Year End Wrap Up

January 2nd of every year is always the busiest for me as I try to wrap up all book keeping activities for the previous year.

Wrapping up 2007 last year was a little rocky – I has just started KC and still trying to figure out what I needed/wanted to track and how to best do it. It was then that I decided to make a new, all-encompassing worksheet that divied everything up by categories (as selected by me and some by my tax preparer) to track all my spending from craft supplies, shipping supplies, shipping costs, etc. It is one big worksheet!

So today I”ve spend the day wrapping up the numbers for 2008. Some conclusions I’ve come to so far are:

• I nearly doubled my anticipated expenses for the year. Wow – this is not good. (But there’s a good explanation for this – see below.)
• Of my total yearly dollars spent, over 55% of it was dedicated to technology type items, i.e. my trusty old Dell had crashed in the spring and I had to get a new computer…and another one…and a new printer. Not to mention the software I needed to get going. (See, I told you I had a good explanation!) This total alone nearly explains why my expense budget nearly doubled.
• The other larger percentages weren’t all that large – 11.13% on craft supplies (patterned paper, card stock, chipboard, spirals, etc.) The third largest category was shipping costs which came in at 6.38%

I’ve decided that for the upcoming year, I’ll go by the budget I had set for 2008 and I don’t think I’ll have a problem sticking to it, given that I don’t have anymore computer problems.

I’m excited because over the past 1.5 years I’ve acquired so much stuff and I’m looking forward to actually USING those things instead of shopping for more, which should help out tremendously with overall costs!

Happy accounting to all!

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