Year-End Accounting

Whew! I think I'm up to date on finances! Our accountant has been hounding us for year-end info to do tax estimates since November. But the holiday sales and personal obligations for the holidays have made that impossible. Having these past two weeks off from my day-job has been so nice and allowed me to catch up on many things.

I did inventory the night of December 31st. Lots of counting. And then on January 1st, I updated all accounts in QuickBooks. Now I need to send this information off to our accountant who will tell me how much to enter for amortization, depreciation, inventory adjustments, and stuff like that. After that, we'll have our profit numbers for this year. Currently the profit does not reflect some of those accounting adjustments. The amount of money we took out in owner distributions does not reflect profit in the accounting sense. If our profit was just the amount of money we took out, then we'd quit this never-ending exhausting entrepreneurial job. The accounting profit numbers would make us feel much better. Our growth and gross sales look great on paper. And our cash flow is very respectable. But for 3 years of hard work in addition to having demanding day-jobs, we'd certainly like to see more cash in our own pockets.

I think this coming year will finally make running this company financially worthwhile. Then we can cut back on our day-jobs and devote more time to building the company. We are quite conservative when it comes to money. We funded the company in the beginning with our own money. We don't have any outside investors, and we don't have any loans with the bank. We pay our credit card bills off every month. The company is our investment for our future, not a risk for our future. But because we have had to build it slowly with limited funds, it's been a long process.

This past holiday season sales haven't been too shabby. I think the economy is coming back. People are spending more in the discretionary category.