So for the past couple of months I’ve been working out a business plan for a small business that I hope will pay for my woodworking hobby.
Yesterday I had a two hour seminar with IRD (New Zealand’s version of the IRS) and I must say it’s not actually as scary as I first thought.
I have some experience with a small business as my wife is running a very successful window cleaning business and I’ve helped out with bits and pieces of admin.
Basically so long as I keep accurate records of income and expenditure then I am good to go for the most part without an accountant.
To help me in this respect I’ve built a database using the brilliant Airtable. With this database I can record clients, products, and orders while keeping a record of what’s owing and what’s been paid from a very simple system. I don’t think I really need to use accounting software at all as IRD just said so long as I have records. They offer a free spreadsheet that pretty much does the same thing so if they’re happy with spreadsheets then they should be happy with a database. Because the database is stored on the Airtable servers it means I should have backups for as long as Airtable exists so hopefully they’ll be around for the next 7 years.
I’ve already made a start on developing my website (this domain name will change soon though) to match my new business as I’ve made the decision to keep using SteemIt for my blog for obvious reasons. I’m developing from scratch as the site is pretty much a small site but at some stage I’ll think about bigger plans for it as I build the business up.
I feel quite relaxed about this move now but due to the way IRD structures their first year payments I’d have to make sure I put a lot of money away over the year. This is fine because I’ve already planned on putting away 40% for tax and ACC which are really the only two requirements for running a business in New Zealand. That might sound like a lot being put away but it’s actually more than needed and will pretty much mean that leftover stuff is basically savings. I might even make it 50% to really give me good savings. IRD recommends two bank accounts in order to put aside some money for tax purposes so that’s what I will do.
No that’s left to do is tell IRD when I’ve started and to get some customers. That’s going to be the fun part but I think that’s where Facebook might be good considering I’ve done quite well selling stuff using Facebook Marketplace so far. There’s also a national bullet board system similar to Facebook as well so I’ll start there also.
Let the games begin... in a month’s time.