Tax season is here! Let’s face it…it’s not the most amazing time of the year. Keeping track of all of your income and expenses can be hard during the year, especially if you have a lot of hidden transaction fees! If you use Etsy or PayPal, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Did you know that when you sell on Etsy, you pay a listing fee, a transaction fee, AND a direct checkout processing fee? With PayPal and other money transfer programs, you usually have to pay a transaction fee as well. So how does a busy business owner keep up with so many small transactions? Today, I’m telling you my secret!

I stumbled upon this program a couple of years ago after a surprisingly great year on Etsy. I opened my Etsy account just for fun one day, and it took off. I had thousands of sales within the first year of opening. So imagine how panicked I was when January came around and I had not kept track of anything. Crazy, right? I think we can all agree I had no idea what I was doing. I searched online to see if there was a program that would be able to import all of the information from Etsy and automatically calculate the income and expenses. I didn’t even know if something like that existed, but I was desperate. Somehow, I got incredibly lucky and I came across a program that did exactly that! I’ve used it for years now, and I’m SO happy with GoDaddy Bookkeeping.

Yes, you heard me correctly – GoDaddy Bookkeeping! It sounds weird, right? Well, let me tell you, this program changed my business! First of all, it’s super affordable. If you purchase the program for a year, you can get it for only $8.34 a month (monthly is $9.99, so still not bad). And before I get too much further into this post, I just want to say that I’m not getting paid or compensated in any way to talk about this program at all. I genuinely just love it and I love sharing it with other business owners because I feel like it’s a hidden gem that nobody knows about.

This program is SO easy. When you are on the main home page, it shows you your overall profits and losses for the year in a bar graph. You can also see your hours, invoices, and expenses in a pie chart. On the left side, it gives you an overview of everything else. To look at each individual transaction, you simply just go into your “Income” and “Expenses” tabs and they’re all listed out for you. Just make sure you sort them into the proper category! This is important when you get to the end of the year.

Here is my favorite feature of this program (and the one I was talking about at the beginning of this post): you are able to link all of the accounts you use to your GoDaddy bookkeeping! Under the “Manage” tab, you can search for the account or select one from a list (see below). I have two Etsy accounts and my PayPal account linked to this program. Personally, I don’t link my credit card because I don’t have one for my business yet, but when I finally get one, I will probably link it. I also don’t link my banking just because I’m really particular about where I put any banking information (but that’s just me — I think it’d be pretty safe to do).

The best thing about GoDaddy Bookkeeping is that when tax season rolls around, all I have to do is click the “Taxes” tab and it has everything listed in downloadable spreadsheets that I can save to my computer! These spreadsheets are MAGIC (seriously, I’m not exaggerating on this). You can upload them into TurboTax and it automatically fills in all of the information! It’s SO easy!

As much as I love this program, I want to be honest and tell you that I don’t think that it’s for everyone. If you use Etsy and make a lot of sales each year — this program is DEFINITELY for you. Trust me, it’s worth the extra money to not have to calculate all of the various fees associated with one sale, especially if your shop has a high volume of sales. However, if you run a business and all of your income and expenses are straightforward and easy to keep up with — this program may not be the best fit for you since it does cost about $100 a year. This is especially true if you already pay for a program that has a bookkeeping feature, like 17hats or Honeybook. Personally, I use 17hats for everything except bookkeeping for three reasons:

1. I like the way 17hats allows me to manage all of my clients and keep everything organized
2. I try to keep everything together in as few programs as possible
3. I don’t care for the bookkeeping feature with 17hats. It doesn’t allow me to link to other accounts (except a bank account or credit card), so I have to manually enter everything. It also doesn’t calculate as many reports as GoDaddy.

There are tons of programs out there that will be the best fit for you, you will just have to do research and find them! GoDaddy Bookkeeping is just one of many, but it does have a ton of great features if you aren’t wanting to always manually enter your income/expenses from Paypal, Etsy, Stripe, Amazon, etc. or if you don’t want to bother figuring out fees for each transaction. So check it out if it sounds like something that might interest you! You can click here to take a tour of the program!