Get (And Keep) That Money, Honey: Pt. 1

Organizing Your Business Finances for Clarity + Power

Get (And Keep) That Money Honey - Pt. 1

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• Background

  Length: 16:05

  We’re off to the races about money 💰 I’m thrilled to begin this series. I know, beyond a doubt, that by the end of it, you will feel more powerful, clear and excited about your financial state. Even if you’re making less than you want to. Even if you’re paying down debt.

  In this issue I talk about:

  • The five steps I would walk you through if you came to me, stressed about your business finances

  • Crafting a simple spreadsheet that is your command center for all things business finance

  • What’s to come in the next, juicy episodes

  Without further ado, let’s dive in.

  And if there’s anyone you believe would enjoy coming along the ride, feel free to share this, and any other blog articles, with them.

• Transcript

  Welcome, welcome.

  Hello, hello.

  I am excited to dive into our series on money, on finances, abundance, stewardship, all the good things.

  I have been struggling a bit honestly to figure out how I want to start this series.

  Part of me really wanted to start with this sweeping, gorgeous treatise on money and abundance and these spiritual, esoteric themes around it, but your girl's a very tangible person in a lot of ways.

  And so what feels right is to start with a tangible episode and weave in that meta conversation as it arises, slash see if it wants its own episode as we dive into the tangibles.

  So why money?

  Well, I have been on my own journey with money for many, many years and have had the pleasure of helping a couple clients of late really dig into finances and their financial state.

  And it's been really exhilarating, it's really exhilarating.

  And it shows me as well that there is definitely a need for a clear, grounded conversation around business finances, especially for solopreneur and micro teams.

  I think this is a topic that is largely avoided.

  I don't hear a lot of business coaches talking about it and the consultants, a lot of people in this state are not getting consultants anyways.

  In general, good financial management is the foundation for peace and clarity in your business, truly, even if your finances are not where you want them to be.

  So today I want to share with you a several step process that if I was your fractional COO that I would walk you through to get you to a place of feeling more grounded about your finances, to be more clear about where your money is going, where it's coming from, and how to take steps moving forward as a result.

  And I will include a little digital download, okay?

  Side note, digital downloads are like my Achilles heel.

  I will spend hours making something and then be done and be like fuck this shit, this doesn't, this is not working for me.

  Like I don't want to release this into the world, not because of perfectionism, but because I created a digital download to create a digital download, not something that I genuinely feel excited about inviting people into.

  And so yeah, I have a whole treasure trove, which I mean at some point maybe I'll just create one big bundle and you can just download them all for free, but if I don't feel like something is really clean and meeting the need, I don't want to release it.

  But I think that as we go through the different series this year, there may be resources that make sense and I can just create a digital download for them so that you can easily access them.

  So there will be one.

  I have a spreadsheet that I built for a client and that I think would be tremendous for anybody else who would like to use it.

  So that will be free.

  I'll include the information on that and if you want to pause and download that before finishing listening to this, it might make it easier to understand what I'm gonna say.

  Or you can also just listen to what I'm gonna say and then circle back and walk through it with me in your ear.

  So let's start with business finances because I'm gonna do an episode on personal finances.

  We're gonna get up in your business, baby, okay?

  So the important thing with finances is fundamentally knowing where money is coming from and know where it's going to.

  That is the heart of finances, but we often don't know either, right?

  I mean where money is coming from, we may know a bit better.

  We like that.

  We like seeing the dollar signs come in, but knowing where money is going to, whether it's saving, investing, certain recurring bills, whether it's pop-up expenses, that's the part where we can get tripped up and that's I think where we have a lot of angst.

  And we know that we're supposed to keep track of money in our personal finances, even if we don't, but oftentimes we neglect to do that in our business finances.

  So, and I'm a little congested, it's that time of year, you know, so I'll try not to be too obnoxious in your ear with it.

  So the first step you want to take is make a list of all your accounts associated with your business and what they are, meaning checking, savings, line of credit, credit card.

  And if you are currently using it, using personal accounts to pay for business expenses, let's pause on that if you can and go through this exercise and then get yourself a business account.

  Super easy.

  I will actually include a link to two that I recommend.

  I think Novo will give you 40 bucks if you sign up and fund your account and have your account for a certain number of days.

  Relay Financial doesn't have an affiliate kickback, but it's a great bank.

  It's one that I'm using right now actually.

  So make a list of all your accounts and what they are and then little B bullet point, if it is a line of credit or credit card, make note of your total balance and your minimum payment and when that minimum payment is.

  So having a spreadsheet might make sense for this.

  However your brain works, we want to add as little friction as possible.

  Also want to make note that, I should have said this at the beginning, this is not, this doesn't need to happen all in one sitting.

  In fact, it might be overwhelming to do it in all in one sitting.

  We want to make this as easily digestible as possible.

  So if you have not done something like this, there are chances, there is a high chance, right, that you may have a lot, excuse me, let me pause and get some water.

  Three hours later.

  Okay, your girl's back.

  She is, yeah, we'll see.

  I might have to go again.

  But there is a high chance that if you have not done this work already, it is because there is a level of inertia, confusion, frustration around it and maybe the relief and release of it will have you driving completely forward.

  But it may also overwhelm you.

  So what we want is a finished process, not a fast process.

  Okay, so if this takes you a year, that is okay.

  That's okay.

  But what we want to do is, what we don't want to do is flood your system, overwhelm you, and then you don't want to do it at all.

  And you just push it to the side again.

  Okay, so give yourself grace, listen to yourself, do, take the steps that you need.

  Okay, so we have our list of all of our accounts and what they are, checking, savings, line of credit, etc.

  Also, little side note, include personal loans.

  Include private loans, is I guess what they would be called.

  Include loans that people have given you for your business that you are meant to repay.

  Those are important.

  Gather, gather all, all the loose ends.

  This is a, this is a exercise in gathering all the loose ends and making sure that you have everything in one place so that you can have complete mental clarity and know what steps you need to take.

  Okay, so then the next step, after we've made a list of all the accounts, you want to get your bank statements for the last year.

  I would say, well, let's see.

  Okay, this is a pick-your-own-adventure.

  Here's option A. Option A is you want to be ready for tax time, you want to have your business expenses so you can get them deducted, you want to, you want to do the hard mode, kind of.

  This is, on this option, you're gonna want to get your expenses for the whole year and if you're listening to this now, you know, and you do this now, now being January of 2026, then this is no problem.

  So let me, let me do that.

  Let's assume that we are, okay, but if you were, say it was August, you would get all your bank statements, everything from January to August, okay.

  So that's hard mode.

  Again, if you're listening to this in January 2026, you, both of these pick-your-own-adventures will be the same.

  The easier mode would be just getting the last two months or so of bank statements.

  On the, I'm doing air quotes, but the hard mode, the purpose of that would be to, like I said, have information for the whole year so that you can use it in your taxes come the next year.

  On the easy mode, our focus is on just looking at our expense, recurring expenses, to help us with the next step and not so much help us with tax time, essentially just, okay, let's have a clean slate moving forward, not go back.

  So for us today, since we're in January, the year has just started, I recommend getting, again, two months of bank statements.

  So, oh, January, I'm recording this in January, this will be dropped in February.

  So you would get December and January bank statements so that you can see recurring expenses.

  So that's the next, that's like this next step, okay.

  You've gotten your bank statements and you've gotten the correct number depending on what kind of mode you want.

  So I guess if you wanted to do hard mode this time around, you would get all the bank statements for 2025 in preparation for your taxes.

  So that would be hard mode, I suppose.

  Easy mode would be January, yeah, January and December of 2025, January 2026, December 2025 bank statements.

  I should have done a video for this one, there's so much explaining and hand-waving, excuse me.

  And so then once you have these bank statements, you want to just sit with them.

  You might feel a little, ooh, dread bubbling up depending on how many accounts you have, you might have quite a few to navigate through.

  But just sit, just breathe, it's gonna be okay.

  So we have the next step we want to take, this is for both, pick your own adventures, both of you guys will do this.

  We want to make note of our reoccurring expenses.

  So this is where my spreadsheet comes in.

  This will help you moving forward know, okay on this date this is coming out here and it'll also give you a good visual on how much you're spending in overhead to run your business, okay.

  And again if you have, if you're looking at your statements for your personal bank because you've been making business purchases out of it, only include business related expenses, okay.

  We're not doing personal finances right now.

  So you will take a spreadsheet and you'll have you know the date, the day of the month that it typically gets withdrawn, the vendor, right, so Todoist or Squarespace.

  And the amount, I like having a little description of like what this tool serves.

  So for Todoist I'd say task management, Squarespace I'd say website hosting, right, and newsletter, do my newsletter through Squarespace.

  And then the amount of course.

  And I have a little sum function at the end so I could see each month how much I'm paying.

  And so I do also include in that spreadsheet minimum payments on business cards, minimum payments on personal loans related to business.

  So once you have this then you can decide, oh another quick note, include annual recurring expenses.

  You can create a separate little table in your spreadsheet for annual recurring.

  If you have quarterly, make note of all of those.

  And annual is a little bit harder to catch, right, if you're not going through the whole year.

  But just take some time to sit and think about the tools you use.

  You'll definitely update the spreadsheet as you go on, as you remember, as you get charged for things, as you add and remove things.

  So don't forget those.

  And then the next step is for the people who picked hard mode and you want to have a clearly outlined breakdown of your expenses for your taxes, you're gonna go through and put in all your business related expenses for the year.

  Now in the spreadsheet I have available and you can download, it will include your, like you can put in your account name so you can say what account this comes from.

  There will be pre-built categories based on IRS.

  So yeah, I am NOT gonna get into the details of that because you can just download that thing.

  Or you can create your own if you're feeling zhuzhed up and you don't, you know, you just want to try it, do that.

  And so at the end of this you will have a clear picture of, okay, how much money is going out every month and where it's going to.

  And this might be enlightening, I think it will be enlightening for anybody, right?

  It might be shocking in a good or not so good way.

  It may be thrilling because you might be like, okay, actually I've got my expenses on lock more than I thought.

  It might be a little disheartening, like goodness gracious, I didn't know I was still paying for that subscription or I can't believe I spent this much money on this.

  But it will be clarifying and I want to really state clearly that clarity brings peace.

  It really does because then you can take things into your hands.

  When we don't know what's going on and we don't know what's happening, we don't know where money's going, when we're guessing, often we inflate the problem and think it's worse than it is sometimes.

  We also don't recognize the ways that we can make the changes within ourselves, within the actions that we're taking to get the outcome we want.

  So this, this, this, this is the process that without sitting across from you and you were telling me that you're stressed about your finances that I would walk you through.

  So I in the next episode will discuss with you how to, what to do with these numbers now, how to think about these numbers, what are some steps you can take to move from okay this clarity to the desired state in your finances that you desire, the desired state that you desire.

  I'm gonna leave that in, we're gonna, I'm not editing this thing down.

  So this is a very tangible episode.

  Let me know what you think, let me know your own thoughts on finances and how you navigate managing your business finances.

  But until next time stay safe, stay warm, and be well.

• Extras

  → My conversation with Klara is live! Listen in to Building Matriarchal Futures: Feminine Wisdom in Business and Society

  → I had the pleasure of speaking at On Purpose Women’s Global Community on Tapping into Potent Visibility. I was super jazzed and think this is a great resource for the person feeling stuck with content creation, visibility and the like.

This article was written by Edi Oduraa, founder of Via de Oduraa, where we help creative + wellbeing brands scale without losing their soul through fractional COO services.