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House cleaning invoice for small businesses

[Music] taxes for your cleaning business where do you start oh this is a fun question because most house cleaners do not like their taxes yay we got that out of the way hi there I'm Angela brown and this is ask a house cleaner this is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question and I get to help you find an answer you know today's show is brought to us by a house called Pro which is the number one service software for service professionals I'm super excited about this company and I'm super excited that we've partnered with them to bring you this show because of them we get to bring you these tips for free so please thank them a house called procom forward slash Angela check out their software if it is not right for you there's no obligation but they're saving a bunch of house cleaners a ton of money by automating the tasks in the background of their business so that you don't have to spend hours a day doing tasks that an app on your phone can do for you check it out house call procom forward slash Angela alright onto today's show there's a caller that called in to this show and asked this tax question hey Angela this is Tonya from South Carolina I'm just wondering I started my business in June of 2019 so I'm getting ready to file my taxes and I'm unsure of how to go about it or how I would I file under what category having a little trouble understanding all of it if you could just give me some advice on which way to go thank you alrighty taxes for your business and where do you start what an awesome question the answer is first and foremost I love the fact that you've started your business so congratulations on that second thing is I love the fact that you're willing to pay your taxes because there are a lot of house cleaners that think that they're gonna just get cash and they're not going to track their money and they're not gonna pay taxes and all those things the problem is if that is your business model it's very hard to do anything for the rest of your life because there's no paper trail there is no way to get a loan from the bank a bunch of problems all right so the fact that you're willing to pay taxes that's a very first thing that a loan officer is gonna ask you when you go to buy a house when you go to buy a car you're gonna say can I have two years of your tax records so this is where it starts alright first and foremost you can hire a bookkeeper which a lot of house cleaners do because they're not great with numbers oh alright now that I got that out of the way have to say this if you are a business owner you have to get great with numbers it's not optional right it's like not learning the cleaning chemicals for different surfaces it's not optional you have to learn your numbers if you want to stay in business you have to learn your numbers so you can hire an accountant but now your accountant knows your numbers I need you to know your numbers you know it sounds like I'm harping on you but maybe I am I'm harping on you so you need to know your numbers there are several different software platforms on the market and now we live in an era of technology so everybody has smartphones everybody has tablets laptops computers whatever it is there are ways that you can track your numbers from software QuickBooks is a really good program there's fresh books there's Quicken I will leave links in the show notes to a variety of different programs that are available they all do pretty much the same things what I want you to start doing is tracking all of your costs of goods this is all of your cleaning supplies the gloves that you wear if you have Swiffer dusters and you use those disposable Swiffer heads those are gonna be your cost of goods all of your cleaning detergents your brushes your brooms your mops your vacuums all of that stuff your operating costs are gonna be a little bit different those are going to be your internet access and your smart phone which you have to have in order to run a business the software that I'm talking about is going to be a software as a service known as a SAS SaaS software as a service this is something you pay for every month and I say every month because like QuickBooks for example has an online portal where you sign up with QuickBooks and then it links to all of your bank account information I'm going to get to your tax question in just a second but it links to your bank account information so every time you buy cleaning supplies it logs into your system on the schedule see where this goes on your taxes that hey you just bought cleaning supplies when you fill your car with gas it goes in on a specific line item and says you just put fuel in your vehicle for your business when you pay your smartphone bill goes on on a very specific line that's gonna transfer over into your taxes so if you have this software that tracks everything that you're spending and it tracks all the money you have coming in all of a sudden it starts offsetting those costs here's how much money you earned here's how much money you've spent in order to make the business happen so whether it's payroll or its fuel for your vehicle whether it's license and registration for your car whether it's your car payment it depends on how you are going to list your business but there are programs on the market that will help you track all of your expenses alright now that you have all of your expenses track there's a program called TurboTax you've probably heard of it it's been around forever it's an amazing program for small business now even if check this out even if you decide to hire an accountant I still recommend you have your own version of TurboTax here's the reason why when you set up TurboTax it's going to ask you what business are you in and you're gonna say I'm a housecleaner and it's gonna say ah and it's gonna give you a number an ID this is the number or the ID for housecleaning then it's gonna say in housecleaning these are standard deductions did you do any advertising this year did you have internet did you have a smartphone did you buy cleaning supplies and go through all the different questions of the standard deductions the house cleaners take the reason this is important is because you only want to take the standard deductions now your Disney trip that you took with your family that is not a standard deduction most house cleaners do not take the Disney cruise and so you can't really tax to duck that's not standard and if you try to you will throw up a red flag and will say whoa this is not a standard deduction and you might get audited do you still want to take this deduction and then you're like oh I don't want to be audited so then you remove it right so before you even go to your bookkeeper and you're paying your bookkeeper by the hour hundreds of dollars per hour you can resolve a lot of those issues before you ever go to your bookkeeper now there are a lot of house cleaners they never have a bookkeeper because they're using the QuickBooks and the TurboTax which work really well together and give you all the information you need in order to run the numbers on your business so that you our business and number savvy so where do you start start with QuickBooks or fresh books or whatever the software is that you choose like I say you can do your research they're all pretty good and they all pretty much do the same thing TurboTax I highly recommend they've got different versions of TurboTax based on how big your business is if you're an LLC if you have employees if you have independent contractors and that as well so I will leave links to those in the show notes as well for the different versions that they have I will also leave my Amazon affiliate links which if you click the affiliate links and you buy it from the affiliates we make a commission which pays for the show which is awesome it doesn't cost you a penny more in a pace for the show so booyah alright that said I want you to start today today keeping track of your numbers because you cannot be in business can't survive in business for the long haul if you don't know what the numbers of your business are so check it out the important thing is that you start start tracking it today and then when it comes tax him if you want to hire an accountant the important thing is that you will have everything already and you're not spending 400 hours of their time you're giving them simply the file and they're gonna double check it and within an hour or two they'll say yeah you're good to go but the turbo tax will pretty much do all the same stuff anyway so I'm not knocking it regular bookkeepers but what I'm saying is there's a lot of stuff you can do yourself and I recommend that you do you need to know your own numbers alright I hope that helps if it does please pass this on to a friend if we've earned your subscription please subscribe and until we meet again leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it [Music]