Start Bookkeeping Right with Outright.com

This year I decided to go “business 2.0″ as much as possible. Sure, I’ve been using (and loving) online bill pay and automatic recurring payments for years, but with an active toddler, 5-6 blogs, one consulting business and another one on the way, I seriously needed an online solution that is intuitive to use on a daily basis. The more straightforward and less frills, the better: I’ve tried products like Quicken – several times, actually – but the learning curve was way too steep for me. I have no doubt that if I took the time to learn Quicken, I’d get good mileage out of it, but I don’t have time (you read that list of stuff on my plate already, right?)!

I started using Outright.com (when it used to be called GoBootstrap.com) to track my business P&L since the beginning of this year, and I LOVE IT! …so much that I’m writing this unsolicited testimonial even though I’m not going to need that free domain name promotion they’re running right now. I also want to take this opportunity to share some tips with budding microbusiness / small business entrepreneurs who want to use Outright.com as a business tactical tool, not just an accounting tool. Therefore I’m going to focus on my favorite feature in Outright.com: Reports.

Reports let you see your business performance on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. If you look at the Outright.com screenshot of reports, you’ll see that by default there is 1 category under Income: Sales.

Here’s what I do: I assign my “Income” into different REVENUE TYPES by labeling the “Received from” category as a passive or residual income versus an active income. Passive and residual incomes are revenue that you receive on a continual and enduring basis after investing an initial (often significant) level of time, effort, and resources into a product or service. Active income, on the other hand, is what I’d consider “job-like earnings”: If you don’t do it, you won’t earn it.

This allows me to view not only how much my gross sales are, but also where the sales are coming from. This is extremely useful for measuring the effectiveness of your business tactics. For example, if I looked at my monthly sales trends and I see that a particular revenue channel isn’t performing as expected, I would see this in the reports column. Then I can do something about it – whether I’d refine my tactics or eliminate that revenue channel.

Based on this minor tweak, I was able to create new approaches to increase revenue in one of my channels, and also to detect the extreme poor performance in another one of my channels. If you sell mostly to individuals (for example, if you operate a coaching business), then you can use the names of your clients to see who your top clients are and who are repeat clients. This is a useful way to even look at the “value” of your clientele and see if you’re happy with how you’ve strategized your business.

I had tried the Freshbooks link-up feature but didn’t continue with FB because of the restrictions of client # for free feature, and I’m a small enough outfit where i can still generate my own biz invoices or even use the Google checkout/Paypal invoicing features.

I also love the estimated taxes. not sure how accurate this is given that my biz tax situation can get complicated, but it’s helpful to track what you’ve paid and how much you may still need to pay based on the standard deductions. my accountant will tell me how the tax feature worked out.

The feature I’d wish to see is to have a pie chart graph like Mint.com does with expenses and income. it’s another way to visualize how our business is performing.

I wonder if the future “pro” or fee-based features will allow a user to track multiple businesses under the same account name. I’ll need to know the answer to that since I’m in the process of creating the foundation for another business that I plan to launch later this year.

If you use Outright.com and have good tips to share to make this more of a business performance tracking tool, I’d love to hear from you!

Disclosure: This review is 100% my own opinion. I’m not compensated by Outright.com in anyway and the company has no control over the content I’ve written here.