Business
Licensing, inspections, training, insurance, taxes, and zoning — these are all things you need to be aware of when building your business. What challenges are you facing, and how do you manage costs while growing? Ask questions and help others with their business in this group.
Business Tools Needed
This topic contains 1 reply, has 2 voices, and was last updated by Sway Soturi 4 weeks ago.
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- January 11, 2025 at 1:40 pm #141253
In November my wife started a cottage food business in Alabama. She’s always had a passion for baking. She had a decent holiday season with getting numerous orders for cakes and cupcakes. She’s been to my work a few times selling smaller items such as cookies, peanut butter balls, fudge, etc. When she comes to my work she typically sells between $50-$100 in product. We did a booth at the local Christmas festival in the small town we live in and did just shy of $500 in gross sales.
Now that the holidays are over we have started planning and strategizing for 2025. She wants to continue to grow her new venture. Her dream has always been to own a café or a coffee shop that sells pastries. So I have been telling her lets put pento paper to see what its gonna take and create some goals. I have presented several questions to get her thinking how she can achieve her dream. If she wants to replace her paycheck she needs to net lets say $400 a week. How much product do you need to sell to net $400? If she wants to scale up and get a store front its going to cost x so she needs to net x which means shes need to sell x.
At this time we do not have any good recordkeeping. I’m hoping somebody can help guide us on how to fix that. Outside of my colleagues and the event most of her sales have been from friends and family.
For her to be able to run forecasts and watch different KPIs such as avg order value how do we go about documenting fast paced sales from events? If she does the local farmer market, asking a prospective client for their name, email, etc can lead to a loss sale quick. I have dove in to Square and glanced around. The only thing I know to do is document the exact product count we take to the show. After the show do a recount to determine what was sold and reconcile that to our payments. Once everything is reconciled we create a single transaction in Square that represents what was sold. That will help us produce some numbers we can use for analysis of profitability, popularity, etc.
How ever that does not do us any good for email marketing. Doing it that way we have no customer information to market to. I’m okay with having the mindset that events are a form of an active channel. Focus on getting customer info with a more passive checkout process such as her website.
The other aspect of record keeping is sale tax and self employment tax compliance. I want to make sure we have solid records so we are compliant but also deducting all of her qualifying expenses.
I know to much for my own good when it comes to a lot of these parts of the business. I manage the books for several small businesses. We have a lot of software and systems in place to view customer history, AP, AR, etc. I know solutions that work at scale but this is smaller. She’s going to do this so I want to assist with getting her some of the infrastructure in place without delaying her progress or complicating the process.
If we are gonna do this and do it the right where do we go from here? I’m used to having a POS that is ran separate from the accounting software. Is the answer to use Square and pair it with Quickbooks online? Gather customer info for marketing when and where appropriate and use Kit (formerly Convert Kit) for email marketing?
January 11, 2025 at 4:03 pm #141387Hi Shane, It’s so fabulous how supportive you are of your wife!
From my personal experience, Square is a great system although they do not offer bookkeeping. They will do most everything else from POS to scheduling to payroll to “banking”, etc. Although for our business we just use it for POSS, scheduling, and savings. They will do the item tracking so you know what are the best sellers.
I think it all really comes down to what you and the business needs. For us we have just been really happy with Square.
As for newsletter, what worked well for us is offering something in exchange for people’s email. You will be surprised how many people will sign up when you offer a free muffin (or a discount perhaps). We haven’t done any paid advertising and so far we have about 1500 people on our email list and our open rate is high when we send out our newsletter (45% and up).
Happy to chat more if you feel this info is useful to you.
We started as a CFO in 2019 and have our own cafe for two years now. It’s a lot of learning and I made plenty of mistakes for sure, happy to share my experience :)
Good luck!
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