There are two types of small business owners in Canada, hear me out. The first type is diligently on top of every receipt and transaction in their business. The second…well, they’re usually sipping wine on their living room floor in April with a Ziploc bag full of crumpled paper trying to make sense of their transactions so they can file taxes. 

Which one are you? 

If you identify with that second group of business owners and you’re tired of scrambling through your bookkeeping tasks (or aren’t even sure what they’re supposed to be), then you’ve come to the right place. 

As your money hype woman, I’m dropping two of my favorite ways to build great habits around organizing your money so you can be less stressed in your business. 

How to start organizing business receipts: make a plan and stick to it

So you’re staring at that Ziploc bag full of paper wondering WTF to do with them. But hey, having physical receipts is a high-fivable offense in my books because it’s the first step to getting organized! (Helloooo, we can’t organize what we don’t have, am I right?)

From this moment forward I want to encourage you to make a plan for every single receipt. For me, it’s taking a photo and uploading it to QuickBooks so I can have peace of mind knowing all my documents are safe. Remember, no receipt = no write-off. Even if you spill a cool diet Pepsi on the only physical copy of a receipt, the CRA will not accept the writeoff in the event you were ever audited. 

If an online bookkeeping software is feeling a little advanced for this stage of the game, the great news is that you can kick it old school for the time being. Pop on your favorite playlist (that’s the R&B Mix on Spotify for me), head to the dollar store and purchase a small file folder to start practicing storing your receipts in their proper categories. The receipts you’ve kept from transactions like fuel, office supplies, and subscriptions all have their own categories in the eyes of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). 

While storing receipts digitally is a great end goal for your money habits, don’t be afraid to start smaller. Building habits doesn’t have to be fancy - it just needs to work.

Start stacking your habits to create new ones

James Clear penned a phenomenal book titled “Atomic Habits” that has played a huge role in how I create and maintain healthy habits in my business. He discusses the idea of “habit stacking” which paves the way for new habits to form. Clear developed a habit stacking formula: 

After/Before [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].

Some examples that could apply to your money habits include

• After I fuel up my vehicle, I will immediately take a photo of my gas receipt.

• After online shopping for office supplies, I will save a PDF copy of the receipt into my cloud storage

• Before I catch up on Instagram on Monday morning, I will review my bank transactions for last week. 

• Before I make an impulse purchase, I will check my budget spreadsheet to assess if I can afford it.  

Habit stacking is your ticket to avoiding the mid-April scaries while preparing your taxes. Stack habits daily, weekly, and monthly to see a year’s worth of positive changes in your business bookkeeping.  

Want to get even more organized with your business finances? Knowing what qualifies for small business tax deductions will save you time, stress, and money.

Knowing what you can and can’t write off will save you time, stress, and money. Come join Bookkeeping Bootcamp because I cover this in detail in Module 2 which means you’ll be a bookkeeping rockstar in no time.