By Clay Schudel
Last month I wrote about getting more control over your
life by getting a better understanding of your finances. Click here to read that post! If you are just getting started, or don’t know where to
start, here are a few useful tips:
1-
Organize
your paperwork. Whether you’re making your living as an artist / performer
or if you’re just getting started as a working artist (but all of your income
is from a day job), remember to take your business seriously.
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Get into
the habit of keeping all bills in one place, so that you can easily put
your hands on them, and commit to visiting your home “financial center” at
least once a week. Develop a simple system that works for you and stick to it –
for example, if you need to, use a red pen to write at the top of each bill the
due date so you never get stuck paying a late fee for a credit card bill or
miss an important payment.
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If you’re an individual artist your business
expenses and personal living expenses are likely mingled; this makes it
extremely important to save your records
in an organized way so that when you file your tax returns you can claim
every legitimate business expense as an independent contractor against any
income, to make sure that you only pay taxes on any profit that your business
made. Do this organizing as the year
goes along. If you are going to claim a deduction, you’re going to need a
record of:
When: The date of the
transaction
Where: Where you bought the
item
What: What the item was
Why: What
purpose it served in your business
Try making a
simple spreadsheet with these columns:
Date | Category | Vendor | Cost | Purpose
Make a note on your receipts
(“rent; costumes; business meeting”) and file them as you pay them; $10 spent
at Staples now on a few file folders will save you so much stress at tax time,
digging through every drawer in your apartment and trying to remember what
these receipts were for.
·
If you’re prefer saving digital copies of your
receipts, there are several phone apps that allow you to photograph and save a
cloud based copy of your receipts; probably the two most popular ones are Shoeboxed ($9.95 a month, but this app
has many other mobile accounting features than just organizing receipts) https://www.shoeboxed.com/features/
and the much more basic One Receipt (free app) http://www.onereceipt.com/
2 - Evaluate and understand your income and
your expenses. Knowing what you spend, and what your income is, over a
period of time will let you make intelligent budgets, better use what resources
you have, and do all kinds of short and long-term planning. As I wrote last
month, the program that I still rely on MOST OF ALL is one that almost everyone
already has if they have a home computer – the old fashioned Excel spreadsheet.
·
Start by listing regular income and expenses you
know will happen or feel pretty sure about:
Make a thorough list of your
regular income, and note when it
happens; you should put down things that happen monthly (a job that pays a salary every 2 weeks), a few times a year (do you a get
quarterly royalty check?) or once a year
(do you usually get a tax refund every May? Teach a paid workshop every
summer?)
·
Make this same list for your known fixed
expenses. Be as thorough and as realistic as you can; after you list your large
and regularly repeating expenses like rent, utilities and internet, take a good
look at your cash or credit card spending and try to understand your patterns
and to group your spending into categories; use your bank and credit card
statements to help you note regularly repeating automatic payments you may not
think of (Netflix? Insurance premiums?) and notice when your credit card
payments themselves are due.
Lining these two categories
(Income & Expense) up side by side in two columns will go a long way
towards showing you the bare bones of your financial picture and will help you
see cash flow gaps that you have to prepare for or changes you want to make in
your spending.
Microsoft Office (maker of Excel) has lots of preloaded
Excel spreadsheets that you can download from the Office website, and easily
modify for your own uses.
SCORE, a nonprofit that provides mentorship services for
small businesses and entrepreneurs also has many templates you can download and
modify to help you analyze your expenses and cash flow
Here’s a very simple cash flow forecasting spreadsheet
that I created using Excel
You don’t need to be stressed out about the money side of
your creative business. A plan that’s simple enough for you to actually keep up
with (and doesn’t take too much time away from your real work of making art) is
the one that’s right for you.
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