah what about for print-on-demand sellers that are using like a print-on-demand partner is Etsy still in charge at that point of the sales tax yes I mean Etsy is still going to be charging your end customer sales tax the confusing thing with print on demand is that your print on demand printer um or provider May charge you sales tax when you go to order it from right okay them so unfortunately there's not a whole lot of wiggle room around that it's something that we have to consider in our pricing structure when if we're going to sell print on demand that I was just I had an in-depth conversation with a friend about that the other day she didn't realize she was going to have to pay sales tax when she purchased the item and that can eat into your margin really fast if you're not ready for it yeah for sure for sure what about also you mentioned certain States still don't have sales tax how do we find out if the state we're in has sales tax um I just start by Googling does Oregon have sales tax you know whatever state you're in um there are some good resources like tax jar the sales tax Institute website is really good for summarizing some of that information um yeah okay but sorry about your State's Department of Revenue is always a good thing okay wonderful is there anything else about sales tax that we need to know as sellers that maybe we wouldn't think of I I will add one more thing because I see a lot of confusion around this don't think that you have to deal with Marketplace sales tax rules for your own business this is something that is etsy's burden it's Amazon it's eBay your business by itself is not a Marketplace though so the the biggest thing that I see holding people up is they don't want to get started on like Shopify or their own website because they think that they're going to be required to charge sales tax to every state with sales tax and they're like I can't set up my site to deal with 45 different sales tax rules and rates and whatnot you don't have to do that you are not a Marketplace if you decide to get set up on Shopify or woocommerce or Wix or whatnot um you only have to set up sales tax for any states in which your business has a Nexus and for most of us that is just where you are physically located we do have that third type of Nexus called economic Nexus and that is different for each state of course but the summation of that is you have a Nexus and a state if you have a big Financial presence there and that's if you're selling like a high dollar amount into that state usually over a hundred thousand dollars in sales to that state so that doesn't apply to most of us so economic Nexus is not necessarily something many of us need to be worried about um I just want to mention it so you know it exists but if you get started on your own site set up sales tax for your state and then usually you're going to be good to go so I don't want that to be something that holds people back from starting their own website okay yeah that's a great point so with the physical Nexus like if they did start their own site on Shopify or even if they had like let's say on the side they were selling at like local markets or things like that um so they would only need to be charging and collecting sales tax for let's say it's on Shopify would they need to charge sales tax if if a sale came in from someone in their state where they have physical Nexus yes okay and you can set up your Shopify site to do that so like I'm in I'm in let's say I'm in Texas I'm selling my jewelry physical products so just a sales tax I'm going to set up my Shopify site Etsy Scott sales tax going to everybody in Shopify I have my sales tax permit I figure out the appropriate rate and I go into my settings and I'm like hey every time you see a shipping address in the state of Texas charge them 8.25 sales tax on that sale and Shopify will do that for me I get the money I hold on to it unlike with Etsy right I'm actually going to get that 8.25 and then I need to give it to the state of Texas when it's due every month every quarter whatever okay but if someone from Idaho Arkansas orders they're not paying anything I don't need to deal with sales tax for those guys okay so I just have another question sorry I'm like thinking about those questions because you're talking this is people yeah so this is a great you're making them too yeah so I've heard of and I don't know if I'm using the right term here but something like destination based Nexus is that a thing and like I guess people are concerned you know it's not just where I am physically for my Nexus but like certain states have this destination base like where the product is actually being shipped to right okay so with a physical presence Nexus when we charge sales tax some states have destination based rates and some states are origin based so your state is either origin or destination and what that defines is the rate that you charge still to those in-state customers only related to in-state so the origin based States Texas is one of them um you charge your Texas customers the rate based on the origin of the sale so origin of sale is where I'm located so the city I mean like the county and the state rate together I think I think the state ran Texas back when I lived there was like seven percent and then Harris County because I was in Houston was 1.25 so all my Texas customers because I'm in An Origin based state all my Texas customers paid 8.25 percent and I think like seven or so states do it that way that's the easy way destination based is when the rate that's charged is based on the location of the customer the destination where it's going so now I need to know the state rate plus the county or city Parish wherever you're located of where it's going still within your own state but I think like Florida is destination and back in the day when we were still inputting the stuff on Etsy you'd have to enter the sales tax rate of like every zip code so it's like like hundreds of sales tax rates that you could possibly have now if you're doing like Shopify I'm pretty sure like it automatically can do that stuff for you or you can at least like upload a file with all the rates in it um but that means if I'm in Florida and I have my sales tax permit and I make a sale to another Florida person who's in a different County than me that customer that Florida customers sales tax rate will be applied to that sale not my sales tax rate that's what destination means um but again it's still within your state you don't need to know if you're in a destination-based state sometimes people think that means I need to charge the sales tax of wherever my customer is in the U.S that's not what it means it's just still within your state yeah okay well good that takes out some of the stress of it because that was one thing that people ask about is like is it anywhere you know if it's a destination based state do I if I'm sending it to a different state does that still reply from that other state which you probably don't right right okay wonderful well this is just so amazing I'm so glad that we had this conversation I think this is hopefully clearing up a lot of things for people um I wanted to ask you just moving on real quick to it's like the best tools and software so you know we need to be from the very beginning looking at our accounting keeping our books correctly like keep like you mentioned before keeping like tracking your sales your profit all that what are the best tools that you would recommend for every kind of budget so for the person that's just starting that doesn't have really much of a startup budget all the way to someone who maybe wants to invest more in their bookkeeping yeah there are a lot of options out there um even if you're on a shoestring budget diying right now there's nothing wrong with just opening a Google sheet and tracking your your numbers in a Google sheet um making your own system you want to be logging your sales you want to be logging your spinning those are your expenses um you want to make sure you're noting any sales tax you've collected if you're selling off of Betsy so that you can make sure not to spend that money but you can do that in your own DIY system if you need to um they we also have um GoDaddy used to be a really big option and that just got discontinued so there's not a whole lot of options out there specifically for makers there are paper and Spark spreadsheets which I've designed specifically for handmade sellers there's ones that Import in from Etsy Shopify Amazon that's a one-time fee so if you're if you're not looking for like a monthly subscription paper and Spark spreadsheets are a great option for that we also have QuickBooks if you want a software option QuickBooks is kind of the gold standard of accountants there are lots of different versions of QuickBooks some are more complicated than others those are a monthly subscription fee uh the one that SC partners with is QuickBooks self-employed which is the least expensive option to use so that's one worth checking out the only thing that I want to note about QuickBooks self-employed is that it doesn't help you track inventory so if you're selling physical products you want to be tracking your inventory in a system that is set up for that so you may need to supplement QuickBooks self-employed with like a DIY spreadsheet or a paper and Spark spreadsheet for tracking inventory related stuff um but that those are all pretty economic options for getting getting started out really just depends if you want to go free monthly subscription or one-time fee I will note to the the sooner you start two other things for like your record keeping the better off your life will be save your receipts you don't have to get like a receipt scanner or complicated software um you don't have to save the paper copies either digital copies are fine take photos save them to the cloud you want to hold on to those for like three to seven years so taking photos is a good idea and uh if you do a lot of driving for your shop like driving to the post office driving to shows uh start tracking your mileage you want to have a nice mileage log for that it can be a notebook in your car some people like to use mileiq which is an app that I think you have to pay for um but that can be something that you potentially get to deduct at tax time you just want to make sure that you're documenting it right it can be easy to overlook that stuff and then you get to tax time you're like oh I could have been using this as a deduction right yeah so yeah keeping track of everything I totally agree um okay so those paper and Spark spreadsheets that you mentioned I'll have that Linked In the description of this video so if any of y'all are interested in that like she said the one-time fee for that spreadsheet you can find the link for that in the video description and then Janet has also offered so generously to give you guys a freebie which I'm really excited about so Janet can you tell us a little bit about your the other thing that we're going to have linked which is her freebie that she's offering to everybody yeah it's the get legit checklist so if you are either working on getting your financial ducks in a row or maybe you've been selling for a little bit and you're not sure if you have all your financial ducks in a row the checklist is going to help you get there so we're just gonna work through you know what permits what documentation you need and then I also have some information there on what sort of financial topics you may need to get up to speed on so like how to track inventory for instance so it's it's a list of things to make sure you've done and a list of things to make sure you understand so that you can feel confident about the financial side of your business and move on to selling making stuff and making money yes Hallelujah I'm so excited about this this is exactly what we all need whether you're just starting or maybe you've been in business for years and still are just like not clear on all this stuff so I'm gonna have that Linked In the description as well it's also here on the the screen hop over there and get that checklist it's totally free to you and thank you Janet for coming and just answering all of our questions this has been so amazing thank you so much for having me I am happy to spread the word on these topics yes so where can people find you if they want to follow your other um your other education where kid what's the best place for people to follow you I'm pretty much paper and Spark everywhere paperandspark.com paper and Spark on Instagram Facebook I'm even on Tick Tock it's so fun okay wonderful all right well you guys hop over and follow Janet she has tons of great information on all things Financial especially for makers and creatives and thank you again Janet I'm sure we will talk again soon thank you all right bye [Music] but I'm dying to tell you