Episode 92: Seven Rules to Make Bookkeeping Easier for Independent Contractors.

How many of us are not tracking our expenses because it's just too complicated?

Bookkeeping has a high intimidation factor. It doesn't have to be that complicated. Keep it simple. Here's seven rules to help make it easier for you.

1. If you think it's related to your business, track it.
2. If the expense is reasonable and necessary for the operation of your business, it's an allowable expense.
3. Track your miles.
4. Keep a record of the money your delivery business earned.
5. Organize your expenses and income into transaction types.
6. Find a tool for organizing your transactions that makes it easiest and most likely for YOU to keep tracking.
7. Have someone who understands taxes take your records and do your taxes for you.

You can see images, and an associated video on the related blog post at EntreCoureir.

This is about bookkeeping - tracking expenses, not taxes. You can read more about taxes on our tax guide. It includes several articles on tracking miles, expense categories, and how taxes work.

We talked about some tools you can use.

Check out my review on Quickbooks Self Employed.
If interested, you can use my affiliate link for Quickbooks Self Employed for Android or on IOS in the App Store

Check out our recent overview of GoDaddy Bookkeeping for delivery independent contractors. You can use my affiliate link to get that program here.

Hurdler is another cost effective but feature rich option that I'm beginning to really like. This too is an affiliate link

You can also check out affiliate links for Quickbooks Online and for Freshbooks

More about the EntreCourier

You can get more tips and ideas at our website, Entrecourier.com
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Transcript

0:03

Hello, Courier Nation. Welcome to the Deliver on your business podcast, where you are the boss. Each week we talk about how to make the most of your business as an independent contractor, as a courier delivering four gig economy apps like Grubhub, DoorDash, Postmates, Uber Eats and so many others. Well, hello, Courier Nation, welcome back. It is great to have you back, and it's awesome to be back on to deliver on your business podcast. Looking forward for another week here. And folks, I'm getting excited about, I've got a couple of interviews getting lined up here that I think could be very practical, very helpful. As soon as I get confirmation on those, I'll let you know more details on what I've got coming up here. But you know, there have been enough times where there's just more of me and me and me, and so it's always good to get some good. Experts that can come on and help you out in ways that sometimes I can't help you out as much, so I'm looking forward to some of that. So before we dive in, this episode today is brought to you in part by a new app, I don't know if it's a brand new app or if it's I think it may have been out for a little while, but it's called HURDLR now HURDLR is a an app that is designed for gig economy workers, and it's designed to help you keep track of your expenses, keep track of your income and keep track of your miles. And they've got a GPS app as well as you can either log in your desktop or through your phone to keep up. Keep track of your expenses is designed to make it easy for you. And I just got into it myself. I just started looking into it myself, and I've been pretty impressed so far. I think it's a little more powerful than some, you know, better known names that are out there and it's more economical. And so it is. If you're looking for something, it's a good solution for your bookkeeping. You might go check it out. Go over to entrecourier.com/HURDLR Skip the E! And or you can just click on the link in the show notes either one. It'll take you over to that, so you might check them out if you're looking for a good solution that's that's affordable, but pretty powerful. Having said that, it kind of ties right into what we're talking about this week, we're talking about bookkeeping, you know, like bookkeeping. Oh man. Talk about a snoozer, right? Well, if I haven't lost you already, some of it. Some of you may have just kind of hit that stop button real quick on the on your podcast player, but here's why. Because I can guarantee I can guarantee you right now that there are a lot of you that are not keeping track of your expenses and your income. I am pretty sure that there are some of you that you've got no idea really how much you've actually made. You've got, you know, you're not real sure how much you've actually spent and. And I think there's a reason for that. I think it's because we're intimidated. That's if anything, is just as intimidating as crap. It's it's accounting its bookkeeping, it's taxes. It's all that stuff. And I think that we make it too hard. And so what I wanted to do today was I wanted to kind of talk about what I'm going to call my seven rules to make bookkeeping easier for you as you do your delivery work for Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats, all of those others. Because I think if you get a grasp on it right now, it's going to save you a lot of trouble and a lot of heartache when it comes tax time and we're getting right at the end of the year now. You know? Who thought? That we could be in the fourth quarter already. But you know how good that sounds to an awful lot of people. You know what? January 1st of 2020 comes around and there's going to be a lot of partying. I think a lot of people are going to be glad to just kick this year to the curb. But the bottom line is we're still coming to the end of it. And so how do you stand with your earnings and your expenses if you thought about it? Have you been keeping track? And what is it? Is it really that hard? Ken, I'm going to tell you, I don't think it's that hard. You know, you're thinking when I say this bookkeeping, wait, you know, what do we want to do that for? What do we want to talk about that for? And I'm going to tell you that I don't think it's that hard. I don't think it has to be as hard as we make it out to be. And I especially want to tell you, don't let your fear of how hard it sounds to be keep you from keeping track of what's going on. And here's what bookkeeping is really in a nutshell. It's just keeping track of your income and your expenses, and then it's organizing them. And that's pretty much it. There's not. Don't don't listen to anybody. It tells you you have to do it a certain way. Don't don't get thrown off by people who say, you got to know a certain amount of money of things before you get started with this because you might wait forever. You can start doing your bookkeeping and you can start doing it today. And it's not that hard. I think if you understand these seven basic rules. You'll be fine, and I and I hope it maybe demystifies it a little bit, you know, because there's no one way of doing it that everybody has to do it. You know, here's the thing. There are certain things that I do. There are certain ways that I do it, and it's not I'm not going to tell you that my way is the best. In fact, the reason that I do some of the things I do is just because I'm nerdier than the average bear, you know? And I like my stuff in a way that I can just analyze the life out of it. And, you know, as I say, that it kind of dawns on me, it's like, that's it. And you're sitting there saying, what's it what? That's the answer to how you do things. It boils down to this, it's what fits for you. What's the best way to do bookkeeping? It's whatever fits for you. I said, you know, like I said, I said, I like doing stuff in a way. I like doing stuff my certain way. And what it really boils down to is what works for you? What is it that will allow you to accomplish what you need to accomplish? It allows you to keep track of the things that you've got to accomplish. That makes it easy. That makes it more likely you're going to do it, you know, do you want something really simple? Do you want something that you can analyze the heck out of it? It kind of depends on really who you are, what you want. And you take that from there. Real quick, let's ask this question, why is bookkeeping even necessary for independent contractors, and I'm going to tell you it's not. You don't have to do bookkeeping. You could just space it off, you can let it go. You don't have to bother. You seriously don't there's nothing anywhere that says you have to keep track of your income and your expenses. All right, so for those of you who didn't already get turned off by my saying, I'm going to talk about bookkeeping. There are some of you now that have said, Oh, OK, I don't have to keep books. All right, I'm done with this episode. He can move on, right? But before you check out. Please pay attention to one thing here. You could choose not to do bookkeeping, and you're fine. There's no law, there's no rule that says you have to keep your books. But what I will tell you is choosing not to do so will cost you thousands of dollars, hundreds of dollars more like at least and very likely thousands of dollars. And I don't know about you, but I would rather keep my thousands of dollars. So how is it that a failure to keep your records would cost you thousands of dollars and it all comes down to your tax bill, would you rather pay taxes on a lot of money or on? Not as much. Because you're completely free, you completely free to pay your taxes based on how much money you got from Grubhub and DoorDash and Uber Eats and Postmates and shipt and Lyft and whoever. They all send your money and you could use that money as the basis for your taxes, but you're going to pay a lot more in taxes. Well, if you would rather keep some of that money, here's the way you keep some of that money instead of paying it all to Uncle Sam, you keep track of your stuff. We pay taxes based on our income, but the thing is, as independent contractors, you know, we've got we've got our Social Security, we've got our federal, we've got our state, we've got Medicare. All of it is based on a percentage of your income and here's where the bookkeeping comes in. Because as independent contractors were treated like a business, our tax is based on our profit. It's based not on the money that comes in, but it's what's left over after our expenses. Uncle Sam recognizes that you know what? It costs money to run your business, so they're not going to charge you on everything that comes in. They charge you based on what's left over, but if you don't have a record of your expenses, then Uncle Sam is more than happy to take your money based on just that huge amount of money that you got to begin with. And so if you're not keeping track of your records, if you're not keeping track of your expenses, you're going to pay more money. Here's the thing, guys. We are doing this all on our own dime, you know, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, they don't care what it costs and it really isn't their business. They just they've got their pay models and they pay you and that kind of wash their hands of it after that. But we're the ones that we got to pay. We got a rare cars into the ground. We got to pay whatever else we got to do to get out there. We got to pay for our cell bills and things like that just so we can go out and do the work for them. But if we do it well, we do it inexpensively, there's more money left over, but if it costs us to get stuff done that comes out of our pockets, it doesn't come out of Grubhub Pocket or DoorDash just pocket. And that's why the taxes are based on what's left over. It's like any business, it costs money to operate your business. So you've got a choice, folks. Pay taxes on a hell of a lot more money or keep track of everything so that you only have to pay taxes on what's left over, but that's the part that kind of drives people nuts. I don't want to keep track of that stuff. It's a headache. I'm I'm going to do it wrong. Well, there's two parts, and it's really not that hard. There are two parts to keeping to doing your bookkeeping. The first one is you keep track of your expenses and your income. That's part one. You keep a record. And you know what, it can be as simple as making a list, you got a pen and paper, you can do it. You got a smartphone. You can do it. It's all about just keeping track, keep track of the money that comes in, keep track of the money that goes out. That's that's all there is to it. That's not that hard. We make it harder than it has to be. You make a note. Who did you pay? How much did you pay? Why did you pay that money? How much money did you make? Where'd you get it from? Another thing, can you prove it? Can you prove you spent that money? So keep track. Hang onto your receipt. That's it. That's the first part. You keep track of everything. It's as simple as that, folks. It really is. We overcomplicate it. So having said all that, let's dive into our rules first part, ask about what should you track? And here's my first rule if you think it's related to your business, keep track of it. The entre couriers first rule of bookkeeping for independent contractors, if you think it's related to your business, track it. Now, here's three things that I want to emphasize that you want to track your expenses, your miles, your income. I know miles are really technically they're a form of your expenses, but it's just a different enough animal that I want to list it separately. But you know, the thing is, a lot of us worry, you know, we kind of feel like, Well, but what if I can't claim it? What's what if I'm? What if I'm tracking the wrong stuff? What if it's not legitimate? And right now, what I'm going to tell you is this isn't the time to worry about that. Right now, we're just talking about keeping track if you've got any kind of doubts, if you've got any kind of idea that is related to your business. Track it. Because here's the thing. If in doubt, track it out. And now we know why I'm not a poet. But you can always find out later that you can't claim it, but that's OK. We don't have to worry about that right now. Right now, we're just kind of concerned about if you've got any questions, you've got any kind of idea that all that this is a business expense. Then go ahead and track it. What I'm getting at, though, is later on you might find out you can't claim it. But if that happens, there's no harm, no foul. But it is a lot harder to find out that you could have claimed it. But now. You've got to go back. You've got to trace back, you got to find out if you can still find a record of it. You got to dig through your records case. It's easier to claim it now and find out that you are. I'm sorry, it is easier to track it now and find out that, OK, yeah, we can't put that on our taxes. Well, that's all right. But it's a lot easier to do that than to have to go back and try and find it later on. So right now, it's, you know, don't don't let this worry about whether or not it's the right thing or not. If you've got any kind of thought that you can track it, then track it. Now, if you don't want to waste your time just tracking every little possible thing that you spend money on. Let's narrow that down just a little bit, understand what a business expenses are, there's there's this long list of all the things you could possibly call expenses. And if you spend any kind of time on Facebook, you know there's all sorts of idiots out there. They're going to tell you to track every, you know. You know, if you if you spent money on anything at all, then claim it as a business expense and that'll get you in trouble. But here's here's the thing that I think the part that intimidates people is because they're such a long list, and it seems like the rules are really complicated, and I don't know that it's necessarily that complicated. You know what comes to bookkeeping for any of these gig companies? There's a lot of things that people get wrong, but how do you avoid that problem? Do you have to become an expert at that right away? No, no, not at all. And that's why I say track it. You can always let an expert help you figure it out later, but if you've tracked it, then you're able to do something with it, you know? And so it doesn't hurt to learn more. But don't let that fear of not being an expert keep you from tracking it in the first place. So if it might be a good expense, then track it. But here's my second rule. For bookkeeping for independent contractors. And it is this if the money that you spent is reasonable and necessary for the operation of your business, it is a legitimate expense. OK. I can't take credit for that one, I borrowed that one, I stole that one from the IRS, no less. I'm stealing from the IRS. I'm not sure I should say that out loud. That can get me in trouble, couldn't it? But anyway, that's the that's kind of their overriding criteria. They even say that themselves that really it boils down to if it is reasonable and necessary for your business, it's an allowable expense. And if it meets that criteria, then it's a good chance. It's legitimate. So it's the thing you got to ask yourself if you spend money on something for your business. If you say, Is this reasonable and is this necessary for my business, then yeah, keep track of it. You can always find out later if you need to not claim it, you know. So do you need that item to make it possible to do business, you need your car right, you need your cell phone. You probably even need that cell phone holder because, you know, it just allows you to navigate and do everything that you need to do. Well, here's another question is, will that item make it possible to improve your business? You might not need that extra delivery bag from Amazon if DoorDash is already giving you a bag, but maybe you found a bag that'll hold more food, or it makes it easier and faster to get, you know, the food delivered than than fumbling with a flimsy bag with a cheap zipper, you know? And so you might not absolutely need that. But it certainly makes it easier for you to do your work, and it makes it possible for you to make more money. Well, that's that's a reasonable expense for operating your business. So just ask yourself that question is, is it reasonable, is it necessary for running your business, getting a Maserati for your delivery vehicle that might go a little bit beyond being reasonable? Some people are going to tell you to claim your meals while delivering, well, that one's not going to fly. I can tell you that one because your meals are not a necessary part of running your business. Yeah, the meals might be necessary for you as an individual, but you as an individual is different than you, as your business or part of your day to day living. And so really, the only time that a meal is actually a reasonable part of running your business in the gig economy deliveries is. I say maybe you buy a meal for your buddy because you want to talk him into signing up under the referral program so you can make some extra money. Well, at that point, it's helping you maybe improve your earnings and now it becomes a reasonable part of it. But your meals that you eat for yourself and your car, they're not a reasonable and necessary part of your business, part of things. Ask yourself that question, be honest with yourself. Is it legitimately necessary to use this for your business? Is it a reasonable way that you can improve your business? And if it seems like it is, then go ahead and track it. You still don't have to know absolutely that. Yes, you absolutely can claim it if it seems reasonable and necessary to track it. You can always find out later. Rule number three for independent contractors in their bookkeeping is track your miles. Like I said, your miles are really kind of a part of your expenses, but guys, if you're using your car for deliveries, the portion of time that you use the car is a reasonable and necessary part of running your business. So you've got to track your miles. Now, I don't want to go into the weeds about all the details about car expenses and miles versus actual expense. You know, all of that stuff, you can't get into a lot of detail over that. But you want to keep track of your miles, and I've got some links in the show notes about the specifics about that and especially how to track your miles of what miles you can track. But ultimately what it comes down to is you want to keep track of what miles you drive when you are active on the app with the intent of accepting deliveries. You know the moment you leave, if you're going available and you're able to and willing to take deliveries, you can start tracking your miles there and you do it until you're done and. That's it in a nutshell. But the thing is, you know, with with your with your car, I know that you can track you can choose one or two things when it comes to claiming, you know, you can claim. On a per mile basis, using this standard mileage rate that the IRS sets for the year and this year in 2020, it is 57 and a half cents a mile. And so you can claim as an expense 57 and a half cents for every mile that you deliver for your business. OK, you can do that, or you can choose to claim the business portion of your actual expenses. You add up all your gas, your maintenance, your insurance, your repairs, you depreciation, and then you take your business percentage of that. You can choose either one of them. You can't claim both. It's got to be one or the other. I recommend you track both because one, you know what those two, how they compare to. You got to know how much it costs to rent your car. I talk about this a lot. It's just it's a good idea to track both of those, and that's not. You know, quite at the rural level to say track both, I think it's just a good idea, that's a strong suggestion, OK, but you should know what it's really costing to operate your car. But the thing is is whether you're claiming actual expenses or miles, you need to know how many miles you drove, so you got to track your miles. Now the IRS requires that whether you're claiming miles or actual expense, if you're claiming the actual expense, you've got to know what percent of your miles are for business, because then you know what percent of your expenses you can take, and you can't do that without tracking, and you've got to have proof either way that you drove those miles for business, so you got to track your miles. You can write down odometer readings, you can use GPS. You can. He want to track every mile where you're available with the intent to accept deliveries. The third thing you want to do, or I'm sorry, the fourth rule I'm going to give you is keep your own record of the money that your delivery business has earned. Don't forget to track your income. It's not just expenses you want to track, you want to keep a running total of what you've earned. And you know, some people will say, Yeah, I don't need to do that because a good company, you know, DoorDash is going to tell me what I earned at the end of the year, so I don't need to keep track. Well. You can't rely on those 10, 99 forms that they give you, though, here's the problem. DoorDash was notorious in the last two years. They've had all sorts of issues with getting the 1099s wrong, and sometimes they'll put out and say that people earn twice as much money as what they actually earned. DoorDash doesn't know what they're doing when it comes to their app. When it comes to keeping track statistics, any of that crap, they just they don't know what they're doing. So don't rely on them because here's the problem if you just rely on them. And at the end of the year, DoorDash says you made $6000 and you send that into the IRS and you're going to pay on, you're going to pay tax on $6000. Well, what if you only made $3000? You made you paid hundreds of dollars more because of DoorDash is a mistake, but really more because your mistake because you weren't paying attention. That's not DoorDash is fault. That's your fault. So keep track of what's going on with each of the different ones because you need to know when they get it wrong. So track your income. All right. You track your expenses, you track your mileage, you track your income, you need to do that. That's the first part of bookkeeping is just track. If you're not sure, track it anyway. Second part of bookkeeping is. Organize your expenses and your income. The fifth rule of bookkeeping for independent contractors is organize your transactions into transaction types. What you want to do is you keep them grouped into similar types of transactions. So. Let's say you deliver for Grubhub and DoorDash. You know, keep your keep your Grubhub earnings in one total and keep your DoorDash earnings in another total. Keep a list of at all and. When you're out, when you're spending money and you know, you went out and you bought gas well, you want to keep track of that with other times that you bought gas. And here's the thing don't worry about what the right categories are. Just keep track, you know, and if you're not real sure, then you want to kind of keep your your categories, your classifications a little bit narrower. So, OK, you went out and you bought a couple of delivery bags and maybe a few months ago you bought a couple of others. Well, you might just keep track of all your delivery bags together. You keep it organized that way. When you bought gas, if you're tracking your gas, you know, every time you buy gas, you keep track of it with other times that you bought gas. You keep it organized, your cell phone, you know, you keep track of your cell phone bill. And each time you record your cell phone bill, you record it with where you record your cell bill, all of your different types of expenses. You want to kind of keep organized and put together with other recordings of the same type of expense. That's what organizing your expenses are. There are certain expense categories, the IRS has their own categories that you need to report, but I'm going to tell you right now, don't get stressed out about that. Don't wait until you know and understand those things because you'll keep avoiding keeping track of your stuff and it's just going to cost you time. You just keep track of stuff as you go now with the IRS. And I'm not going to get into the weeds again about how taxes work, but. I'll explain a little bit about why this is also necessary, and it has to do with when you file your taxes, because what you do is you report your income and your expenses on a form that's called a Schedule C and that's included with that. And that's how you report what your actual earnings are that it report it includes, they call it, a profit and loss for business. It tracks all of the money in and all the money out. And you just you fill out your totals for each one of those. Now, real quick, I'm going to throw this in while I'm talking about the Schedule C because a lot of people think, Well, I don't bother with my expenses because I don't make enough for I don't have enough to itemize my deductions. It's not about itemizing, folks. You can claim your business expenses even when you're taking your standard deduction. It doesn't matter how you're filing your taxes when you're working as a business person. All of your expenses are included on the Schedule C, not in your itemized or standardized deductions. So don't let that keep you from keeping track. And don't get yourself caught paying more money than you have to pay or getting a smaller refund than you might normally get. Because of that misconception, OK? So get that out of my system, let's get back to where we were. So Schedule C, it has a list of different expense types, you know, so they've got one for supplies, they've got one for office expenses, they've got one and they've got one for other expenses. Well, what happens is you take all of your money you spent and you or really, I think for most of us, it's going to be your tax pro. It's going to take the money that you spent and enter the total for each of those Schedule C categories onto your Schedule C, and that's how you record what your expenses were. Now, ultimately, what you want to do is you want to make your records so that there is easiest possible to translate that stuff on to a Schedule C. And eventually, if you get to know those categories and what fits into them, then it really makes it easy. But that's where people get freaked out. They think that they've got to know the different expense types and what fits into them, don't worry about that right now, you just track stuff and do your best that you can to categorize them. And then your tax pro can help you get those in the right places later on and don't get too freaked out if you don't know, you know, if you don't know whether or not your your cell service, whether that fits under, does that fit into office expenses or should that just go into the other expense category? Don't worry about that, because even the experts don't agree on that one. You know, the experts don't always agree on where you should put something. The main thing is you want to just keep track so that, you know, what did you spend on your cell service? What did you spend on your delivery bags? What did you spend on your gas? What did you spend on each of these different things? And if he could come up with a total on all those things, your tax pro can help you get those in the right category with the IRS. OK, so the question is, what's the best way to get it, keep it all organized. And there's a lot of tools out there. There's a lot of things you can do, but I'm not going to tell you anyone is the way to go. My sixth rule of bookkeeping for independent contractors is you find a tool that fits you. You find a tool that works best for you. You want to find whatever it is. It's going to be easy enough for you to use and you want to find something that won't discourage you from doing it. You know what, if I keep my records on QuickBooks desktop? It's kind of a full blown system. It's it's a little more complicated, and it's because I'm tracking for a few different businesses. And the thing is, for a lot of people, if you had to go into that and you would see that and it's like, Whoa, wait a minute, I might say, Yeah, I'm not, I'm not ready for that. Well, don't let that kind of thing keep you from doing it. That's that's what I'm getting at. Find something that isn't going to discourage you. And you know what, if you're on a tight budget, you feel okay, just jotting things down, then keep a written notebook that might make more sense. There's some free programs out there and some of those are awesome and some you know what you get what you paid for. There's something out there finds something that works for you. That's my rule. Find the tool for organizing a transactions, transactions your money and your money out. Find a tool that makes it easiest and most likely for you to keep up with doing it and tracking it. And organizing it. So I'm real quick, and she's going to walk through a few different tools that are out there. And so the objective here, the thing is to remember your goal is not to do your taxes right now. Your goal is not to get every category. You're right. Your goal is not to be an expert on exactly what you can track and what you can claim. Your goal is it's not about accounting, it's not about any of this. It is about organizing your expenses and your income in a way that you or your tax pro will be able to take that and translate it into your tax form later on. And so. You want to find a tool that will let you do that. And ultimately, what it comes down to is anything you spend and anything that comes in, you're going to give it a category, you're going to give it a classification. You want to find a tool that gives you a way to do that, that works for you. And I'll throw out some ideas here. These are tools that can help you. There's different degrees of difficulty, there's different learning curves. My guess is you might start with something simple and you might graduate to something a little more advanced as you begin to understand more. And so we're going to start with the most basic thing out there is pen and paper. You know what, if you're the kind that just prefers to write things down, then get yourself a notebook. You know, it's pretty cheap. Couple bucks for a notebook. Whenever you buy something, you write it down. But now we're talking about organizing, so you want to keep it written down in places that that are kind of organized. So here's what I would tell you to do. You know what? Create a page in your notebook for each one of the gig apps that you deliver for. And so one is for DoorDash and one is for Uber Eats and one is for Postmates or whoever you know. Well, every time you get paid by DoorDash, you write down the date and the amount that you were paid on the DoorDash page, every time you're paid by Uber Eats, you write down the date and the amount that you paid on the Uber Eats page. See where I'm going with that. And one thing you might do as you're adding things in there is keep a running total so that because what happens is, let's say, you know, I've got a little screenshot of a way that you could do that is, you know, I put down Grubhub on June 11th, you made 145 54 and then on June 18th, you made 286 84. What you do is you add those two together and then off to the right, you put down your running total 432 38. And then the next week you made 189 20. You put that down. But then to the right now, you add that 189 20 to the 432 38, you got six hundred twenty one dollars, 58 cents. But you know, what you're doing is you're keeping a running total so that at the end of the year, you're not having to go back and manually add everything up. Because if you ever had to do that, every time you add it up, it seems like you get a different total. You may still go through an add up if you're doing handwritten just to be on the safe side. But you know, here's the idea. You do that, though, with all of your expenses as well. You keep a page for all of your cell phone payments and actually, maybe you break down your cell phone payments. You know, if you're paying for the phone as well, you get your service is going to be one thing and your lease or your phone payment are going to be another area. You keep a page for your gas, you keep a page for your insurance or your maintenance or different things like that. Every kind of expense that you can think of, you keep a separate page for it. And every time you have an expense, you write it down on the page that goes with that, with the date and with. They say if you're doing it for gas, keep track of who you paid for each one and and if you're doing it with a notepad, maybe staple the receipt on the page that goes with it, you know, and it's cheap, it's easy and you're doing what you need and you you don't worry about whether you're keeping things in the actual tax categories because like I said, you figure that out later, but you grip things that very obviously belong together. And the main thing you're doing is you're keeping all the income and the expenses organized, and you can figure out the rest later. Here's another tool. This is this the one that I kind of suggest is a free tool if you've got a Google account and let's use Google Sheets. Use a spreadsheet. It's kind of the same thing is doing a pen and paper, but you're doing it on a program and and then you can kind of, you know, you can format the numbers and you can kind of clean it up a little bit and it's easier to make corrections and it's easier to add things, but you're doing it on there. And if you go to entrer courier dot com slash 92, which is for we're on episode 92, it's kind of a transcript or semi transcript of what we're talking about today. But I'll have in there a video where I show just kind of doing real basic setup, and it's the same thing. You just you set up either a different column or maybe even create a different page in your spreadsheet for each of the different expenses. Every time you got an expense, you write it down or you type it in there and you're good to go. You keeping it all separated by different types of expense. And so that's that's keeping things organized. Then at the end of the year, you can add it all up. Figure it out later. There are some programs out there, and I'll mention a few. And I'll have links in the show notes or on the associated page to those now some of the programs that are going to list, they're going to have affiliate links. And what that means is that if you know, if I've got an affiliate relationship with them, if if somebody buys buys the program through my links, I might receive a little bit of money for it. These things are all so cheap that it's not going to be a whole lot of money that I get, you know, almost probably wasn't worth the time creating the links, but I didn't want to put some stuff out there that you could use. So the first one that I'll mention is a free program. It's called Stride Stride, his company. They sell like, you know, health programs for drivers and things like that. But they created a free app and it will do some of the expense tracking for you and it will track your miles for you and. It's it's OK for kind of an entry level thing, I think it's just got too many limitations myself. But, you know, it's designed to make things as easy as possible. My complaint with it is. If your expense doesn't fit within the few things they put in there, there's nowhere to put it. You've got no way to actually break down your income by delivery company, so you can't do what I recommend any way where you want to keep track of each one individually. And you can't. If there's an expense that you're not sure of, you can't go stick that in an other category or anything like that, you've got to put it somewhere. And if you're not sure where to put it really creates problem. You can't do anything with something that doesn't fit in one of their categories. And that's the thing I don't like on the straight program. I like that they put out something free. That's great. But unfortunately, it's kind of limited on that. Another one that I'll throw out is a one called QuickBooks Self-employed, QuickBooks is probably the best known name in bookkeeping, you know, and a lot of businesses use them. As I mentioned, I use their desktop program, but they've got a very low cost version. It's like $7 a month to get started,$15 a month once you've been on for a few months. And that's that's as I record this, you never know when prices will change, but you know, it's designed for independent contractors. It's designed around the Schedule C, and that's nice. It's got a GPS mileage app and it it's one that a little more feature to it than strides and everything like that. So there's a lot to like about it, but it doesn't have some of the flexibility that I like to have. And again, they're like stride in that you can't track Grubhub and DoorDash and Uber Eats separately. And so and you can't customize. You can't add categories. I'll have a link where I've got a review of the program itself. If you want to read more about QuickBooks self-employed. Another one is one you've probably never heard of. It's called GoDaddy Bookkeeping. I like GoDaddy bookkeeping a lot better than Stride or QuickBooks self-employed. I used to use it back when I was doing a lot of eBay stuff because it can link up with your different bank accounts and it works kind of automatically. It is designed around the Schedule C like QuickBooks Self-employed, but it's got a little more flexibility. It costs less than QuickBooks self-employed, and they get a five dollar plan, a $10 plan or $15 plan. And I don't know any justification really for an independent contractor in our area using that $15 plan. But you can get by with the $5 plan or the $10 plan and do just fine. They've got more flexibility for customizing your income and your expense categories. You can manually enter your mileage amounts on a day by day basis or whatever, but they don't have a mileage app, and that's maybe one disadvantage. I don't rely on mileage apps myself, but you might. And so anyway, I'll have a link where I just yesterday put out an overview of the GoDaddy bookkeeping. A third one is the one that I mentioned that, you know, as our episode is brought to you by Hurdlr and I'm just getting to to discover Hurdlr and I'm liking what I'm seeing so far. It is. It's a better price than QuickBooks self-employed. It's right in there with GoDaddy bookkeeping. And so far, I like what I see. I want to dig in a little bit more before I get into a lot more detail, but it's a lot more flexible than QuickBooks. It's got a GPS app. I haven't tried to see how accurate it is or some different things like that, so I want to dig in a little more. But. Everything that I see so far, I've been pretty impressed with Hurdler. So stay tuned on that one and I'll be getting some reviews out soon about that particular program. Now, if you want something a little more involved, a little more full power, there's QuickBooks Online or their desktop version. There's FreshBooks as another kind of a competing program that is designed around entrepreneurs, but maybe a little more high power than what you might be ready for or something like that. But those are some options if you need something that does a lot more than just delivery stuff, you know. And so some of those, you know, and once you get into the higher end programs, they're not really designed around a Schedule C as much. You've got to understand accounting a little bit more, you've got to understand your categories a little more and you've got to customize a lot of things. And so that may or may not be the answer to you. But you know, I'll still have links to those so that you can check those out. So there's a lot of different tools that you can use to keep things organized. The last part of it all, though, is rule number seven. We finally get to rule number seven for bookkeeping for independent contractors, and that is have somebody who understands your taxes, take your records and do your taxes for you. Get help. If you're not sure at all about how taxes work, absolutely get help. If you're even kind of fuzzy about it, you think you've got an idea, but you're not 100 percent sure. Get some help. Get somebody to help you with that because here's the thing. I mean, especially if you're listening in detail looking for how to do the bookkeeping. I'm pretty sure you probably don't know the tax as well enough yet. Get somebody to help you. But that's why I think the bookkeeping can be simple. You can keep track in the ways that make sense to you, but keep track in a way that's organized that of things that clearly fit together. But you need someone who knows what they're doing, then to take that and translate that into a tax form. And some of the best money you can spend is having a tax pro go through things because they're going to think of things, they're going to find things you never would have thought of. It's really unusual when you get to this level of taxes that. A tax pro isn't going to save you more than what you're going to pay, you know, I mean more than what you pay them to do, you know, they pay for themselves and so get some help. All right. My main thing is, you know this this is my whole point, though, in talking about doing things this way where you just start tracking whether you know how to or not start tracking because I don't want you to wait until, you know, because you'll never get started, then you'll never get, yeah, it'll never happen. So get started. Don't get freaked out by all the complexities, because when it comes to keeping track and keeping things organized, it's just not that complex. Start tracking, start organizing and then let somebody else take it from there. And oh, by the way, when you pay them to do your taxes for you, make sure you keep a record of it. My friends, that kind of wraps it up for today. But one thing that I want to ask you like I do every week as I wrap this up is can you do me a favor? Can you take control of your life, of your money like we're doing here of your business? Because this is what it's all about as an independent contractor. It's all about being able to take control. It's all about having the freedom to run your own business. And the best way to do really well as an independent contractor is to take control. It is to make your own decisions. It is to go out there. And be the boss.