28. How Alex Mitchell Used Simple Financials to Quit Avoiding Her Finances

The best bookkeeping system for your business is the one you'll use.

A system, no matter how full featured, that you don't use, isn't any better than no system.

So if you don't have a system or you aren't using the system you have and are overwhelmed by the idea of using QBO or adding the cost, you are who Simple Financials was designed to serve.

Alex Mitchell is an integrative hypnotist and business coach. She'd been running her business like many coaches or business owners do: without paying attention to her finances and just waiting until tax season. Her system was a shoebox. She felt the need to start treating her business like a business - enter Simple Financials.

In this episode of Purposeful Profit, you'll hear how Alex using the Simple Financials bookkeeping template to get control over her finances and in the process, change how she thought about her numbers and how hypnosis can help you in your business.

Mentioned in this episode:

Get your Simple Financials Bookkeeping template
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Other resources:

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Connect with Alex:

Alex Mitchell is an integrative hypnotist and works with women in all aspects of their lives, whether it be personal transformation or business coaching. After a long career in technology, Alex found a new path to explore when she discovered the power to change her own brain through hypnosis. She starts her sessions with the simple question "what do you want to change today?"

Instagram: https://instagram.com/alex.mitchell.coach
Free Focused Fifty Co-Working Session: https://alex-mitchell-hypnosis-coaching.ck.page/a9ee21ede7
Website: https://alexmitchellcoaching.com

DISCLAIMER: The information in this podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an accountant-client relationship. While we use reasonable efforts to furnish accurate and up-to-date information, we assume no liability or responsibility for any errors, omissions or regulatory updates.

Transcript

Welcome to Purposeful Profit, where I help you take your business to the next level. I'm Carla Moats, Finance and Strategy Coach, and Fractional CFO for high-achieving female entrepreneurs. I'm here to empower women to build wildly profitable businesses that give them the freedom to live their dream lives. I'll use my more than 30 years of finance and consulting experience to take the mystery out of your finances, help you make more money, and go after your next big thing.

Hi there, and welcome back to the Purposeful Profit Podcast. I'm Carla Moats, I'm your host and I am a financial accounting expert. I am a financial whisperer to female founders. I help them simplify their finances so they can put more money in their pocket.

This is being recorded in early February, and so we are in tax season here in the States. It’s that time of the year when a lot of business owners here in the US are scrambling around to get their information together to give to their tax pro, and for a lot of business owners without any type of bookkeeping system, it's just a stressful time and it is a huge time suck. They're spending time gathering receipts and entering information that they really would rather be spending on their business.

I know I talked a lot here on the podcast about bookkeeping with QBO, but the reality is that a lot of business owners out there, and a lot of you listening, don't really need a full-featured bookkeeping system, and you feel overwhelmed with another tech product, or you just want an easy DIY solution. Bookkeeping doesn't have to be complicated. It can be really simple, and I'm doing my first guest episode today. I'm super excited about that, and I could not be more excited to have Alex Mitchell joining me today.

Alex and I met at a coaching conference a little over a year ago, and together we ran a mastermind for mostly coaches, and a lot of what we talked about in that mastermind was getting control of your finances. Alex is also an early adopter. She is one of my early users of a tool that I've mentioned a few times on the podcast, which is the Simple Financials bookkeeping template, and she's going to join today. We're going to talk a little bit about hypnosis and how it interplays in business. We're also going to talk about how she's used a Simple Financials bookkeeping template to get her finances in order. 

Alex is an integrative hypnotist and business coach. She works with women in all aspects of their lives, whether it be personal transformation or business coaching. She had a long career in technology, and then she found a new path to explore when she discovered the power to change her brain through hypnosis. She starts all of her sessions with the simple question, “What do you want to change today?”

I'm going to be a little upfront here. I do not have a “woo-woo” bone in my body. I joke with Alex about this. I'm an accountant. I'm totally a logical brain, and I've actually done a little bit of work with Alex and used it recently when I had some family crisis. But she's kind of opened me up to it. So if you're sitting out there and you're like me and you're like, “I don't do woo-woo”, just be curious, and keep an open mind as we go through this today. 

The tools she's taught me are really simple, and I've used them more so early in my personal life than in my business. So I mentioned earlier that she's one of the first users of the Simple Financials bookkeeping template. I created the Simple Financials in late 2022. It came out of a talk I gave to a group of business owners, and most of them were still working toward their first six figures. And when I asked them about their bookkeeping system, they were like, “Does a shoe box count or does a Google folder or Dropbox folder count?” And I'm like, “No, shoebox, Google folder, that's not a system.” So Simple Financials is just a Google Sheets template that's got pre-populated reports on it. Pay for it once, you duplicate it for future years, and it's populated with dropdown categories so it's aligned with your schedule C. It makes your tax prep really easy. So please help me welcome Alex. Thank you so much Alex for being here.

Alex Mitchell: You're so welcome, Carla. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I'm super excited to be here today and talk about this because I do use your product.

Carla Moats: Well, I'm always glad to hear that. So why don't you start by telling us a little bit about you and your business, because I know your business. Our mastermind ended about 6 or 7 months ago, and your business has evolved since then. So, just share with our listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Alex Mitchell: Sure. I am an integrative hypnotist and change worker, and people are like, “What does that mean?” It just means that I bring these tools and skills to all aspects of my work, and Carla likes to refer to hypnosis as a “little woo-woo”. Perhaps there is a part that is that. We also know from a scientific basis, though there's been a lot of research around certain aspects of hypnosis, things like mental rehearsal that maybe you've heard of, maybe an Olympic athlete using where they're mentally practicing their ski jumps. And because the brain is an amazing tool, the brain actually can't tell the difference between what you imagine happening when you're doing mental rehearsal and actually doing it. So I bring that to my work, and it does apply in business in interesting ways, and we're going to get into that a little later as we talk about sort of what happens with financials. And because I do have this long tech career, I do some business coaching, I do some hypnosis, I do regular general life coaching, I really am a General Life coach. I think I would say because I work with lots of different types of people on lots of different types of issues. So that's me in a nutshell and what I do.

Carla Moats: Well, what would you maybe say to our listeners out there who are a little bit like me, who are saying, “I don't do woo-woo.” How can hypnosis possibly help me in my business?

Alex Mitchell: I think when you think about doing your numbers. If that creates a sense of anxiety in you. If you feel that “uh” in your belly or like the, “Oh, I'm going to put my hand up and I'm going to ignore it.” That's where hypnosis can help you. It can help you reduce that anxiety and regulate your nervous system so that you can stop procrastinating about entering your numbers. Feel good about your numbers. Whether or not they're massive profits or a little less (like we can help with that, help you rewire your brain on how you want to feel), and generally help you just feel good in your business. You want to love your business and if you don't do your numbers, it's hard to love your whole business.

Carla Moats: Yeah, and a lot of the people that don't have a system and even those that do have a system, there could be people out there that have a system and they still don't. I talk to people who are like, “I have a bookkeeper and they send me reports. I just don't look at any of them because I'm afraid to look at them.” I tell people it all starts between your ears, and I do money mindset work with my clients, but often it's deeper than that because it's not just a matter of changing your thoughts about money. It's if it's a deeper nervous system issue, I think that's where hypnosis can come into place.

I think you got Simple Financials, I want to say in early 2023. Before that, your business had still existed, how were you managing your finances before that?

Alex Mitchell: I was one of those people who had a shoe box because I came from a tech career. I spent all this time working in corporate, so I never ran a business. I didn't do that. I didn't have to do that. My business started in 2021, and that's how I did it. It was always a scramble as my husband and I were getting ready to do our taxes, and I was trying to find receipts and do all those things. When I got this spreadsheet in early 2023, I immediately sat down and did all of 2022’s data entry, gathered all my stuff, put it all in, pulled out that report that writes automatically, and said to my husband, “Carla tells me that the tax guy is going to love this report”. Well, that's what happened. He took that one report to our tax guy and there was not a single question.

Carla Moats: I think one of the nice things about Simple Financials is that you can go out and create a spreadsheet on your own. (Folks, let's be clear. You can go out and create a spreadsheet on your own.) I talked to a few people. I have a few people who have bought Simple Financials who were doing their spreadsheet, and then when they saw the reports that it created, they're like, “Well, this is a step up over that”. But that's one of the limitations usually in a lot of the spreadsheets, you'll do it on your own. It doesn't have any type of reporting. So it gives you a way to enter your information but really to make your tax preparation easy. What you want to do is have a report that you can hand off to your tax guy, and one of the things Simple Financials does is there are dropdown categories where you select what type of categories expenses go in, and those categories are completely aligned with the schedule C of your 1040. For those of you who don't know if you are a sole proprietor, if you are doing your taxes or your books this way, and all likelihood, you are a sole proprietor. You're going to file your business income and expenses on Schedule C of your tax return. So this just makes you enter your information and it gives you a report that you can just kind of hand off to your tax person. 

So what were your biggest frustrations with your business finances before you had Simple Financials?

Alex Mitchell: Well, honestly, Carla, I had no idea what my finances were. That was my biggest problem because I wasn't taking care of it. I know this question is probably going to come, like, “How do I use this sheet?” I'm going to be honest. I don't use it every month. I know Carla recommends that I use it every month and I close out my month at the end of the month. But now I can do it every other month, and I can have an idea of where I am in my business. Like what income I have coming in, and what expenses I have going out. I'm lucky because I'm a coach. I don't have a tremendous number of expenses, and a lot of them are annual for me, and they hit at the beginning of the year. I'm not entering expenses every month. I do kind of let it slide a little bit and then I catch up.

Carla Moats: I do allude a lot of my calls to having a finance our junior finances every month but again the users of this template are typically lower volume. They've got probably a few cash receipts every month and a lot of them are coaches/consultants. They're paying a lot of their expenses electronically. You could do it on a “quarterly basis”. Most business owners can tell me how much money they brought in. They just can't tell me how much money they spent, so you could do it on a “quarterly basis”. While I'd like to see everybody use it every month, I'm also a pragmatist. I have several clients who've been messaging me this month, they bought it a year ago and they haven't used it all year, and now they're sitting down and they're just using it to do their 2023 tax information. So it gives you the flexibility if you want to do it every month, or as your volume increases, or if you find that you're starting.

One of the reasons I would suggest people do it on a “monthly basis” is if you find that you are paying, that you're dipping into your “personal” funds to pay business expenses, that's when it's really good. That tells me that you probably don't have a real good handle on where your money's going, but you have the flexibility to do it on a “monthly basis”. You also have the flexibility to do it on a quarterly or even an annual basis.

So tell us a little bit about your process. So you're not using it every month—I mean like you said you're low volume, so just tell me a little bit about your process for using it.

Alex Mitchell: It's really “straightforward”. I take photos of my receipts. I emailed them to myself, and I labeled them in Gmail with a label that says “Business Expense”. Any electronic expenses I have, I labeled them in Google, in my email as a business expense. Then I just pull that tag essentially at whatever interval I'm doing this, and I grab the expenses from there and I enter them into the system. 

Then for me, the easiest way to get my revenue, because all of my revenue is coming through my Stripe account, is I just pull up Stripe, and I do my data entry for the payments coming in. That is my process. It is really “straightforward” and “simple”, and that's what I needed. I just needed a place to enter this stuff so I could have an idea of where I was. I kind of look through the reports to get a general sense, but I'm not looking at those all the time. My key thing is, “Let me get it entered”. Once I kind of got a feel for the flow, and I kind of understood what the dropdowns were doing, I just zoomed through it. It does not take long and that's probably why I kind of put it off because I am low volume and it doesn't take long. And so it's easy for me to batch it and just sort of push it through every other month, every two months, kind of whatever's happening. If I'm having a lot of new clients come in, I might do it more frequently. Then if I have someone in a group program, my group programs are five months long, and they pay at the beginning, and I'm not having income coming in monthly for them. I don't have any income to put in unless they're new individual clients buying packages. When you sell as a package, they buy it upfront and that's my one time of entering that revenue. Then maybe I'll be seeing that client for 3 to 6 months as they use up their package, and I'm not entering any more data.

So, I think for people who are small like me and just starting out, it's great because it can flex for what we need. But I also know as my volume has increased, it also keeps pace with me, and so I can imagine (because “imagine” is one of my hypnosis words), I can imagine continuing to use this spreadsheet. I don't see a need for me to change. I don't sell a product. It's really “straightforward”. What I do is I sell a service and I have annual expenses, and that's kind of it.

Carla Moats: I tell people when they ask if the template’s for them, “You're relatively low volume.” And I'm going to define that as say, 50 transactions a month or less. You don't have employees because when you get into employees you have payroll (and that's a whole different can of worms.) You don't have a physical product or your service business, and you don't mind doing some manual entry.

Do you have a dedicated business account, can I ask?

Alex Mitchell: I do but for me, it's just easier to use Stripe because I know what's coming in through Stripe is exactly what's going into my bank account.

Carla Moats: So one of the things I always tell people is to set up a separate bank account but the reality is, especially people that are “new”—again, I'm pragmatic. (I know that. Not that I can preach it until I'm blue in the face, but not everybody does it.)

Basically, the way Simple Financials has a transaction register so you can do it in a number of ways. When I did service business (I was prototyping it), I used it for myself for my first two years. I pulled out my bank statements and entered my transactions. You can do it that way or you can do it the way Alex is where you can use Stripe, you can have your receipts, multiple ways you can do it, and it is flexible enough that if you are not putting everything, running everything through a separate bank account, you can just go in and enter. If you paid $5,000 for a conference and you cut it out of your personal bank account because you didn't have enough in your business account, you can go ahead and enter that.

When you get to do something like QuickBooks, it becomes a lot more problem. Problematic to be paying business expenses out of a personal account and it requires a lot more accounting. So if you're in the primitive stages, that’s really who it's for. 

So what was your biggest win? If you look at where you were before Simple Financials and after, what do you think is your biggest win?

Alex Mitchell: Honestly, the biggest win is not getting any questions back from the accountant, the tax guy. Honestly, that is it. Because I just enter my stuff, I print out that one page and hand it to my husband (he does art, he's our tax guy). He goes off to the accountant and there's nothing, there's no question. That is a huge win for me to not have to go through that.

Carla Moats: What's a huge win for in terms of mental energy? Because every time you get a question, it's time you have to take away from your business. But in many cases too, depending on your taxpayer, they're charging you on a per-hour basis. Over time they're sending you a question. You're essentially paying extra for that time.

So, how do you think it's helped you change your relationship with your numbers? I know when we were in the mastermind, I saw your relationship with money and your numbers evolved during that time because you were using the template while we were in that mastermind. How do you think it's helped change your relationship?

Alex Mitchell: It definitely contributed to I think—that's two parts, right? There are two parts to that for me.

One is I have learned how to regulate my nervous system and work on as I explained earlier, my anxiety around money and putting that info in and perhaps seeing that I have more expenses than revenue in a particular month. 

And the other part of it is it just makes it so easy for me to look at what's happening that it doesn't feel intimidating.

Because when I think about creating my own spreadsheet and trying to do this, I would have no clue what to do. And when I think about going to something like QuickBooks, I knew that it was way too much for me. Having had some experience with—I don't know, us personally, my husband and I using some Microsoft money or something. Something that's like pulling data in and I've never liked that because like you're saying, as a new business, there are times when I fund from my personal bank account what's happening in my business.

Just this ability to be flexible and do my numbers the way I need to do them, and then, know that because this spreadsheet in this system was created by someone who actually understands numbers on a much deeper level than I do, I feel really confident than being able to look at those reports and go, “Oh, this is what's happening”. And then when I look back at using it that first year, I got an idea then of what my annual expenses were, which I had no clue about before then.

So as I'm looking at what I know what's going to hit me in January (because that's when all of my annuals hit in January), and so I feel more comfortable knowing kind of what's going to happen. If I haven't earned enough in the months prior and I don't have enough in my business bank account, I know that I can fund it from my personal and have that happen, it just gives me that clarity into my business where before I had no clue what was happening.

Carla Moats: And from I think from a mindset perspective, our mind goes crazy over the unknown. Our mind just goes into overdrive about imagining the worst-case scenario. So I see this time and time again with my clients, whether they're using QBO or they're using this tool, is that once they finally get some clarity, I've never had any client come back to me and say, “Now that I know how much money I'm spending and no matter what the numbers look like”, I've never had them say, “God, I wish I never knew.” It's just whether they're making money or they're spending more than they thought. The amount of clarity that it gives them is very soothing.

So let's talk about the nervous system. The nervous system is really your jam. So can you talk to me a little bit about how we can use hypnosis to regulate your nervous system? Maybe you could even give an actionable tip to our listeners for something if they feel that their nervous system is—maybe even recognizing how they know their nervous system. It took me a while to understand how I even knew that my nervous system was out of whack. So give us maybe a tip here.

Alex Mitchell: Sure. I think as we think about and experience doing our numbers or doing other things in our business, making that phone call that you're afraid to make, making that offer that maybe you're feeling a little unsure about. 

When we tune into what's happening in our body, we're going to notice what that feels like. And so when you're dysregulated and you're feeling anxious, 90% of the people are going to go, “Oh, I feel that in my stomach”, and if you're listening right now, I want you to call up that feeling of anxiety. You all know what it feels like. Everybody listening to this podcast has had a moment in their life where they felt that kind of fear and anxiety of the unknown. 

And what we do in the work that I do is we want to interrupt that pattern. So the easiest way to do that is to literally shake it off, and for those listening and not watching me, I am shaking my arms, laughing, dancing, and doing some other anti-anxiety techniques that I teach. Anything to interrupt that feeling of feeling anxious and then taking a breath or 2 or 3, allowing your exhales to be twice as long as the inhales, and then say to yourself, “How do I want to feel instead?”

Well, for me, when I'm dealing with my numbers, I want to feel confident, I want to feel safe—because lots of us have “feelings around” safety and money. I want to feel grounded and I feel into that. I make myself feel that in my body, and then I start entering my numbers, or looking at that report or going, “Can I really afford to do this conference that I want to go to in looking at my numbers?” And so that's my practical tip. That's what you’re feeling, right? We're going to interrupt what your body and what your brain is doing. And that is the power, right? You have the power to change that in your own body and in your own brain to stop that.

The more times we do that, we start to make a new neural pathway of when I think about my numbers, “Oh, I feel confident and safe and grounded” versus that neural pathway that you used to have that was, “Oh, I'm anxious about my numbers. I feel like way up here and I'm freaking out and I don't know what to do. And so I'm just going to ignore it”.

So, that's how you can start to change your relationship from a nervous system standpoint with your numbers and then with the spreadsheet, it really does make it easy. It is literally just sitting down and doing some data entry.

Carla Moats: And I will say the shaking part, you feel a little silly, especially if you're not a “woo-woo” person. But I had a personal situation come up last week. My father was in the hospital. I was quite worried and I used the shaking. Shake your hands, move your body a little bit and it did it did help kind of get me out of the moment that I was in.

So, is there something you'd like to say to someone who's maybe sitting out there listening? He doesn't have a system right now and they are considering Simple Financials.

Alex Mitchell: I would say if you are listening to this and you just said, “Oh yeah, that feeling of anxiety is me.” I would encourage you to just do that technique that I just talked about, and then go reach out to Carla and get this spreadsheet, and then do that whole technique again when you sit down at your computer. Do it again, and then start entering those numbers because it will get easier, and you're going to go, “Oh, I was making this out to be this enormous mountain, and this is really just a little hill that I have to climb every year to do my numbers.”

Carla Moats: Alex, let's end this with if people want to connect with you and learn more about hypnosis, what's the best way to do that?

Alex Mitchell: They can see me on my website (it’s one of the easiest ways) alexmitchellcoaching.com and from there you can get to all of my socials and you can book a free consult if you would like to learn more about hypnosis. On my very first session when I do a consult, I will do change work with you if that's what you want to do.

So if you want to learn this shaking technique or a few other anti-anxiety tools, feel free to schedule a session with me because I will do that in my very first consult.

Carla Moats: Well,  thank you so much for being here and sharing your experience with our listeners. I will drop all your links in the show notes.

So part of writing any business is having a bookkeeping system, but it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be simple. If you want to reach the financial goals you have, it is important to have a system of some sort that helps you know where you stand. So if you're sitting there without a bookkeeping system and things, Simple Financials is for you. Please check out the show notes for the link. It is a one-time $79 charge.

Thank you for joining us this week and again, if you have a curiosity about hypnosis and how it can help you, please be sure and check out Alex. Her links on how to connect with her will be in the show notes.

If you want to talk further about your business, you can always schedule a free financial health assessment at www.carlamoatscom/workwithme and I will see you next week. Thanks for being here.

Thanks so much for listening to the show. Remember that your finances deserve some love. Finance doesn't have to be complicated or overwhelming, and you do not have to do it alone. I'd love to talk to you about your business, so please come on over to www.carlamoats.com to learn more. Or if you're ready for financial and strategy support that will upload all your business, go to www.carlamoats.com/workwithme to book your free financial assessment. And the last favor I'll ask is for you to help me get out the word. Tell your friends about this podcast and share it on your favorite social media. Until next week, go create some purposeful profit.