Well, we've managed to hang in there for 3 months now! It's not profitable but it's still alive. Since we opened in October, the 3 month mark also happened to be the end of the year. That means a whole slew of new things we have to learn. Yay!
We've been rolling along with payroll using Intuit's online payroll system since we still don't have a computer at the office. It was a logical choice since we had also used them to create the website. They charge us a base monthly fee and then an additional amount for each employee. Once we get that office computer we will purchase quickbooks or something similar but it works great for now and it's really user friendly. It has a nice To-Do task list on the front page and sends email reminders when it's time to do payroll. The payroll process itself is simple too. It will handle the federal and state reports and withholding payments too.
So that part of the quarter end and year end was pretty much taken care of. We printed W2's easily and got all that squared away. Now we needed to figure out what we wanted to do with the business taxes and year end stuff for which we knew nothing.
I contacted the CPA who Tiffany and I had consulted with during our partnership start up. She was such a help to us then that I knew we wanted to have her help us through this process as well. The good news is that even though we don't have a computer, Tiffany and I are meticulously detailed and keep up with the business on spreadsheets and on paper very well. Most of the things she needed we could provide easily. The one thing that didn't occur to me was that we needed to inventory our unsold products and supplies at year end. Woops! Now I have to go back and to the best of my ability, calculate how much 'inventory' we had. Some items are not a big deal, we can estimate packaging pretty easily and whole packages of certain products, cheese, butter, etc. But the amount of flour, sugar etc. No idea. Anyway, it should be fun.
It will be a relief to have the first yearly tax hurdle over with.
Now, on a different subject, breakfast. We open at 10:00am right now and we have almost no customers until 11:00 or 11:30 but we still get folks in asking if we have donuts. Currently the only breakfast item we serve is cinnamon rolls. We're not able to fry anything at our current location so donuts are out. We could provide muffins, bagels, biscuits and gravy, breakfast wraps,scrambled eggs, fruit and yogurt, and oatmeal or granola. Maybe even pancakes, french toast or breakfast pizza.
It's cost prohibitive to try to make specialty coffees but we could add hot chocolate and tea, milk and orange juice. The question is would you be interested in these items if we offered them and opened early enough?
We have no drive thru window so that's also a disadvantage. We are kicking the idea around so your input would be appreciated. Let us know what items you would like to see on a breakfast menu, and if you would be interested in having us open at 6am to provide those items, or if it's "No donuts, don't bother".
Thanks,
M
