69: Get Your Financial Resolutions Back On Track Whether You Are Starting A Business

69: Get Your Financial Resolutions Back On Track Whether You Are Starting A Business, You Are Self-Employed, A Solopreneur, Entrepreneur, Small Business Owner, Remote Virtual Online Bookkeeper, Virtual Assistant Or VA

Whether you set goals at the beginning of the year or you have resolutions you have promised yourself you’d do in the new year, now is the time to make sure you are on track so that you can follow through with your goals and resolutions for the remainder of the year. I’m sure that you’ve heard that most people will quit their resolution after just one week. When asked why they don’t stick with their resolutions, most people will say that they don’t have the time, resources or support to keep the motivation up so that they can stick to their resolution. This can be true of goals as well. When you want to ensure you are reaching your goals and sticking to your resolutions, you need to make sure you are following through. This includes checking in to see how you are doing and being truthful to yourself if you feel you are slipping and need to realign yourself so that you can continue to move forward. In today’s podcast episode, I am going to help you take a realistic approach to making sure you are staying on track or picking yourself up and getting back on track early in the year. I don’t want you going a few more months into this year and just giving up on your resolutions and goals. You made promises to yourself to reach these goals and today I am going hold you accountable and give you a second chance if you’ve found it was much easier to make your resolution than to keep your resolution. Resolutions and goals are important to your business whether you are just getting started with your business, you are a self-employed individual, a solopreneur, entrepreneur, small business owner, a remote, virtual, online or in-house bookkeeper, or a virtual assistant or VA. Many of the resolutions business owners make revolve around the organization of their financial data or bookkeeping. Listen in, and let me help you make a lasting change with the resolutions and goals you’ve set for this year. It doesn’t matter if you are using a computerized software system like QuickBooks, Xero, Wave or FreshBooks for your business finances, or if you are doing your bookkeeping manually with an Excel spreadsheet or even a Google Document, this episode will be helpful for you…

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Show Notes:

Welcome Back…Think about your feelings at the end of the year and how you were so positive about the goals and resolutions you were setting. You knew at that time you could reach these goals, but here we are one month into the new year, and you might be thinking twice about those feelings and second guessing if you can stick to your resolution or reach your goals. Today, I’m going to help you ensure you have everything set up correctly to stick to your resolutions and goals because if you thought they were important at the end of the year, they are still just as important today. We are not going to let a little time that has slipped by change how you think about the remainder of the year.

One of the resolutions or goals that I hear from business owners is that they are going to stay up to date with their bookkeeping and eliminate the stress they have when they fall behind. For today’s podcast example, I am going to use this scenario, but you will find that everything I talk about today can be applied to whatever your resolution or goal was for this new year. All in all, no matter where you are with your goals and resolutions, you need to make sure you follow these tips to have a successful outcome.

First, we are going to start out with the fact that to follow through with your resolutions, you need to be ready. Knowing that you want and need to have your bookkeeping in order is just one part of the follow through. You need to know you are ready. You must realize that having your bookkeeping up to date would be much more helpful than letting it fall behind. You also need to be ready to take the steps to make a change and follow through with this change. If you are not mentally ready to follow through on this resolution, you may need to look deeper into your why and use this to help carry you through sticking to your resolution. If you weren’t ready to get your bookkeeping up to date at the beginning of January, maybe after you’ve gone through the steps to realize just how much being caught up will benefit your business as well as your stress levels, you may be ready to get back on track today.

As much as keeping up with your bookkeeping is a pretty good resolution, a better resolution or goal would be to make it even more specific and break it down into manageable pieces. You may choose to have all of your invoicing and bills paid on a weekly basis, and once everything for the month has been recorded, you are able to reconcile your bank accounts. Your specific goal could be to have all of your bookkeeping for the prior month, as well as your bank reconciliations done by the 10th of the following month. Be realistic about this and make sure that you are setting achievable goals that you know you can meet. Focusing on a specific goal will eliminate feelings of overwhelm and can boost your self confidence in knowing you can do this.

Even if you haven’t touched your bookkeeping for the year so far, this is no reason to give up on your goal, but you may need to implement some planning so that you can hit your goals in the upcoming months. Like I mentioned earlier, you may want to plan to enter your invoices and your bills in on a weekly basis. If this plan won’t work for you, then you need to come up with a plan so that you can reach your goal. Write your plan down and block off time in your calendar so that each process will get done. Make a list of things you need to do to achieve your goal and schedule them so that they will get done.

Once you have these steps in place, you’ll see how much more manageable it is to reach your goal or stick to your resolution. If your goal was to start this in January, and you are finding yourself in a place where nothing has been done yet, make sure you are starting with a small task to take on rather than the whole process of doing your bookkeeping monthly. Don’t get discouraged, and definitely don’t feel like since one month has gone by that it is too late to reach your goal of having your bookkeeping caught up. It is pretty simple to get one month of transactions recorded and back on track for the next month. Making changes like these can be hard if you have always let your bookkeeping go in the past. You may even find that you are only able to do two months of bookkeeping at a time, but this would be much better than having an entire year of bookkeeping that you need to get caught up quickly when you know the tax deadline is approaching.

Following through with resolutions and reaching goals can be much easier and successful when you have a support system. Just like any other resolution, whether it be weight loss, exercise or finances, if you have someone there to help you when times get rough, you’ll be much more accountable and motivated to follow through. This