Zen Accounting for Bloggers

Let's talk a little bit about Zen accounting for Bloggers. This is the system that we use for both Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro. It's a really simple system and there's four primary steps in this accounting system. Number one, receipts folder. Number two, setting up QuickBooks online. Number three, setting up read only bank account access for your bookkeeper. And number four, the monthly check in. If you want to see the blog post for this, you can go to fbpro.co zenaccounting but. But this is the overview. Number one, a receipts folder. You need a physical and a digital Receipts folder. And with the physical Receipts folder, it's going to be something that's really simple. All that you need is some manila folders that you can mark out by month and put all of your physical receipts into those folders. The Digital Receipts folder works in a similar way, but it's going to be on your computer. So here's a screenshot of the one that we have for Pinch of Yum for the the month of September. And basically what happens is whenever we get an email receipt, all that we do is create a PDF version of that and then we drop it into the expense folder for that month. And we do the same thing when we have digital receipts or digital payments, we make sure to put those in the income folder. So that's the Receipts folder. Number two, setting up QuickBooks online doesn't have to be QuickBooks. That's what we use. But you can use any cloud based accounting system. And the nice thing with this is that your bookkeeper and your accountant is then going to be able to log into QuickBooks and access your files so you don't have to export anything or have that information on your computer and your computer only. It's really nice for that to be cloud based so they can access that. This is also related to that. Number three, read only bank account access for your bookkeeper. Now what this allows your bookkeeper to do is to log in and access your information without having any privileges to like withdraw money or do any transactions. So here's a screenshot in PayPal of where you would create that type of user. You can just click on Manage Users and set up a user that only has access to read the information but not to do any type of transaction. And what that will allow them to do is go in and see all those transactions. Then they can log in to step number two, the QuickBooks and make sure everything matches up. Number four, step in. The Zen accounting system for Bloggers is the monthly check in. And the idea here is that your bookkeeper or your accountant will send you an email and say these are the things that I didn't quite know how to categorize. And here's a screenshot from Food Blogger Pro actually of some different transactions. And these are ones that came up that our bookkeeper didn't know what to do with. There were first time charges that they saw. And so with this we would put some information in the notes area here and we'd send it back and say here's how to categorize that. It's completely hands off, really easy to do all the other transactions she knows what to do with. So she can jump in there and categorize those and only ask us about the ones she has questions. So that's the Zen accounting system for bloggers. With this system we spend about half an hour a week at the most doing accounting and bookkeeping for our two different websites for our two different blogs. And I hope that if nothing else, it's given you some ideas of what you can do to help improve your your accounting and bookkeeping system. If you are a blogger, you can check out foodbloggerpro.com ebook there. You can sign up for our email list where we'll send you all of these different tips about blogging and we'll also send you an ebook called 10 Mistakes that Bloggers make and how to Fix Them. And lastly, if you're interested, we'd love if you subscribe to the YouTube channel for food Blogger Pro and we will continue to put out simple little videos like this that will hopefully help you improve your blog. Thanks for watching.