The Little Receipt Box That Changed How I Run Every Business

Jeremy went away to the Patrol Academy in 2002. He graduated six months later, in 2002. But what happens is, you get notice where you will be post location wise maybe a month before you graduate (it has been a long time lol). You graduate on like a thursday or a friday. Then you start work that monday. There is no long time off.

Jeremy’s closest post was 1.5 hrs away from where we lived. That is 1 way. He did not want to drive that long every day. So we needed to move.

We also owned our current house already.

So…within about 30 days we looked at houses, found one, put ours up for rent, closed, packed everything we owned and moved.

Looking back…how in the heck did i do that? 😂

What also happened fast was we decided to turn the 1st home into a rental.

With rentals comes applications, leases, and receipts. Lots of receipts.

My father in law had a farm and owned his own trucking business.

Every tax season he’d have literal boxes…plural…full of receipts.

Like those copy paper boxes.

And every year they’d head to the accountant.

I remember thinking…

“Absolutely not.”

There was no way I wanted to spend an entire year throwing papers into a box hoping Future Amber could figure it out. It made my eye twitch. But i also had no clue what to do.

But i also had no bookkeeping background. I had a very very general knowledge but other than that nope. And being a landlord, nope. But thankfully our Brother in law had many rentals. So we were able to sort of ask him the basics.

So i grabbed a box, hold on lol, put the lease and application in a file folder, threw it in the box. Then another file folder in the box for receipts. Which wasn’t too many in the beginning.

We went to the accountant to get our taxes done and i asked before we brought them in. I explained we started a rental and i didn’t want to bring in a box of receipts. The accounant was handy and gave me a very basic sheet on the different categories i should organize the expenses & income in.

• rent
• supplies/equipment
• utilities
• mortgage
• taxes
• insurance
• repairs/contractors

That was about it. Really simple. She was great and said, if you keep it that basic, give me the totals for each category we will be good. And if she had questions she would ask me.

So i went home, went through all the receipts, totaled them up and gave her a sheet (which later became the Accountant yearly recap sheet) with those totals and boom done.

We started rentals in November. So I only had TWO months worth of receipts…

…and I already hated sitting down to organize and total everything. 😂 Two months.

Nope. That is when i created a spreadsheet.

Now, yes, i already understood spreadsheets, formulas, etc. But I made it a habit of every month to grab the folder, throw the receipts on the spreadsheet under their category.

Being a land lord was never on my bingo card for my life. But we did it and we expanded (more on that later). I could’ve just kept tossing receipts in a box and dreaded tax season every year.

I could’ve convinced myself bookkeeping just wasn’t “my thing.”

Instead, I spent maybe an hour making something that made the next twenty years easier.

The spreadsheet changed over the years. The recap sheet changed.

We bought more rentals. We sold rentals. The system evolved.

But the idea stayed the same…

Don’t make Future You clean up a mess that Present You can prevent in five minutes.

Looking back, this wasn’t really about rentals.

It was the first time I realized something that has followed me through every business I’ve had since.

If something feels overwhelming… Before you decide you hate it… Ask yourself…

“Is there just a better way to do this?”

Because honestly…

There usually is.

And funny enough…that little receipt box was probably the beginning of Organized Online Entrepreneur.

I just didn’t know it yet.

xoxo amber g