Day 9 of 362

Like the tie? Goodwill... $1.19, plus tax. Sometimes thrifting is good...

Sundays at the game store tend to be slower than most days, and that's the time I catch up on back work stuff, mostly rough financials to give me an idea of how much we can order for the week. Fun stuff, playing with money. It makes me feel wealthier than I actually am. =)

One thing I learned from the original owner of the store was to have multiple bank accounts for the store. One handles your day-to-day regular expenses, while the other(s) act more like savings accounts. You can write checks on them if you HAVE to, but it's better if you can leave it alone. Our extra account is where we store our sales tax money. Each day, I look at what we've collected for tax and shunt 2.25 times that amount of money into the "tax account". Why so much? Simple... Emergency/Special Project money.

If something happens, say, an intoxicated, unlicensed driver totalling your wife's parked car for example, it's good to have a spare $1200 laying around to help replace that car. Sometimes, I'll look around and realize that we are out of "store dice" (dice with the store logo on them). It takes about $350 to get a new batch in. If we have it in the main account, cool. If we don't, then we have the backup account to eat that semi-unexpected expense.

Another thing I learned from the original owner was about credit accounts from distributors. Simply put, DON'T HAVE ONE! If you buy stuff from a distributor on terms and things go south on you (a run of bad sales months, a medical emergency, etc.), that distributor can claim product off of your shelves that you have ordered from them to repay your credit debt. We buy stuff with a bank card tied to our main bank account. Once we buy product, it's ours. If we have a run of bad sales, we'll have enough debt issues without our distributors being among them. We may pay a touch more for product as a result, but the peace of mind from that end is well worth it.

Until later...

-- GopherDave