I volunteered to take a look at setting up a system to track financials for the IGotNewsForYou team. Big, big mistake! Since I once worked at a financial services company about fifteen years ago, and I've heard the terms debit and credit before, the team thought I was the best qualified man for the job. My respect for accountants has just gone way, way up. I spent the better part of yesterday trying to come up with a way to set up a financial tracking system in Excel so that the team can then adopt it and run with it. My aim was to have a process that involved a minimum number of steps. Of course, IGotNewsForYou is a volume-type business. We're expecting lots and lots of transactions (hopefully) and no one should have to spend the entire day, every day, 365 days a year, logging $3.95 transactions...And it's not just simple transactions either - there are a number of combinations of products (online page, printed poster, shipping costs to various locations), and exchange rates to deal with...I even ended up reading some accounting stuff. I almost puked. In any case, I think I have a semblance of a plan. Basically it involves a daily expense register (not yet completed), a daily sales register that is downloaded from an online transaction file that adds up eight sales types, the eight tracked sales totals then automatically go to a monthly journal, and those totals then go to a quarterly/yearly actuals journal that includes budget numbers coming from a budget file. Say what now? All journals have an estimated exchange rate (since we're taking US dollars but we'll be working in Canadian dollars, or what we like to call "loonies") and when a bank reconciliation is done at month end, adjusting entries are plugged into the General Ledger to make it all balance. From there, I think an accountant can complete the monthly or yearly close of books... Did anyone catch that? Now some people might say, "Why bother with all the complexities? Launch IGotNewsForYou, take the money and run like the wind." That sounds great, but from day one we wanted IGotNewsForYou to be run like a proper business. We're not messing around. Well we are, cause IGotNewsForYou is all about humor, but the financials need to be solid... Anyway, perhaps some accounting demi-god will appear before me, take all this work off my shoulders and make my life easier. It's very difficult to drink a gin and tonic, eat ice cream and watch Olympic sports on television while working on this stuff! (Technorati Tags: accounting, financials, setting up a business)