Blogger Series Part 4: Organizing Your Finances

This image is used by permission from Hobbies on A Budget

Many people start a blog with hopes of making money whether it's to supplement their income or even replace an income. Some can do it and are quite successful, but most bloggers will tell you that their real satisfaction and "payment" is reaching others and sharing with other bloggers and their readers. Making a small profit is lower on the list of priorities but does help out when it comes to supplementing website hosting, giveaways, and the many hours spent updating our blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter, the list could go on and on.

Any income that you generate should be tracked and accounted for accordingly. As bloggers, this includes ad revenues and the value of review products.  We should, also, account for all of our expenses - web hosting, giveaway fees, shipping of prizes, etc.

A simple Excel Spreadsheet should be sufficient:

This spreadsheet applies not only to bloggers but to anyone that takes in additional income. It would, also, be beneficial to look into tax codes to see what parts of your home office space could be considered a business expense if you use it solely for your business.

Keep your blogger funds separate from your personal funds - even if it's just using a Pay Pal account linked to your blog email.  This makes it easier to print out official statements for back-up. If you use Pay Pal, it's essential to save our print out the monthly statements as they are not stored indefinitely - only for 3 months. After that time period, you'd have to run a query to get your information.

Use a binder or file folder to keep all your financial records (statements, receipts, etc) in one central location.

As a blogger or online business owner, what tools do you use to organize and track your finances?

If at any time you're in doubt about what should or should not be accounted for, consult a tax advisor or the IRS directly for clarification. 

If you haven't done so yet, be sure to chime in on the previous posts in this series:
I switched commenting tools and, alas, lost all previous comments. 
I'd love if you'd chime in again on previous posts :)

Blogger Series Part 1 - Newbie Advice

Blogger Series Part 2 - Social Networking

Blogger Series Part 3 - Balancing it All