Transparency

There's something I've always appreciated about having a little look behind the scenes of something successful. Am I alone in that? I really appreciate a candid look at another person's business, seeing what is working for them and how their business is lining up with their goals. I love numbers and data and analyzing my own stats (part of why I always run with my garmin*). But at the same time, for some odd reason I have a hard time with keeping up on my monthly accounting tasks. Even though they should fall under the umbrella of data, numbers and statistics, they feel so tedious and boring.

In an effort to be more helpful and transparent to my readers and customers AND as an added motive to keep up on the tasks that I dread the most, I've decided to start talking more openly about my business:  the numbers, the stats, the systems, the tools, the experiments and the changes I'm trying to implement to become more successful. And the plan is to talk about it all right here, on my blog. Stay tuned!

Customer Locations

I have always used quickbooks to track all of my business-related finances, but I recently signed up for a free service called outright as well.  I like it because it connects directly to my accounts associated with my business and generates useful reports with the information it collects.

One report I found interesting was the "sales by state" report.  Here's the map it generated:

This is just for sales in 2012, but looking back on 2011, I noticed that the same states seemed lower in sales.  I wonder why that is?  Does someone from Idaho, North Dakota, Montana or Vermont care to explain? I don't really care about having customers in every state, but I just thought it was interesting that the pattern seems consistent.  I wonder if there are fewer etsy buyers in general from those states?