Record Keeping

This is a topic encouraged by many, but it is rarely discussed at great length. I can understand why, few of us actually enjoy paperwork. Unfortunately, some of the least enjoyed items can be the most important as you progress towards you goals.

In this thread, I would like ask for this community's help in coming up with a list if important things that should be recorded and why its important. This will be all inclusive, any record or business related counts.

-Road miles. By keeping a log in your car of all your business related car trips, you have proof of an important tax deduction.

-Phone conversations - No, not the entire conversation. At the minimum you should be recording date, time, who you spoke with, company, their extension or badge number, and any pertinent details of the conversation. This can really be a headache saver down the road when you are getting two different answers from a company. When you tell the next person or supervisor that you talked to Bob at 11:37 on 6/7 about the price quote of x. It gives you credence to your claims.

-Personal Budget (at least monthly)- For many of us starting out, its gives you a starting point. It also allows us to clamp down on those money leaks on our finances.



It doesn't matter what business you're in folks. What have you been keeping track of to aid you down the road? Whether its home expenses or certain business deductions, let's hear them.

• goals
• deadlines to meet goals
• lessons learned or rules of the road
• really clean books.... because it allows you to see many reports at the click of a mouse... trends, how much did you spend on ( ), revenue for the quarter vs. last year, etc.

We are attempting to get as many of our docs as possible to be held electronically...

In our real estate lives, for each property, we have (on the PC)

appraisals
title commitment
loan docs


Also, tax docs and PL statements, current net worth statements, "boiler plate" bio and portfolio of experience.... when you are continually seeking credit for new acquisitions, etc. it is really nice to have these in an electronic format... can email to your loan officers... it can become a pain if you have these things "filed away" somewhere. Nice to have them readily available - - - and really nice not to have to make a new copy of everything everytime you apply for a new loan. It could take a small forest!!!


And, we were just discussing a few months ago that we really need to update a list of account numbers (and name of company and contact info) insurance policies, etc. to make things easier for an executor should something happen. Boy, oh boy. If something happened to both of us right now, or poor executor would probably be driven to madness just trying to figure out our financial lives...

If you're generating innovative ideas, you should keep a separate "Idea Notebook," just in case you have an idea that you'd like to apply for patent. Date your ideas, and sign each page...this notebook can be used as evidence of when (specifically) you came up with an idea and can protect you in the case that someone else attempts to patent a similar idea at a later date.

remember to make sure you have backups of all those electronic records.

We mulled this over a lot, and decided to go w/ one of those online backup services. Seems to work pretty well.

We're in the process of automating our back-ups.

We want to do both off site storage (via quickbooks or logmein storage), and on-site via an external hard drive that auto-backs up every day.

This way, should the hard drive fail, we can plug in a new PC (still in the box) and keep going. This is important for us, business wise.

And the off site storage protects against catastrophic failures, like fire or theft.

Like Sonya (ATW), we're also scanning our important docs to .pdfs. This *really* speeds things up when you need to send a title officer (or lender) something.

I should mention that we use quickbooks to track our expenses.

Aside from that, using logmein.com to monitor our reservations program at the Inn daily, as well as our bank accts and inn emails via fastmail.fm. Using Logmein fastmail has been probably the biggest, most helpful change to our biz this past year-- but it's not really record keeping--more monitoring.

-Russ H.

Are you guys scanning receipts as well? Are you using any of those receipt scanners and software or just the regular scanner for that purpose?

We aren't.

Yet.

Haven't decided one way or the other if we're gonna.

-Russ H.

So you never formed your own opinion, but rather just took the nay says and returned it? I had contiplated getting that device, but i would like to actually see its capability to recognize letters and numbers.

I conduct nearly all important correspondence by email and keep multiple backups. If I have a conversation by phone, I reiterate what was said, and I recap the conversation in an email message to the client. This way I always have a record of what's said. I don't scan receipts but have been thinking lately that it's a really good idea.

There is nothing wrong with drawing conclusions based on the opinions and experiences of hundreds of others. Too many bad experiences gives me an opinion that I don't need to risk my time and money with it. I will wait until a better version comes out.

Oh, absolutley nothing wrong with it. Personally i like to try something out myself to see if it will work for me, otherwise i may lose out on a useful product. Like i said with this particular item, i would like to try it out at some point. It is nice to know that costco carries it because you can try it and if it doesnt work out costco will take it back. I do not know if thats exclusive with a business membership or not, however. nothing wrong with what you do though.

Information is everything, therefore it is important to put it perspective and prioritize.

Lists give you the power to do this and the master transactions are the journal entries (9) to put together the financial statements (transaction priorities).

The transaction summaries can be labeled cash receipts, cash disbursed, payroll, labor distribution, sales, cost of sales, production, inventory movement, accurals, and adjusting entries. You can put together the financials of GM with the above.

Once you have financials it is not enough it is only control.

Then you must develop the technology of packageing, reporting, and telling the story!

When the above is in the most simplified format more questions and information is uncovered which then re-prioritizes for report #2, report #3, etc.

Packaging and Reporting are big part of record keeping!

This follow thru is what then teaches you timeless concepts that overlap into everyday life, very powerful stuff that cannot be underestimated.

For example Robert Kiyrosaki's emphasis on financial statements at the core of his teaching came to the conclusion that your house is not an asset.

Think of the power of this concept and the simplicity of it. I had accounting and finance degrees and years of experience and never thought of this formal definition.

Its always right in front of your nose - these concepts are earth shaking and revealing and re-prioritizes entire thought processes.

Unicon, great perspective.

Thinking a little bit more about this, I just came to realize that I am failing at noticing and tracking patterns in a clear way.

For example, if I were driving a lot for investments purposes then maybe I should create a table where I record the number of miles driven per month, or per week, to be able to see them in the long term and notice any pattern (for example, do I drive less during the winter? why? does it matter?).
Again, this is just an example.
What about tracking monthly expenses? Any variations worth noticing?
Same for many other important numbers, like income or utilities.

Thanks to this thread I have more things to look forward to improve. Rep++ to the original poster.