This past Friday my daughter Emily and I moved into a fabulous apartment in the Coolidge Corner area of Brookline. It’s bright and sunny, and walking distance to everything I can think of. We already love it. A couple of months ago, and about 30 seconds after I decided that we were moving, both Emily and I began to excitedly clean out our stuff.

Before an hour had passed, the Whole Foods grocery bags were lining the foyer, filled with clothes that no longer fit, books that we no longer wanted and things we never used.

The amount that we pulled out in such a short amount of time was surprising, especially since we had just moved fairly recently. I actually thought we were already pretty lean, but by the time we were finished we had filled up a Suburban-not once, but twice.

There are many benefits to keeping life clutter-free besides having less stuff to load on the truck if you decide to move. It frees up space, it reduces time spent looking for the things that you actually use, and it offers an opportunity to donate to others in need.

But it’s not just in our personal lives that clutter gets in the way and grows on its own. I’ve managed the relocation of several businesses and I know from experience that the same human tendencies to hold on to things “just in case” applies to the office as well as the home.

The good news? You don’t need to move to declutter. Just take a look through these areas:

• Old equipment – Old printers, unused computers, fax machines that aren’t even plugged in… we’ve all had them. Get rid of them. They’re dusty, stuck under desks or in closets, taking up space and making your office unattractive. These days it’s easy to recycle them. Just go to the website for your city or town and, in most instances, you can fill out a form online and leave this junk on the curb for pickup.

• Old paper – This comes in many forms, including old business cards, letterhead with the old logo and outdated marketing materials. It feels like a waste to get rid of them…they were so expensive. But it’s time. Recycle them or use them for scrap paper.Next, open your filing cabinets and take a look around for old brochures, files you never reference and receipts that you no longer need. If you have a lot and it needs to be shredded, call Iron Mountain and they’ll pick it up and shred it for you. It’s worth the investment.

• Old supplies – Open your supply cabinet and go through your desk drawers. I imagine you’ll find cartridges for printers you no longer own, disks for software you no longer use, and other types of outdated junk. Throw. It. Away.

Remember, there’s a cost to the clutter and junk in your office that goes beyond wasted space. These unnecessary things sap your energy and slow you down. Give your business a boost by making a clean sweep today!

Yesterday afternoon I sat down to reconcile my RocketGirl financial accounts for the month of January. This is the first month I’ve done this since moving my accounting to a new, cloud-based system called Xero.

Being the geek that I am, I’ve looked forward to this since I signed up for Xero in late December.

When I transitioned from QuickBooks, I decided not to simply transfer my chart of accounts to Xero “as is.” Instead, I took advantage of a great opportunity to rethink how I want to track my spending and decide which kinds of reports I’d like to use as I go forward.

Xero has a great little interface that allows you to review each transaction that’s been downloaded from your bank or credit card company and assign them, one by one, to the category of your choice.

One of the primary reasons I break my expenses out in the way that I do is so that I can easily see what’s happening and make adjustments as needed. To do that, you need to pay attention to your categories of spending.

Let’s take the category of marketing, for example. While some small businesses might lump all of their marketing expenses into one bucket, I break mine out in a pretty granular way so I can easily see what’s going on.

Here are some of the types of expenses that fall under the category of marketing:

– client gifts
– email marketing vendor
– newsletter editing
– stock photography for my newsletter
– contact management system
– RocketGirl-branded memory sticks
– business cards
– “snail mail” cards

I’m sure you can see that if I put all of these expenses together in one category it would take a rocket scientist (one level above a RocketGirl) to figure out where the money went, let alone how to make any cost savings.

I therefore created subcategories within marketing, like this:

E-newsletter

Editor
E-mail Marketing Vendor
Stock Photography

Collateral

Business Cards
“Snail Mail” cards

Gifts

Client Gifts

Promotional Gifts

Networking

Contact Management System
Events

Now I can easily see how and where I’m spending my marketing dollars, understand how things change from month to month, and make informed decisions about future changes that I may want to make.

A bonus to making categories small enough is that I guarantee you’ll find services that are automatically being deducted from your bank account that you’re not even using (call your bank and stop them!).

Marketing is just one example. I do similar breakouts for my other primary expense categories and for revenue types as well.

So remember, watching your bank account to approve each expense as it comes along is important, but that’s just scratching the surface of what your monthly books can tell you. Unless you have a well-organized chart of accounts, it’s as if you’re working in the dark!