How doyou track profits?

Like everyone else I have several ways that i monetize my sites. How do you track profits on a daily basis?

I would like to be able to import profits from adversal, adsense, affiliates, etc.

What do you do?

 

That is a good question since I hear people mention Quicken or Quickbooks but personally I do not like the software. Mainly because it doesn't automatically total up everthing. Those programs only add up your earnings and what you spent. They do not allow fields for fees, taxes, earnings, deductions, and other fields you would need. I figured I could easily download history from PayPal and my business bank account and just import the data and it would all be ready for me. However you still have to manually separate and add/subtract everything which is stupid IMO. You would think the computer could do that for you. Maybe if the bank and PayPal offered files like CSV that separated all fields and added it up for you and allowed you to remove certain payments like personal spendings that would be great.

 

QB will automatically total everything for you if you set it up right. You do have to assign additional information to each transaction you import from Paypal. You have to set up various revenue and expense accounts in the Chart of Accounts and manually assign each transaction to one of these accounts.

You can also associate each transaction with a Job. This way you can run profit and loss statements on each website or each aspect of your business to see what is profitable. The only problem with this is sometimes you get one payment (Adsense) for multiple sites. You will actually have to break that up and receive it as multiple payments associated with there respective sites.

Just remember, good data in = good data out. The more time you spend setting up and entering good information, the better and more accurrate your profit/loss statements will be.

 

QB is ok for tracking cashflow but I want to track daily earnings.

 

Use a spreadsheet or custom database to track daily earnings. You can import your adsense earnings on a daily basis and even import or enter any advertising expenses.

 

Well the only way I track my earnings is by checking with each site.
But I don't find it a hassle really to check your earnings online.
Ya maybe you might have a long and annoying password, but I don't think there is another way to check your earnings.

 

Checking it is not a problem. I want to be able to check and see if I have made more or less than normal on the 15th, or on Friday.

Importing one source into a spreadsheet is not hard but I don't know how to import, say both the adsense and azoogle reports into the same sheet.

 

Oh ok.. so you want to track you daily earnings to compare if you are doing better or not... Well I don't know about that... I once tried to do it manually but I got bored, so I stopped.

 

theres not going to be an easy way to handle all types unless you code something. I have a script myself which imports adsense earnings and seperates based on channels so i can see what sites are/have been profitable over a set time against advertising costs. theres probably scripts you can but to do this, but to import azoogle etc your going to need somehting custom made