Alcimar Santana Studio
Alcimar Santana, a self-employed hair stylist and makeup artist - and my father, has worked in the beauty industry his entire professional career. And up until the Winter of 2019, he had always kept his services performed recorded in a standard revenue chart. As we were talking one night at the dinner table, I saw him spending an hour calculating how much he had earned from his services performed for the week, as well as how much his employees had generated, and the commission that was due to them for their services.
After learning the in's and out's of my father's business, as well as his needs for an accounting platform, I created a spreadsheet based system for him that takes all of the manual calculation out of the picture, so that he no longer needs to spend his nights at the dinner table tracking revenue and commissions. Instead, he can open up the spreadsheet system - which has become second nature to someone who is not computer trained - and write his employees their due checks, trusting in our system's integrity and reliability. All so that ultimately his nights can be spent with family - or anything else besides number crunching.
Aside from the benefits of automating a weekly task which used to take about an hour per week, which over the course of a calendar year will save Alcimar over 52 hours in manual computation, an added benefit is the ability to have an annual revenue report per professional. This might not mean much immediately, but in the Jan-Apr period when taxpayers are preparing their 1040's, this report makes accurate revenue recognition as simple as possible.
Mobile Form
The Mobile Form records all information regarding a service rendered to a client: date, professional, client, service, and respective amounts.
It operates independently from a card payment processor - such as Square, but can be used with it as a control to make sure both registers balance at the end of the week.
By entering in all the data into a spreadsheet based system on a regular basis, it allows the business owner to forecast revenue for upcoming weeks and create an accurate budget. It also allows for additional reports to be run, such as which clients return most often, or which services are provided most often.
Weekly Service Report
The Weekly Service Report automatically pulls all of the services rendered to clients based on the Professional's Name (Alcimar, or one of his employees), and the Sunday of that starting week, from the responses of the Mobile Form.
It then calculates how much of the service revenue is paid directly to the professional in tips, versus how much is paid out via commission. This eliminates the repetitive weekly process of keeping track of revenue by hand to pay employees.
Not shown is the Annual Report which is a breakdown by Professional Name, that shows how much was generated per employee on a weekly basis. This annual report makes filing your 1040 in the following calendar year a breeze.
(Click for Alcimar's Instagram)