Hiring a Bookkeeper Improved My Mental Health
Around this time last year, I started my foray into entrepreneurship. I work in tech, and contract work opportunities abound if you know where to look for them. After making a couple of key connections, I found myself with enough work and enough of a financial cushion to make the leap to doing it full-time. In July 2017, I officially started working for myself.
I made many of the invoicing mistakes that you often hear about rookie freelancers making. I was invoicing every day, sending out invoices without payment buttons, and losing a lot of money to PayPal fees. Even on days that I wasn’t sending out invoices, I found myself in a cycle of checking my bank and checking my invoicing software to see if I was “on track” to hit a number I had never set a target for but thought I’d know if I saw it.
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Every weekday, I’d spent eight or so hours working, but I’d also spend at least an hour every single day checking my bank, checking my books, and reconciling the bank and the books. Most days, nothing had changed since the day prior, but the need to check was still there. I’d be sitting on the couch, cuddling with my dog, when I’d reach for the phone–not to check social media but to check my bank.
As a self-proclaimed personal finance nerd on my site She Does Better, it’s no surprise that I love money, but what I was doing was not good. When I get my paycheck at the beginning of the month, I get excited because I take joy in the hour that I spend budgeting that paycheck into the goals my partner and I have set for that month. What I was doing with my business, though, was not that–I was checking my bank balance out of fear.
Read: How I Use Fear to Make Positive Financial Decisions
As a consultant, I might deliver a project on July 1, invoice for it on July 31 and payment would be due on August 31. As I was perpetually in this waiting period, I was in fear of whether or not the money was ever going to come in, and my coping mechanism was to constantly check if it had.
I don’t know that I had one single tipping point, but I did recognize that things had to change. My solution: hiring a bookkeeper. I had no experience with bookkeeping, and there are other people out there who specialize in exactly that. I knew that if I could turn over the day-to-day management of money coming in and money going out to someone whose expertise it was, I could remove myself from the process of checking the books–at least for long enough for me to reset my mindset (and eliminate the habit of incessantly checking).
More on Resetting Your Mindset: 10 Habits of Financially Smart People That Anyone Can Learn
While spending money on a bookkeeper may seem silly to some, especially with the plethora of made-for-freelancer tools outs there, I look at it as an investment. With the hundred-or-so dollars I spend on bookkeeping per month, I’ve bought myself roughly 20 hours back. Twenty hours that I’m not actively trying to re-reconcile the books for the millionth time. That doesn’t even count the hours every month that I’m not worried about whether or not there is going to be enough money coming in. I’ve bought myself peace of mind.
Working with my bookkeeper has been freeing. I know that I’m bringing in more than enough for my targets now — numbers I’ve set and she helps me track. I now think about the business money just when I’m preparing for my semi-monthly check-ins with her. It is hard to quantify the value of peace of mind, but it is definitely more than the price of bookkeeping. While committing to a new recurring expense as an entrepreneur can be scary, consider bookkeeping an investment in you and your business that you don’t want to skimp on.
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Hiring a Bookkeeper Improved My Mental Health
