Bookkeepers, accountants, lawyers… I should get one of those at some point. Instead I seem to waste time moving from one accounting app to another — Xero, QuickBooks Online, Less Accounting — hoping that the next one will solve everything. Then I go back to tweaking monthly revenue summaries in Numbers because it turns out that spreadsheets are still pretty useful for this sort of thing.
This year I did sign up for what has turned out to be a game-changing app for my business: Baremetrics. I dragged my feet subscribing because it starts at $79/month, but it’s worth it. The way it breaks down which of your web subscriptions — in my case Searchpath, Watermark, and Tweet Marker — is the most profitable or has the highest customer churn or best average lifetime value… It was just eye-opening to me and led to finally taking some action to invest in the products that are doing well.
I still have a lot to figure out with this. The one thing I am doing right, on the advice of several folks over the years, is paying myself the same amount once a month from my business checking account, as if it was a normal salary. This helps in forecasting how much income I need in the near-term to keep enough padding in the bank to cover the slow months. It also makes sure I don’t spend everything too quickly.
We haven’t traditionally had the most strict budget. It’s easy to get lazy with finances at a regular job where you seemingly have a never-ending paycheck supply. The freelance or indie software world is quite different. I’m learning quickly.
