If you are trying to earn money online, you should always treat it as a real business. Every business needs a profit and loss account. I am not saying that you should create an accounting report that is meant to be audited but just create one that can at least give you a profit figure. A Profit and Loss Account can clearly shows you whether you made or lost money in a period. Being an Accountant, A spreadsheet provides an easy platform for you to create your accounting report. Microsoft Excel and Google Docs are two programs that allow you to create spreadsheets but the latter comes free.
Below is an example of Profit and Loss Account:
The figures provided are fictitious and are for illustrative purpose only
You can access the spreadsheet at:
Template of Profit & Loss Account
Depending on your business nature, you can add on more types of sales and expenses. The more detailed your P & L Account is, the better you can keep track of your business. You can create separate spreadsheets for sales and expenses. One spread sheet for each and every sales and another spreadsheet for each and every expense. From the P&L account, you can calculate your profit margin and the increase or decrease of profit from month to month. Thereafter, you can create a chart to portray the trend of your profit.
For those who handle most of its online transactions using Paypal account, you can easily find out your profit figure as the balance you have in the account is most likely your profit. However, there are quite a number of affiliate programs give commissions in the form of checks and direct bank deposits.
As your business transactions increase, you will need professional accounting software such as those from Intuit as they can automate the process of creating P&L account. Accounting software from Intuit is designed for the layman who is not required to have any accounting knowledge. It provides 30 days free trial. For those who have started out using Excel, data can be imported to Intuit’s program.
As an online marketer, I believe that you keep track of the traffic to your website. I would like to highlight that it is equally important to keep track of your profit. If you find that you are making losses in a particular month, this raises the alarm for you to control your costs. For instance, you can cut down the cost you spend on Internet Marketing e-books in order to increase your profit for a particular month. It is pointless to have high amount of revenue with sky high costs. By increasing revenue and controlling costs at the same time, you will increase your profit. A profit and loss account provides a basis for you to set a target for your future income. If you are able to achieve your targeted profit figure at a particular month, you can feel the sense of achievement that keep you motivated.
Quite a handful of online entrepreneurs post their Profit and Loss Account on their blog monthly. This helps to motivate newbie bloggers and themselves at the same time. I like to read other bloggers’ Profit and Loss account as it encourage me to continue earning money online as well as telling me that earning money online is possible.
Form Creator
There is time when you need to create a form on your website to collect some information from your website visitors.I created such form at this post . Since I am hosting a Kindle Fire giveaway, I need to collect the information of competitors such as name, e-mail address etc. After the information is collected through a form, they will be stored in a database. This makes it easy for me to process the data.
Forms can be created by simply drag and drop the required fields. Forms can be designed in such a way that it prevents invalid data from being collected. If alphabets are keyed- into a field that is meant for a date, they will not be captured into the form but an error message will be displayed telling the user that the data entered is invalid. To embed the form onto your website, all you need to do is just to copy and paste a few lines of pre-written html codes.
Thereafter, you can easily collect information of your website visitors by letting them fill in several fields on the form you created.
There are many “What Is See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) form creator around but I will introduce some of the best below.
Zoho Creator provides 15 days free- trial so that you can try out the premium features of its form creator. Its forever free plan can be used to maintain 1,000 records. It has 5 different paid plans that range from $15- $175 to cater the needs of various customers. It offers discount for non- profit organization.
Wufoo is free if you use it to create 3 forms/ reports with 10 fields and 100 entries per month. Some of their clients include Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, New South Wales Government and Harvard University. If you need to store more records, you can subscribe to their plans that range from price of $15- $175 per month. On PAID accounts, if you exceed the number of entries allowed for the month, a fee of $0.05 USD per entry over the limit will be charged to your account at the end of your billing period.
Unlike similar services, Jotform does NOT show ads or show a logo on your form. All features are available to Free users. Its paid plan comes with 30 days money back guarantee. Their clients include Facebook and BBC. Jotform has one of the best rates among similar form creator as its most expensive plan is only $49.95 per month but it can store 1,000,000 submissions per month.
Apnitro pForm, can be used to create self- hosted forms. You just to pay a one- time fee of $39 for a license to install their form to one site. However, you need to have your own server to host the data.