New Year 2008

The year started like any other I guess but I have some resolutions that I hope to stick to this year. The whole of 2007 was spent in managing my accounts and projects in a haphazard way. I was using a variety of unrelated tools to manage my small business.

I used MS Outlook for my mail services, MS Excel to keep track of my projects and my vendor payments and coordinated between all these manually. But this year, I hope to change all that. The manual process meant that I would skip updating my projects excel sheet and do it at the end of the month. This would lead delayed payments to my vendors. Also it would mean that at any time during the month I did not have an overview of my sales and expenses.

Not having an overview of your expenses in a web business means that you tend to over spend on certain things such as investing in domains or paying for small outsourcing jobs. But this year I hope to rectify the situation by utilizing MS Office 2007 to the fullest extent.

I have install MS Office 2007 with Business Contact Manager. I have also installed MS Office Accounting Professional 2008. Now, when a new order comes into my Inbox, I would create a business contact, a business account, a new invoice for the sale and then record the payment. This would then automatically update my Accounting software. This would also mean that every single order/project is recorded and I would have an overview of all sales and projects at any given time.

Next, I am also recording every single business expense by generating expense invoices. This will then give me an overview of the income and expenditure at any given instant. This all sounds like a lot of work, but believe me, it is not. The new MS Office 2007 and the Accounting software work seamlessly and by making a part of the business process it does not seem like a chore.

I was almost tempted to take some resolutions regarding smoking or exercise but resisted the temptation. I hope to tackle them as I go along.

I have however made a few more business resolutions for the new year. To start investigating investment opportunities in domains, to be more flexible in my pricing policies, to be up to date with my MBA course and apply any thing I learn to the business and to cut down on all outsourcing jobs that are not directly related to client projects.

Here’s to the New Year!!!