January 17, 2016

New Year, New Accounting

Branch

Since the flipping game came back into my life in 2015 in a bigger way than expected, I vowed to clean up the books for 2016. I launched Etsy in late September 2015 and by year end had gross product sales of $544.11, eBay for the year was decent. Now that its 2016 I have to deal with it tax wise. My accounts were co-mingled in 2015, I was buying from the bins with our points credit card, buying personal & household stuff out of the Paypal account and generally being negligent to this business which could be profitable.

I knew late in 2015 that this had to change. I wanted to open a free business checking account, get a business credit card to pay monthly and shift all expenses for my flipping out of our personal accounts. Thankfully, Nerdwallet put together an awesome state by state breakdown of who offers free business checking accounts here in the US. I really wanted to use a credit union, but any one close to my operation charged, and the charges were big. 119 per month for one and 99 per month from another. Really hard to justify 10% of last years gross flips to bank fees (on top of Etsy, eBay, Paypal and the USPS’ fees!).

I ended up going with US Bank’s Silver package. The staff were hella cool in getting everything set up including registering my sole proprietorship with the state. I had an existing LLC from the PepperCave but wanted this to be its own thing and for what I currently do sales-wise online, sole prop will work out. Aside from being free, I chose US Bank because at my last company (e-commerce startup), they worked really close with us on an SBA Loan that helped us get into a new warehouse. If the stars ever align again, I want access to that.

Anyhow, just an update for 2016, how are things with your flipping business? Any tips going into the new year?

Thanks for reading like always,

Justin

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