Have you ever looked at your P&L or even your bank account balance and wondered where all of your money went? You’re not alone! I talk to business owners all the time who tell me one of their biggest frustrations is that they work so hard and they know they make “good money” but they just can’t figure out where it all goes. Stick around because I’m going to give you my number one money-saving tip for your small business. 

Ok, so you’ve busted your butt working hard, you see a lot of money come into your bank account, and then you see a lot of money go out of your bank account. Before you know it, you go to pay yourself and you’re left with nothing but pocket change. Where did it all go?!?!? 

Well, there could be a lot of reasons for this like not having a budget for one. That will be an entirely different video all on its own though. Because without a budget you’re not pre-planning anything, you’re just going with the flow and hoping for the best.

Whether or not you have a budget though, one thing you can do is take an assessment of your recurring expenses and see what you can cut. Seriously! Have you ever gone through your statements or through your bookkeeping reports and looked at the details of what you are spending just to realize that you are paying for a subscription that you meant to cancel before the 30-day trial was up? Oops! Don’t worry! It’s happened to all of us and I’m here to tell you how to find those expenses and save some money before the year is over!

Recently, I did this for my own business and I found quite a few transactions that I didn’t need to be paying for anymore. After going through my expenses I found transactions totaling right around $200 a month for a total of $2,400 a year for things I was not even utilizing anymore!! Things like an $80/month LinkedIn subscription that was doing I don’t know what for me because I’m not on there enough to need any of those fancy upgrades and another one was a subscription to an app that I had been using for a client that we no longer work with and I didn’t even need the app anymore!

To find these transactions, I simply pulled up my latest bank and credit card statements and went line by line looking at all of the transactions. If there was a transaction that I wasn’t sure about why I was paying for that, I went into my bookkeeping to see if it was a one-time thing or if it had been recurring each month. If it had been recurring, I logged into the site where the charge originated and did some digging on my subscription. Once I verified what I was paying for, I analyzed whether or not I really needed it and if not, I went on ahead and hit that cancel button while watching my profits grow knowing I was no longer wasting money!

It took me less than an hour to go through everything but as I go into the next year, I’m already saving $2,400 just by hitting cancel on a few websites! That is a no brainer to me and about the biggest (and easiest) money-saving tip I can offer you. And don’t think this is just for your business either, I’d encourage you to do the same with your personal accounts when you have time – you never know what you might find!

If you want to know more about bookkeeping and best practices, be sure to sign up for my free course where I go over the who, what, when, where, and why of bookkeeping for your small business.