For many small business owners who have to wear all the hats in their business, managing their budget can be a real pain. I know when my husband started his business, he was at a real loss when it came to managing his business budget, because guess who had always managed the household budget? Yep, me! So the first thing I had to teach him how to do was use QuickBooks.
If you've got your own business and you're doing all the bookkeeping yourself, you need to use a program like Quickbooks to manage your budget and business finances. Better yet, hire a bookkeeper to manage it for you, but even if you do that, you still should know how to use Quickbooks. You never want to be totally hands-off when it comes to your business finances.
My mom is an artist; that is her business. Yet she manages her finances in Microsoft Excel. Now I love my mom, but I can't believe she still uses Excel for this. I've tried to tell her many times how much easier it is to use QuickBooks, or even Quicken, but she's pretty set in her ways.
The great thing about using QuickBooks is it tracks all of your expenses by category. So you will know at the end of the year what you spent your money on. That means you'll also have a very clear picture of what you spent on marketing.
And you'll know what results that level of marketing spending generated. Team that up with a good marketing tracking system (you don't need packaged software for this, this is something Excel is actually quite good for! In fact, I provide ready-made tracking forms in my Small Business Marketing Resource Center) and you've got the tools to help you become a very cost-efficient, effective marketer.
So if you're still doing your own books manually, take a trip to Office Depot, Costco or www.pricegrabber.com and pick up a copy of QuickBooks. It's an investment that will easily pay for itself.
Marketing Success Podcast: Manage Your Marketing Budget the Easy Way
Click Here to Download MP3/Audio
(length 3:22 minutes)
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