The books

It's that time of year again!

You know the one that really sucks joy out of life.  The time where you find the sight of your computer makes you find other non-computer stuff to do.  I personally would love to have a slave to do this kind of thing for me, take the pain away.  But  I don't, I don't even have an un-paid intern, little own a paid book keeper to do the thing in life I really hate doing.

Lean into the pain!

Ok, so I'm plugging away putting the information in the right boxes to keep the accountant happy and not charging me their rate to do this stuff.  It's a very motivating thought.  I must step back and take a big-picture look at it, and realise that it's my own fault!  No, no, I hate being in this place.  The realisation that if I had done the monthly admin monthly, it would all be there, ready to go with minimal effort... Shit.  I hate tax and gst time!

My accountant set up a free business coaching session for their clients and I turned up to see what it was all about.  Funnily enough I was the only client that made the effort.  Tuesday night 6:30pm and I was Nigel.  It was a great time, I had the advice of two business experts for a couple of hours for the fee of $20.  We sat through the prepared material, and that was good.  A case study of a successful businessman in Australia, and I got a lot out of it.   

I got to ask heaps of questions about what I should and shouldn't be doing, once that was done.  They asked me some hard questions too.

• What are your goals, short and long term?  
• What do you want to achieve creatively and financially?  
• What are your life goals and how do you think you can achieve them?  

It's easy to give the glib answers, but I don't want to do that.  I thought I had most of this sorted in my head.  However it was the detail that I need to sort out.  

The upshot of it was, allocate time to work on the business as well as doing the work of the business.

Instantly I find this hard to do.  I'm a great photographer, it's the joy (apart from my family), in my life.  The other stuff.. not so much.  So there's a bit of work for me to do. Get down there and put all the receipts away, transfer the CSV file in to the spreadsheet, and populate all the expenses in to the right columns.  In the long run, I can save myself a heap of money by doing the dog leg work and not the accountant, who by the way, charges just as much as I do, in fact more.  So if I have to pay them 1.5 of my hours for everyone of theirs, it's just plain simple - do it myself. 

Good shooting.