Finance Management in the Afternoon

What can I say? It’s not an exciting day.

The joy of the home office situation is the lack of interruptions. Having just transitioned away from running a 30 person office and having as many as 8 client meetings a day, sitting at home planning the website while my assistant types away in the next room is downright peaceful. A great experience, except for today, which is inexplicably dull.

Wait! This explanation just in — today is budget planning day. Since I am determined that this little startup is not going to fail because of a lack of funds, I am taking the following measures

1. Working from home (no office rent, save on transport, blah, blah, blah)
2. Begging all my friends for free help and pilfered paper clips (damn but this works well)
3. Devoting my entire savings to the project
4. Tracking and planning every expense down the the last kuai

And this last one means weekly budget days. Well, maybe more like budget afternoons, but they are boring, no matter what you call them. Budget afternoons include the following exciting activities:

• Checking last week’s expenses against the amount budgeted
• Reconciling bank and other account balances
• Adjusting the budget to include any changes in anticipated future costs
• Figuring out when I will run out of cash or make a million dollars

So far costs are very much under control here at Rightsite. But we have a few issues to consider, such as the cost of building the website and whether to bring on one more full-time staff to assist with data entry.

For the website, we want to have a great site, and you do (generally) get what you pay for. So we are looking carefully at the costs and benefits before deciding on a vendor.

As for the additional full-time staff, once this site is built, it needs to have some data in it. And someone has to put that data into the site. Four thousand industrial zones, approximately one hundred thousand available industrial properties, and who knows how many thousands of real estate agents. We expect to eventually have a full-time data management team of five. So we should hire the first one this month and go from there.

Now we just have to make sure the money is available in the budget.

Have a good day and see you tomorrow