Administrative Week

It has been a very administrative week. My tax accountant noticed something wonky with my inventory tracking, likely caused by last year’s switch to new store and accounting software. She sent me to talk to an expert on inventory tracking, after two focused hours I emerged with a long list of housekeeping chores. It turns out that there are far better ways to track inventory than an annual counting-of-all-the-things. I now have a system in place that tracks from the moment I place an order for inventory until I sell the last one. Having the process makes my organizational brain happy, though learning to implement all the aspects of it will take some practice.

In addition to that, there have been dozens of other small business administration and tracking tasks. I got all the tax paperwork turned in to the accountant. I took my high school senior for a tour of her impending college. …and my brain is blanking on what else I might have done, but I know it was a long list of thing after thing after thing. Being the person who tracks family schedules, tracks quantities of household supplies, tracks groceries, fetches new groceries, does returns to stores, and reminds people of their chores, etc is not a small task. The work of a household administrator is frequently so invisible that people don’t even define it as a job. But it is, and it is a job that is separate from parenting even though it frequently runs in parallel.

The week is likely to continue administrative as I’m expecting a shipment of new inventory (challenge coins.) I’ll need to put my new-learned inventory tracking into practice and then turn around and ship a hundred or more packages. Despite all of that, I’m trying to carve out creative time around the other things. We’ll see what I can do.