Keeping Financial Records for Alternative Income Sources

If you live in a country where you don’t have to pay any taxes on the income your business generates then first of all you’re probably too rich to be reading up about how to keep financial records for people who have alternative income sources – you can probably afford to pay a team of accountants to worry about that for you, and secondly, you’re very lucky to enjoy that privilege. Cherish it!

For those of us who aren’t that fortunate, it can make for quite the challenge keeping financial records for what are considered to be unconventional income sources and there are a range of these we can use as examples. I think I’d be correct in saying that for the most unconventional of income sources, the amount of money you generate varies over quite a wide range, so naturally you would never dream of something like hiring an accounting firm to keep tabs on your books on a full-time basis. Often you can’t make that kind of financial commitment.

So how then does one go about keeping financial records if you earn your income from some of the most unconventional of sources in this world?

Create a Digital Journal

When you experience something nice, go someplace that takes your breath away or enjoy a nice meal, your first instinct would likely be to try and capture the moment as best you can with your camera, whether you’re taking a photo or a video. Next, you probably want to share that experience, whether in real time or later when you have time to “apply filters” or sort through the images to get the best one. Tap into this natural instinct as some motivation for keeping financial records via what will subsequently be a digital journal.

Looking at it this way will make it fun instead of the chore it otherwise appears to be. In any case, the internet (actually the selection of remote hard drives on which all this info is stored) probably has enough photos of things that people value personally but things which aren’t really valuable as information in any other way, so you can do your bit to make the internet valuable again.

What you should do is document your income-earning journey and make it as visually-appealing as possible. If you can, make it interactive as well, which means you could perhaps create  blog about exactly what it is you do to generate your income, taking special care to document all related processes, such as where and how you store your money, how you complete transactions, etc.

For example, if one of your (unconventional) income sources is that which is derived from online casinos, if you caught wind of the special bonuses offered and you join this site, document that. Either write it down as a blog entry or make a screen-recorded video of the process.

What this does is it creates records of your finances in a fun way, but in a way which can be monetised further, as per the monetisation techniques used by people who create and publish content online.

Make accounting fun by making the documentation of your “alternative” income sources interactive.