Tag: Banking

Don’t slack off with your banking!

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These days, it seems everyone is banking online.

Gone, it seems, are the days when people had paper checkbooks and wrote each transaction in them. Also gone are the days of reconciling by hand and calculator.

This is rather a shame. The only way to properly learn to do banking is by hand. That way, one learns to add up the debits and subtract them from the ending balance and such.

In my household, my husband and I do our personal banking in this way. However, my business account is taken care of differently. I do electronic banking for that.

Electronic banking is different because while I am writing down each deposit and debit in my paper ledger, the bank statement is electronic and I can check it any time I please and not have to wait a month for it to come in the mail. (I could go on and rant for a long time about the state of the mail these days, but that’s another post for another time.)

It is extremely important, however, not to neglect looking at your bank statement. This can happen when you get very busy with your editing and your marketing. Your banking can get shoved to the back of your mind. You must know what is going on. Guess how I found out?

Two years ago, I was very busy with editing projects and went weeks without checking my online bank account. Finally, I checked it. Lo and behold, some unkind soul had gotten their grubby paws into my account and stolen almost a thousand dollars in payments to Amazon Prime!

The first thing I did was to…panic. Then I called my bank and stated what had happened. The bank was nice enough to temporarily return the stolen money while they completed an investigation. After a few weeks, the investigation was done. I do not and have never had a Prime account; I only have a regular Amazon account. When this was discovered, my money was officially returned.

Online banking is very convenient, but it can be dangerous. What do you think of online versus paper banking?

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

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What’s in a business name, more precisely?

I recently changed the name of my editing business and the change took effect in late September. My original name was “Suzelle Fiedler, Proofreader LLC.” I changed it to “Fiedler Editorial LLC.”

The latter, I believe, sounds much more professional than the former. The former name was one which I pretty much made up on the spot one evening after realizing that my business needed a name. (Duh.) It turned out that, at the time, I had confused copyediting (what I do) with proofreading (something many people think I do). I wish to emphasize that this happened three years ago, and both I and my business have grown by leaps and bounds since.

As I said earlier in this post, the name change took effect in late September. Would you believe that I first put the wheels in motion to change my name back in late July? I had to pay a sizeable amount of money, make phone calls, get my Articles of Amendment from the state where I live, and then wait until my state recognizes the new name (eight weeks–and I did not know it would take that long).

After that, I had to close the bank account of my formerly named business and open a new account under the new name of my business. This was terribly hard. It involved several trips to the local bank and dealings with some people who were not nice, to say the least. Last week, the new account was finally established. Yippee!

However, today I got a package at my door from the bank. It contained things which I had never gotten when I opened the first account with the old name. I had only asked for checks. Instead, I got things that I don’t even know how to name, much less use. And so tomorrow I must haul myself to the bank again, this time with the box, and ask what went wrong.

After all of this, do I regret changing the name of my business?

Absolutely not!

The new name is much better than the old, and I am very glad that I have it now.

Have you ever changed your business name? How easy or hard was it for you?