Introduction
My wife and I own and manage a
fourplex that has several sources of income and many monthly expense items. At
the end of each month we manually track down and total both revenues and
expenses to calculate profit and ultimately tithing. The current process involves
looking through bank statements online and tallying cash flows in a spread
sheet before my wife calculates tithing in a paper note pad. At the end of the
year when we report profit – and more specifically, tithing – the best record
we have is the little notebook, and we just hope we kept all the records in the
same notebook.
My solution is to create a sub
procedure that will go out to the internet, log into Mint.com where all of our
financial data is aggregated, import transaction data into an excel
spreadsheet, and manipulate the data to show what our revenue, expenses,
profit, and tithing is for each month. This data will also greatly simplify yearend
tax reporting for our business. Currently my wife spends 1– 1.5 hours at the
end of each month manually entering all of the applicable cash flows in to the
spreadsheet above. Later, usually on a Sunday morning, we’ll go back and look
at the numbers to assess how much tithing to pay. Finally, when I go to do my
taxes at the end of the year, I typically spend 3 – 4 hours going from tab to
tab in the spreadsheet verifying the cash flows. In addition, I go back to the
bank statements to look for any cash flows that were accidently omitted originally.
Thus, we typically spend ~20 hours per year managing data input tasks that can
be automated.
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