How Much is Your Time Worth?

This essay was written for the Makers of Sport® newsletter in August 2015. Monday Musings and Weekend Reads were the written editions of the newsletter that accompanied the podcast; the archived email is on Mailchimp. The newsletter's links and announcements are trimmed here.

[In my best Kentucky accent] Happy Mondee, folks. I've been battling the hell that is allergy season in the Bluegrass. This past weekend you may have noticed there was no Weekend Reads. That's because between opening new boxes of tissues, I was working on my taxes and bookkeeping. A dreadful weekend for any.

As a creative-minded person, I *hate* bookkeeping. It's an analytical side of the brain that I just don't like to use that much — reconciling QuickBooks with my business bank account and credit card, running reports on invoices and expenses from last year and checking to see if I can even afford to remain in business for myself or get a job.

Because I got so behind my bookkeeping, I had a lot of work to do as the deadline for those that filed tax extensions in the U.S. is fast approaching. In the last 2 years I have been operating my business with an American Express Business Gold card for expenses which are paid off monthly from my business checking account, and invoicing through the online billing software, Harvest. Because many of my expenses are paid and recorded in that AMEX, I tend to let my Quickbooks bookkeeping slip. Typically I'll spend a couple days at certain points in the year and play catchup. This time around, I have had enough.

As I slaved away on numbers, reconciliations and P&Ls this past weekend, I decided that my time is worth much more than what it would cost to add a few extra pieces of software or pay my account to take care of some bookkeeping. For years, I kept my business as lean as possible. I didn't want to use anything other than the free software trials for anything. But in the last year or so, I have realized that you get what you pay for and that if a couple of days worth of my time is valued much more than a couple of extra hundred bucks in software at the end of the year.

Enter Automation

Around a year ago, I decided to quit being cheap; to suck it up and realize it costs money to run a business efficiently and that tech companies have been solving age-old problems by providing better user experiences when it comes to bookkeeping, project management and general business administration. When your time is worth money, it makes sense at a certain point in your business's growth to just pay the money to software that allows you spend less time doing administrative tasks that you hate.

QuickBooks is the go-to for many accountants and businesses keeping books. It is a staple in the industry. The problem is, it is very generalist and more the Walmart of software (in that is trying to be everything to everyone), rather than serving specialized needs of different industries. To solve these problems, one needs additional software or methods of record keeping.

My process includes billing, sending invoices and tracking hours in Harvest, software built for designers and developers doing project-based work. When I send invoices, I allow clients to pay me via credit card, something I used to not do because I didn't want to pay the processing fees. Now that I allow for this, my cash flow has sped up allowing clients to pay sooner and not leave me chasing dollars 60-90 days out. A program called Stripe processes my credit cards, it then takes a processing fee and automatically sends the payment straight to my business checking account.

In Quickbooks, I have to record these transactions manually as invoices received do not reflect this fee taken out when I reconcile my accounts with my bank, it only shows the amount transferred or deposited into my bank account. That fee though is a tax-writeoff so I need to record it and I also need it to reconcile my invoices in QuickBooks for my P&L to be correct, those invoice amounts need to match my actual sent invoices in Harvest.

We live in 2015, there has to be a better way to do this without me manually entering these transactions. Luckily of for me, through my weekend research I discovered a program called Zapier, which has many custom automated webhooks that work with over 400 popular web apps. One of those apps included QuickBooks Online. Perfect! But, it costs money monthly though. Ugh, another fee to add to my monthly payments of Basecamp, Harvest, Quickbooks Online, Dropbox, Evernote, Soundcloud, you get the point.

However, through Zapier I found out I can have my invoicing software (Harvest) create a new project in my project management software (Basecamp) after I create a new client there, as well as duplicating the invoices I send in Harvest in my bookkeeping software (QuickBooks online), not mention tracking and recording payments in the bookkeeping software as well reflecting every change I make by logging into that one billing software. I also discovered that I can automatically add Stripe processing fees to my bookkeeping software everytime Stripe sends a deposit to my business account. All through these things called webhooks and APIs in Zapier, which allows all of these apps to seamlessly talk to each other when I make a change in one.

I know this all sounds confusing, but the TL;DR is I distilled about 24 hours of work over the weekend down 90%. My point with all of this is to tell you that even though you may not understand fully what I have done above, if you happen to not run a business, don't hesitate to pay for software that will make your life easier and save you time. It took years of wasting time for me to figure this out.

Let's say for mathematical ease that I bill at $100/hour. Spending 36 hours a year on tasks I hate but that are necessary cost me $3,600 in potential revenue. If I take software that costs $20/month and consider that 12 months of that fees are just $480, it really seems to make the fees totally worth it.

Don't waste precious time doing what you hate. Outsource it either to other humans (like bookkeepers) or paid software such as Zapier. Time is a precious resource in this day and age where we are inundated with social media and other areas of life that try to suck it away from us. Think about that his week moving forward. And if you need any tips on Zapier, I'd be happy to more thoroughly explain the things I'm doing to make my digital and business life much more efficient.

Have a good week.

Your pal,

Adam