176: Business Chats [Set up a simple money management system this week (so tax time isn’t scary)]

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In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, Krista Kolodziejzyk talks about:  Links: Episode Transcripts: Welcome to the Dietitian Success Podcast. I’m Krista, the founder of Dietitian Success Center, an online learning platform for RDs and students. I am on...

In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, Krista Kolodziejzyk talks about: 

  • Why we often feel fear around the ‘money stuff’ in our business 
  • A simple organizational system you can set up that will make tax time a breeze 
  • Benefits of having a business bank account 

Links:

Episode Transcripts:

Welcome to the Dietitian Success Podcast. I’m Krista, the founder of Dietitian Success Center, an online learning platform for RDs and students. I am on a mission to help more dietitians build confidence and expertise in running successful, profitable businesses. I went to business school so you don’t have to.

My team and I have grown DSC to a platform that serves hundreds of members. We’ve experimented with all types of marketing, tech, sales strategies, productivity tools, systems, and more. And we want to spill the tea on what’s working, what’s not, and how you can leverage our insights to kickstart, expand, or elevate your own business.

Ready to dive into your business school crash course? If so, let’s get started.

Hey there and welcome to a new episode of the dietitian success podcast. I have to apologize. My voice is still a little bit just not normal sounding. I have been, I mentioned this in last week’s episode, but it has been a whirlwind of sickness in this household since my little baby started in daycare. Holy moly.

So we are just dealing with the back-to-back daycare, coughs or sneezes colds, the whole gamut. So. But the show must go on and I want to keep getting these episodes out there. To you all. So. Anyways. I apologize for my scratchy raspy voice. Okay.

Let’s get into the topic for today. Which is basic money management. The reason why I thought this would be an interesting one to talk about is because you probably just went through. Tax time. So paying your taxes from the previous year, filing your taxes. And I know that a lot of, for a lot of people, that process, especially when you’re just getting started in business can feel really scary. And I think that fear often comes from just the unknowing.

This is an area that’s often totally new, maybe completely foreign to a lot of us. I know I felt this way when I was just getting started. And a lot of times that fear that uncertainty is what ends up. Is, is really because lack of information, we’re just not super informed. So we don’t really know what we’re doing.

And so we don’t know if we’re doing it correctly. And so consequently, it just becomes this sort of vicious cycle of I’m scared. So I’m just going to avoid this, but then that avoidance and ends up feeding into the fear and it’s just. It’s just a bit of a messy process, but it doesn’t need to be that way.

I really, my hope for you is that. We can approach this topic from a place of wanting to become more informed and consequently become more confident in dealing with the money stuff in your business. So, how would it feel for you if you did a couple of simple steps today or this week to set yourself up for the next year?

So that next tax season. Comes around and you actually feel great going into it. You feel confident. You feel empowered because you know that you set yourself up for success. You set up an easy peasy organizational system that just runs in the background for you and you have all of your ducks in a row.

How would that feel? That is my goal for this episode is just to walk you through how I organize the money stuff in my own business. This is not financial advice. I’m not an accountant. I’m purely just speaking about how I organize myself. So that when it comes time for taxes and the accountant is stepping into the business, it’s all set up.

It’s ready for them. It’s easy. It’s clear. It’s organized. And I know what’s going on in my business at the end of the day. That’s the important piece is that I know how much money I’ve been spending. I know how much money I’ve been bringing in. I know what our profit margin is. So that’s revenues minus expenses. So I know how much money we have in the bank.

I’m able to plan for the future. I’m able to figure out, Hey, am I going to invest in that? Course or that training program. I can make all of these decisions because I know where the money is at in the business. So that is my goal for you. For today’s episode. These are just going to be super. This is going to be super simple blueprint for you that you can set up this week. And again, set yourself up for success for the next year. Okay, so starting off with step one. Which is setting up a separate business bank account.

Okay. So I want to be super clear on this. This is not absolutely necessary. Until you start having more transactions each month now. I don’t know if like, if you were to set up your business as a corporation or as an LLC, your accountant might say, no, no, you need to have a separate business account. Business bank account. But if you’re a sole proprietor, like when I first started out. I had, I didn’t have a separate business bank account.

I just had all of my business revenues going into my personal bank account. And I would just spend out of my personal bank account. And the assumption was kind of that like any money that comes in is either mine or I spend it in the business like mine personally. But when you have a corporation and I think an LLC works the same way.

We don’t have LLCs in Canada. So I’m less familiar with just the ins and outs because I haven’t actually. Set up on myself. But I know with a corporation, the corporation is a separate business entity from you yourself personally. So it needs to kind of live in its own world. And so having a separate business bank account is. Just really important for keeping everything organized and separate from you. And having a business bank account is really easy.

And, and I actually did set one up eventually when I had a sole proprietor and it just made my life so much easier for keeping things organized. When your revenues and your expenses are like mixed in with your personal stuff, it just gets really messy, honestly, really messy. So having that separate account can be super helpful. And it’s easy.

Just go to your bank or some banks allow you to do it online, go to your bank and just ask, Hey, I’d like to set up a business bank account. And I think for mine, I am pretty sure I pay. One annual fee. And then I want to say it’s around a hundred bucks maybe. And then every month there’s a fee, but I get a reimbursement as long as I keep a certain balance in my account.

So it ends up being free every month. So long as that balance is maintained. So. That’s kind of nice. It’s really easy. It just helps to keep things organized.

Real quick. I just want to pause this episode to talk about a brand new piece of content that we’ve recently released in the dietitian success center membership. That’s available to all members. And this is our menopause toolkit. And I want to tell you exactly what’s included. If you work with patients or clients, chances are, you’ve probably had women coming to you asking about issues. Related to menopause things like weight loss, body confidence, feeling like their metabolism has slowed down, feeling frustrated with how their body is responding to aging.

So with the DSE menopause toolkit, you get a three part video course that looks at background nutrition therapy. And case studies, so you can learn how to implement the material. And one of the things. I love about these case study specifically is that they explore how to navigate. If a client comes to you looking for weight loss, they have a history of weight cycling and maybe some disordered eating behaviors. And you as the practitioner still want to remain weight, neutral, remain weight inclusive, but you also want to support the client.

So what do you do in that scenario? This case study will help you navigate that situation. We’ve also included an evidence summary, which is the best available science on nutrition and menopause summarized in one document. And a number of handouts that you can use directly with your patients or clients, nutrition tips for menopause phytoestrogens. Nutrition and hot flashes and so much more.

You get all of this plus hundreds of other resources for only $34. So pop on over to dietitian success center.com and become a member today.

Step number two is setting up either QuickBooks or wave app. And linking it to your bank account. So basically QuickBooks or wave are, and I think it’s wave app. Let me just check yeah. Wave apps.com is the URL. So basically how these work is, they are essentially financial, digital, financial management systems.

So. You essentially link them with your bank account, your business bank account. And they will record your revenues. So money coming into your business and expenses, money that you’re spending. And then you can actually go in and you can save your receipts in there. You can look at you can categorize your expenses into different categories in your business, so you can see, like how much am I spending on contractors for instance, or how much am I spending on marketing?

How much am I spending, spending on just general? Office expenses, like what does that look like? Professional development, et cetera, you can categorize all of those expenses. So that you have a better overview of where your money is going in your business. And then you can save your receipts in there as well. And so then the cool thing about these and having these set up and they’re affordable wave app actually has a free starter plan.

QuickBooks has a $6 per month starting plan. But the great thing about these is that when it, when tax time comes around, oftentimes you can actually just give your accountant access to your QuickBooks account. And I haven’t done this with wave app, but I’ve done it with QuickBooks that my account just gets access to. My QuickBooks account and they can just access everything from within there.

So I don’t actually have to provide them with anything when taxes time comes around, which is really nice. And the other thing too, if you don’t have an accountant, if you’re doing your taxes by yourself, by through like TurboTax, TurboTax is owned by Intuit, which also owns QuickBooks. And so they work together really seamlessly. Your TurboTax can pull my can pull information from QuickBooks.

So that’s why I kind of like, I like QuickBooks. I’ve used QuickBooks quite a bit and my accountant uses QuickBooks. So that’s the one I prefer. But I’ve also used wave app in the past as well. When I was first getting started. So having one of these systems is really going to help to keep you super, super organized.

And it’s great because they link straight to your bank account. So they will record the accurate information of what’s coming in and what’s going out versus if you’re doing it manually. There’s obviously always that opportunity for user error, her right. And oh, oops. Maybe I missed an expense or, oh, oops.

I recorded a revenue incorrectly. And so I find that these systems are just super, super helpful. So would definitely recommend doing that. So step number one was setting up a business bank account. Step number two was setting up QuickBooks or wave app, linking it to your bank account. Step number three. Is once every two weeks or once a month, even just depending on how many transactions you have each month. I would probably recommend once every two weeks, just to sort of stay up to date on what’s going on in your business. Go into your QuickBooks or your wave app attach and attach your receipts to your transactions and like categorize your drift transaction.

So just go in there. See what’s happening. Categorize those transactions. Upload your receipts to the different transactions and just get a sense of where are things at in your business? I know for me, every time I go in there, I’m always like, oh yeah, I forgot that I spent money on that. Or it just helps to give you a more up to date. Perspective on where things are actually at in your business. One other thing I forgot to mention too, which is one reason, another reason why I really like the idea of having a separate business bank account is because. It actually, I find makes it so much easier for you to make financial decisions in your business if it’s not linked to your personal account.

So. Like I remember. You know, when I had it all coming into my personal account and I just treated the money coming into the business as mine, it became a lot harder. To invest back in the business because I would say to myself, well, no, this money is mine. It goes in my pocket. And so then it, it just becomes more of an emotional decision if you’re like, well, am I going to give up this money to invest in like a purse professional development course for myself, or like new business software or whatever? Versus if your business money is separate from your personal money. Then I know for me like the money that’s sitting in the business bank account.

I do not look at that as my own personal money. That is money that belongs to the business and it is money to be used to help grow the business, invest back in the business. Now, of course I can pay myself a chunk of it. I do pay myself a salary. So I’m not talking about that, but like I’m talking about the extra money in the business.

I can. You know, it makes it a lot easier for me to say, okay, where should that money go? Where can I spend that on. And so that’s another reason why I really liked the idea of a separate business bank account.

And so once you have your business bank account, you’ve set up QuickBooks, you’re checking in every two weeks or so you might be wondering, well, what do I pay attention to in this QuickBooks account? There’s a lot of information in there. Most of which I have no idea what it means. But if you go into reports and you look at your profit and loss statement, that will tell you. How much revenues coming in, how much have you spent and ultimately, what is your profitability?

So how much profit do you have? How much money do you have sitting there? That, you know, you can make a decision on what to do with it. But that’s really the important thing for me personally, that I like to look at is like, what’s our profitability. And I like to think every year of like, okay, what’s the desired amount of profit. That we just always have as like a cushion room in the business. And you might not have any profit, like, especially if you’re first getting started, maybe you are in a deficit.

So that means you have more expenses than you have revenues. And that’s a very normal part of early business and maybe your goal, your financial goal is just to achieve profitability. So just to have that. You know that you had just have more revenues than expenses and then every year your goal is to have a little bit more profitability and so on. So again, it allows you to set those business goals, those money goals that. Those financial goals, but we have to do that.

We have to know what’s going on in order to be able to do that. And then when tax time comes around, all you have to do is again, like I said, give your accountant access to your QuickBooks. And, you know, or if you’re doing it yourself, going through turbo taxes And then they’re going to calculate for you how much taxes you owe you, pay it, and then that’s that, that’s it.

It’s easy. It’s not scary. But we want to make sure we’re setting up a system for ourselves to feel empowered, to feel successful, to feel confident. Just to know what’s going on. I think that like, I, I often think that in my old life and my own business, it’s like when I feel the most anxiety or the most stress it’s often when I am not. Like I’m, I I’ve avoided something I’ve avoided. Learning about something or I’ve avoided expanding my knowledge in an area.

And I’ll just say, oh, you know, no, that’s scary. I don’t want to pay attention to it. And I’m just going to put it to the side. And then it just feeds into those feelings. We don’t need those feelings in our business. There’s enough mindset stuff going on in our business for us to deal with that.

Like, this is one of those easy things that we can just check off the list. If you don’t have an accountant, all you have to do is just in your looking for one, you can just Google small business accountant and see what pops up. You can also look on Instagram. Just search small business accountant. Or like accountant and the city in which you live. If you don’t have an accountant, I’m Canadian and I use, I work with someone named Kaitlin, Kirk. She’s incredible.

I’m obsessed with her. She’s so good at what she does. She makes it really not scary, which is awesome. And all you have to do with her is you pay a flat fee every year. And you get QuickBooks, you get quarterly meetings. She does corporate, my corporate tax filing. She does a lot of stuff for me.

So you may not need anything this intense, you may just need somebody to just, you know, pop in every year when you’re ready to do tax taxes. But it is helpful. If you can find somebody that you can work with longer term, they can get to know your business a little bit better. And so you don’t have to like re-explain things to them every year.

So we definitely recommend that, you know, set up a relationship with a local accountant who can help you and who can be there for you if you have questions or, you know, if you get a. Friendly notice from the CRA or from the IRS that just says, Hey, you know, We need this from you or whatever, they can help you navigate those things too.

So again, they’re just not so scary. Oh, okay. I hope that that was helpful. Let’s do this this week. Let’s set up this really easy money management system. Now, so that next year, at this time of the year, you’re like, oh, that was a breeze. That was super easy. I’m so glad that I did that the year before. Okay.

I hope you have an awesome week. Happy money management. And I will see you next Thursday.

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