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The End of Year Checklist for Small Businesses

By Becky McCray

In a fabric store, a dark-skinned woman with long salt-and-pepper colored hair is using a laptop notebook to manage the business

I’ve been in business a long time now, from retail to service to ag, and I’ve learned some things about wrapping up one year and getting ready for the next. Some of it I learned the hard way! Whether you run your business on paper, desktop software, mobile or cloud services, there are common tasks […]

December 25, 2025 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, management, organization, rural, tax matters Tagged With: annual planning, retail, service businesses, small business management

The end of year checklist for small businesses

By Becky McCray

  As you wrap up one year and prepare for the next, your business needs to do the same. You have some accounting tasks to reset and some backups to make. Must do Jan 1 These are the ones you can’t easily do later, so you don’t want to put them off. The good news: […]

December 26, 2017 Filed Under: Best of, entrepreneurship, organization

To-do lists are overwhelming and depressing. 1 trick to fix that.

By Becky McCray

To-do lists can be overwhelming. They can put too many demands on you, too many deadlines. You’re not the only person who feels this way. My friend Rob Hatch told me about a friend of his who felt just like this. He hated to-do lists because they made him feel much too pressured, like they […]

January 25, 2016 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, organization, Small Biz 100

Half-year’s resolution: get finances under control

By Becky McCray

columnar pad bookkeeping. Photo by Becky McCray.

  Take this simple quiz. When I think of last year’s tax return time, I’d say it was: A breeze. I just printed out one or two reports and answered a few questions from my tax preparer. A bit of a mess. I had to do some work to catch up and then answer a […]

July 6, 2015 Filed Under: entrepreneurship, organization, rural

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