Reconciling the Business and Magic the Gathering

Mental Note

So, it’s a really good idea to not wait months before reconciling the business account. Captain Obvious, right? With the pace of putting the website together and building inventory, time has just been slipping away from me. One second we’re picking up the business license from the courthouse in February and the next it’s almost June.

Like a lot of my other projects that seem to jump out of the woods at me, this one took a few days to complete. There is a lot involved, and quite a bit of it has to do with taxes; like assets, expenses, retail, shipping, travel, etc. I hadn’t even measured out the office space yet, so I did that as well. We ran for several months before the business bank account, so I needed to characterize our other accounts. I’ve put them all in Excel, but I’ll probably need to manually enter them into Quickbooks too.

In any case, I will need to reconcile the account on at least a weekly basis. It’s important to keep up, especially when the site goes live and orders start coming in. I created a good log for business travel, and I’ve given myself a crash course in Quickbooks. It’s a fairly good piece of software, but for some reason it isn’t pulling in data automatically from the bank. After messing with it for awhile I just pulled the information from the bank and manually loaded it to Quickbooks. Then I was able to put everything together. Best part, like a good ledger, everything equaled in at the end.

Which way to Lean with Magic?

I am going to return my efforts to categorizing all the Magic cards. I need to get them inventoried, photographed, and uploaded. Once they are all in the system, I can complete the final tweaks on the Shop and site layout. I anticipate at least another month before I get everything ready. I have to get it all done, though. If I were to open the store too soon, I wouldn’t be able to react quickly enough if something unexpected happened while also working on inventory. I’ve also made the decision that I’m only going to sell the more expensive cards from the older sets. So, from War of the Spark all the way back will just be cards in the .70 range and above. I don’t have the manpower or computing power to do them all. For sets going forward, though, I may add all the cards as my internal system will be set up by then.

However, I have a second concept – and that’s to keep all the cards that are worth relatively little and make fun Pauper decks from them. I would have a whole swath of cards to choose from to make decks. I could easily make Tribal, and other theme decks. These would be very inexpensive and would be a great way to introduce new players to the game and to just have *gasp* fun. I’m also going to use these decks when I make my instructional videos for Magic. I guess time will show me which way I should go – Pauper or Sell It All. I’m sure the answer will become clear later.