Latley I have been adding a ton of updates to the main website I use to link all my projects together (e-com and leads) to one place to better keep track of stats including keywords, conversion rates, adwords spending, product earnings, plus much much more.
Well today I added a feature so I can easily add and track my expenses. Last week I paid someone to build me a efficient script to check my earnings using arrays. After he finished the script I modded it so I can view all of my products and projects by any custom date (you can see the chart in the image below). Now I have a way to track all of my expense in any custom date range I set, which will help me cut costs and keep profit margins up (the profit margin is what I focus my attention on).
I have been using this website and all of these scripts to help me increase my earnings and efficiency, so far it has been working great. Within the last month I have increased my main profit margin (all projects combined) 5% by cutting costs and talking with drop shippers and freelancers to cut costs somehow.
I highly suggest you to make something like this. But I am curious on how everyone else is tracking all of this critical data?
(click image to view full size one silly)
Let me know if you have any suggestions, I’m always down for criticism.
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I use a spreadsheet. Dead simple to make copies of & back up, it does everything I need it to and I didn’t have to code anything.
The one advantage to keeping it in a database (whether that’s MS Access, or MySQL + PHP front end) is that you can SELECT specific transactions, or SELECT groups of similar transactions, which obviously isn’t possible with a flat-file spreadsheet.
Also, I wouldn’t focus too much on profit margin. Some of the more expensive items I sell have a smaller margin, but because they’re so much more expensive, that works out to a larger sum of money. Certainly keep an eye on your margin, but it’s not the most important thing.
Hey thanks for piping in. I like to focus on the profit margin a lot because increasing that will increase my profits. I can use my statistics to see what needs to be done to get the margin down and increase profits.
If you could code would you use mysql? (im assuming you dont code :-s )
Actually I do code. We’ve spoken about it on MSN before (I run Coffeesh0p.com)
And yes, I do use MySQL, for no reason other than it’s what I’ve always used, and pretty much every web host has it installed.
Pro tip: Create a database abstraction layer, so you just have to use $datalayer->query( $sql ); instead of functions specific to the DB you use. Then if you ever need to change the DB, you only need to alter the abstraction object rather than the database-specific code which would be all over your application.
Oh haha yeah i def know you then sorry I didnt recognize your screen name.
She already receives financial aid, but in order for us to keep paying our bills we will need her portion of income to continue.
huh?
Spam comment? I get tonnes of shit like that in my spam queue…
It’s really interesting to see you have made a custom application to track expanses. I would always be enough with some self built excel document, but i guess i never had so much various expanses to separate and track them more deeply.