Keep Track of Your Business Income and Expenses with Outright

Updated on: by Erica Martin

Keep Business Expenses Organized with Outright

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If you work from home, especially if you’re an independent contractor, one of the most important things you need to do is keep track of your business expenses – anything pertaining to your business, such as the cost to run a website, advertising costs, or the cost of any outsourcing you do, are expenses you can write off  at tax time.  Unless you’re paying for those expenses out of a business account, it can be difficult to keep track of them.  There is a website that makes keeping track of your business expenses easier, however – Outright.  I first found out about this website when I read a blog post on AndreaDekker.com where she talked about how to start a business – this lead me to a more in-depth post that she had written about Outright, and I decided to check it out for myself.  This post will provide a little more information on this website.

What is Outright?

Outright is a website that allows you to link your financial accounts so you can see your business income versus your expenses.

 

I have both business and non-business transactions in my bank account –

how does Outright know the difference?

When you set up your account and Outright downloads your transactions, you can go through and categorize your business transactions and tell Outright to hide any non-business transactions – this way they won’t be added into the totals for your business income and expenses.

 

Is it free to join Outright?

You can join Outright as a free member, however you won’t get access to all the features – as a free member you’ll be able to connect your financial accounts and categorize the expenses – once you do this you’ll get a better picture of your income vs. your expenses for your business.  However, if you upgrade to Outright Plus for $9.95 a month, you’ll also be able to see automated updates to your annual taxes, Schedule C worksheet, estimated taxes, and sales tax.  If that’s important to you, then you may want to consider upgrading.  If it isn’t, and you’re okay with just seeing your income vs. your expenses, then you  may want to stick with a basic account.

 

How easy is it to add your banking information to Outright?

Depending on how tight the security is on your bank’s website, it can be either very easy or very difficult – I had no problems adding my Paypal account to Outright, but when I added my bank to Outright, I had to give my login information and answer all three of the security questions I have set up multiple times before  my bank account was linked to Outright – the reason for this is because Outright needed to learn the answers to the security questions my bank asks when I log into their website, as explained in this FAQ on Outright’s website.  However, now that Outright has learned the answers to my bank’s security questions, I only have to answer one of the questions once whenever I update my totals on Outright.

I hope this post has given you an idea of what Outright is and how you can use it to keep track of your business income and expenses.  If you’ve had any experiences with Outright, or if you have other methods that you use to track your business income and expenses, I’d love to hear about them!

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Leisa Good

August 13, 2013 at 9:57 pm

Erica, I can see where this would be a very, very useful tool. For $9.95 a month, I could see where it would pay for itself. It sounds like it is also something that you could quickly pull up to review the profitability of a month.

Thanks for writing this.