Shore Thing

Ask most small business owners about their profit and loss statement and you’ll get at least a vague sense of recognition — it shows whether you made money, roughly, sure. Ask about the balance sheet and you’re more likely to get a blank look. It’s the report that gets generated, filed away, and never actually read. That’s a shame, because your balance sheet answers a question your P&L can’t: not how did you do this period, but what is your business actually worth right now.

Whether you’re affiliated with a host agency or running fully independent as your own registered entity changes more about your bookkeeping than most travel agents realize when they’re making the decision — and it’s worth understanding before you set up your books, not after you discover they don’t match your actual situation. The basic structural difference. A host agency provides you an umbrella — often handling your accreditation (like an IATA or CLIA number), supplier rel

When you worked for someone else, retirement savings may have been almost automatic — a percentage pulled from your paycheck, maybe an employer match, a decision you made once during onboarding and mostly forgot about. When you work for yourself, nobody sets that up for you. Nobody matches your contribution. If it’s going to happen, you’re the one who has to build it. I bring this up because it’s easy to postpone indefinitely — not because it’s not important, but because ther

When I tell people I’m a bookkeeper, I get one of two reactions. Either they nod politely and clearly have no idea what that means, or they say “oh, like taxes?” and I have to gently explain that no, not like taxes — adjacent to taxes, relevant to taxes, but not taxes. So let me explain what bookkeeping actually is, because I think a lot of small business owners are either doing parts of it accidentally or skipping it entirely because they’re not sure what they’re skipping. B

Let’s talk about the clients who come to me not because their books are a little behind, but because their books don’t exist. Or they existed in 2023 and then life happened. Or there’s a QuickBooks account somewhere that nobody has opened in fourteen months and the password is a mystery. If that’s you, I want to say two things clearly. First: this is incredibly common. Second: it is completely fixable. There is even a name for the fix — catch-up bookkeeping — because so many

I hear this one a lot, and I understand why. Your bank app shows every transaction. It even sorts them into little categories with pie charts. It feels like the work is already being done for you. So why pay for QuickBooks Online and a bookkeeper on top of that? Fair question. Here’s the honest answer. Your bank app is a record of what moved through one account. Bookkeeping is the story of your whole business. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where pe

I want to give you some permission you didn’t know you needed. You don’t have to enjoy bookkeeping. You don’t have to find it interesting, or satisfying, or anything other than necessary. I work with plenty of people who are great at their businesses and genuinely uninterested in their finances, and that’s completely fine. What’s not fine — what I’m going to push back on gently — is using “I’m not a numbers person” as a reason to not know your numbers. Because here’s the thin

At some point in setting up your books, you’ll run into a question that sounds far scarier than it is: do you keep your books on a cash basis or an accrual basis? People tend to nod, pick whichever word they heard last, and move on terrified. Let’s actually understand it, because for some of you — travel agents especially — it genuinely matters. The whole difference comes down to one thing: when you count the money. Cash basis: you count it when it actually moves. Income coun

Let me start by saying something important: none of these are stupid mistakes. They’re incredibly common, completely understandable, and almost always the result of nobody ever explaining how travel agency finances actually work — because the travel industry has its own financial rhythm that generic business advice doesn’t account for. Here are the five I see most often. 1. Treating commission income like regular income. This is the big one. When you book a trip, you don’t ge

Let me save you some time: if you want to work with me, you’re going to be in QuickBooks Online. That’s not negotiable, and I want to explain why — because “my bookkeeper requires it” is not a great reason to pay a monthly subscription fee, and you deserve an actual answer. First, what it is. QuickBooks Online is cloud-based accounting software. It connects to your bank accounts, tracks your income and expenses, generates reports, and keeps everything in one place. Your bookk

Nobody talks about this part, so I’m going to. When small business owners avoid their books — and most of them do, at some point — it’s rarely because they’re lazy or irresponsible. It’s because looking at the numbers feels like a verdict. And if you’re not sure the verdict is going to be good, it’s easier to just not look. I get it. I run my own business. I know what it feels like to be afraid of your own bank account. But here’s what I’ve learned from working with a lot of