One of the areas that most beginning online sellers know little or nothing about is how to keep the books for their new online sales venture. Uncle Sam wants his portion of your profits, and it is probably most common for sellers to file a Schedule C and SE along with their annual 1040 tax return with the IRS. Some people find it easier to hire an accountant to handle these things for them - they put the receipts and printouts in a shoebox and hand it off to them each January to turn into a meaningful report about if you made money or lost money. But don't you really want to know if you're making money during the year, so if you're NOT, you can work on changing that?For small sellers just starting out, you can probably do this yourself and save a little bit of money if you have just a few simple guidelines in mind. If you took a bookkeeping or accounting course in high school or college, you're ahead of the game, but just in case, I'm going to discuss a few basic accounting concepts to give us a framework for my lens.I'm not a tax accountant, but I have been an accountant at a non-profit firm since 1999, and earned my Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in Accounting, so I've got the background to help you get started.If you have Microsoft Excel, you can use spreadsheets to keep track of your records and help prevent mathmatical errors. If you don't have Microsoft Excel or another kind of spreadsheet program available, you can purchase ledger books at most office supply stores to record your entries in. You would want two-column and three-column ledger books. These have columns for Date, Description, and then two columns usually on the right side of the page, one for Debits and one for Credits. You would use one sheet of the two-column ledger pages to create Journal Entries, and then have a separate page using the three-column ledger pages for each Account, where you post the Journal Entries - first column for debits, second column for credits, third column for the running balance.I am a proud member of the OSI Rock Stars! OSI Rock Stars is an educational gold mine for online entrepreneurs who "Choose Success", as RockStar Founder Janelle Elms would say. Through OSI Rock Stars, we have the opportunity to participate in podcasts and webinars covering a broad range of topics that all online sellers would learn from: accounting, taxes, product procurement, search engine optimization, even Squidoo! Janelle puts out a daily newsletter filled with kudos for the success that we have built, sharing questions she has received and gathering input from the newsletter subscribers to help answer the question. The OSI Rock Stars brings together a broad range of people, whose group knowledge is available to all to learn from. If you would like to get more information, click on the logo below.

Date Added: Jan 3, 2008 Hits: 1 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0