Wow It's been a while!

It has been quite some time since my last posting. Here's a little update as to what's happening in my life and with DDB.

DDB finally completed a HUGE school order that had been hanging over my head for a few weeks. I had to make 25 streamer pony tail ribbons and 25 korker pony tail ribbons. The streamers were a piece of cake and were done within a day or two. The korkers were much more time consuming than I had expected them to be. And I ran out of ribbon at one point and had to order more. Needless to say, the last 19 that I needed to finish after deliver of the first batch took me quite some time. I'm so happy though that this order is finally complete and shipped! I took the weekend off from bows, and last night started back up again rebuilding my etsy stock. I only have 24 items listed, so I've got alot of work ahead of me. I made 6 new items last night that I plan to list tonight. I will continue creating tonight in hopes to build that stock back up quickly. My focus last night was getting holiday/winter items in my shop nice and early. I want to get my inventory rebuilt and keep up some networking in hopes to get sales up. We had a nice jump in sales (more than doubled) in the beginning of September. If I could keep that pace up, then I would definitely start to see the fruits of my labor. Profit/loss wise, I am just shy of breaking even, but it's difficult because I am usually in need of more supplies for something somewhere.

On the personal front... My husband and I are booked every Saturday and Sunday through all of October and even into the first three weeks of November. It's that time of year where you start to think about how a little extra money would be nice. Granted, I think of that on a daily basis all year round. But for some reason when fall hits, I am usually focused on trying to find another way to earn some extra cash if possible, or get a second job. With DDB still fairly new, it's like having a second full time job. I come home and sit down to work on bows. I just need to stay positive and know that all of this hard work WILL pay off someday. Hopefully sooner rather than later. We have the tendancy to go to open houses once in a while. We aren't actively looking to buy a home at the moment, but we like to check out homes and see what they are listed for in order to stay knowledgeable about what's going on in the market. We do eventually want to get into our bigger/permanent home. Well let me tell you..... We walked into a home on Sunday that would be within our price range that I absolutely fell in love with. I walked out of that home with my chin practically quivering and tears almost in my eyes because I could absolutely envision us spending the rest of our lives there. I could picture kids running around and just how comfy and cozy we would make it. We could totally entertain there too. But we are unfortunately not in a position right now to put our house on the market and upgrade. We live in this small lake home. And there are days when I don't know where our money actually went. So it almost feels like we may not ever be able to afford a bigger home some days. And that is just depressing. I love our little home, but we are out growing it as it is. Oh well. There's a reason for everything right....

A GREAT Way to Keep Track of your Etsy Profits/Expenses!!

So I have been thinking a lot lately about what I need to do for my business. I knew that I needed to get some sort of excel spreadsheet in order. I just had to take the time to sit down and do it. First I decided to post a forum and ask my fellow etsians how they go about organizing their shop's profits/expenses to have everything in one place for tax time (as this is a huge fear of mine, not having this correct by the time I go to the accountant). Here is the forum link I originally posted: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6251981

Then someone with the shop name of AccountingSpot (http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=7127134) not only helped me, but in turn helped many others. And based off of everyone's comments on the thread and on her blog, it made me so glad to have started that topic of discussion. So today I finally sat down to check out AccountingSpot's FREE.... yes, I did say that..... FREE worksheet to calculate profits/expenses. The link for this free download and AccountingSpot's blog is here: http://www.accountingspotonline.com/2009/07/free-download-simple-profit-loss.html.

I think any etsy shop owner will greatly appreciate the effort that was put into this form for us to be able to use for free... Especially beginning etsians! Happy Financing!