Receipt Please!

I dashed into a shop to buy whatever it is my dad had sent me to get. Upon my return he asked, "So where is the receipt?"

"Oh, I forgot!" I said, annoyed with myself for I so hate to disappoint my father.

"You forgot? Business people don't forget. If you forget to ask for receipts you won't make a very good business person, my girl!"

I was only seven years-old. I sat in the back of the car dejected at the prospect of my pending doom as a businesswoman.

You might be thinking I was made money-aware at too young an age but I'm glad I was. Bad habits form early and once a bad habit has been etched into your persona it is very hard to give up. When you are very young and impressionable you absorb and accept things much more easily.

Receipts are important. That's what I learnt that day.

If you start a business you'll need receipts to offset against tax but even if you are not running a business, receipts are your only barometer for how much money you are spending.

Learning the Habit of Asking for Receipts

I have a challenge for you to carry out over the next week. Get an envelope. Put it into your handbag and every time you buy something, ask for the receipt then make a note of what you bought on it. At the end of the week lay out your receipts and note down everything you bought and how much it cost you on paper or, even better, in a spreadsheet.

I can almost guarantee that a) you will be surprised by how much you spent over the course of just one week and b) you will realise that you didn't need to buy some of the things you did.

Do I always remember to ask for a receipt?

Not always but 95% of the time I do and this practice has served me well. I recently started my own business and when it was time to get my annual tax return sorted out I didn't struggle to find my receipts. They were all saved in one folder and any receipt that had been received via email was already stored in a specific folder on my computer.

Receipts received via email are ALWAYS immediately saved to a unique folder as a PDF in the format:YYYYMMDD {Amount} {Item}. This makes them supremely easy to find. So, for instance, the receipt for the artwork of my recently published book, "Chichewa 101", is saved as: 20120619 MWK9000 Chichewa 101 Artwork.

This way, when you need to summarise your receipts in a spreadsheet you won't even have to waste time opening the PDF document because it's there in the filename.

What does all this mean for your personal wealth goals?

The sooner you get used to keeping receipts the better you will get at understanding what you spend your money on and the easier life will be if you one day start your own business.

Running a business alongside your regular job is the best way to boost your income but you need to have business habits before you decide to start a business.

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." - Charles Dickens

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