Summer Vacations as a Bookkeeping Biz Owner

I actually pulled back on a lot of obligations and calls this summer, but I still worked a lot. It's actually my goal to work less in future summers now that I’ve gone through a summer like this. But it was still a very present summer, and I want to share about what my summer vacation looked like. It started with me clearing some space on my calendar. I pulled back on the calls that I had in my group coaching program, Life by the Books. That was part of my restructure, which I actually started thinking about in December, so I was already planning for being able to take a vacation in the summer while it was still the winter. That way, by the time summer and the opportunity to take a vacation rolled around, my group coaching program was running very smoothly and in a way that allowed me to take vacations.

 

So, usually bookkeepers have a busier time of every month. It’s about the first two weeks of the month. For me, it’s usually the fifth through the fifteenth, because in the first couple of days of the month, I'm just not stressing bookkeeping yet.

 

I'm waiting for the reports to be ready. I'm waiting for the data to come. I want to make sure that when I get in, I'm actually able to do the job in one sitting if possible. So I love that structure with bookkeeping, because I'm so easily able to plan around what I want to do in my life. And for the most part, I find it ideal if I can push that off until after the fifteenth. The end of the month is really when I prefer to take a vacation, when I prefer to have workshops within Life by the Books, when I prefer to batch podcasts, all of that. It’s easier to take a vacation when I'm out of the headspace of the actual data-crunching of bookkeeping.

 

So, this vacation that I took in August was from the seventh to the thirteenth, right in the thick of my heavy bookkeeping time. And the reason that my sister and I decided to take a vacation then is because it was really the only time that we could this summer. This summer was about eight weeks long, and our other sister was in town for five of those eight weeks, which was amazing.

 

She came down with her three kids and between me and my two sisters, we spent most of the summer together in my hometown with our eight kids. So that took up a huge chunk of the summer. And I talk about it a lot more often lately, but my son is sick a lot, so the first week of summer we spent with him being sick, and then we had five weeks with my sister in town. After that, we wanted to take a vacation to go see my mom, but she was traveling, so we obviously couldn't take a vacation to see her when she wasn't there. So we were left with just these six days that were not ideal for me with bookkeeping. So we had to make this decision: do we go on this trip, or do we say it's bad timing?

 

Well, my sister told our kids months before that we were planning on doing a road trip to what we call The Farm, which is our mom's property in Tennessee. And so my son, being six and a half, gets this idea of being able to take a vacation there very stuck in his head. For months, he was talking about what the seat assignments in the van were going to look like. So there was no getting around doing this trip without disappointing him, and even though the trip was hard for us because of the timeline and our work schedules and also the proximity to starting back to school, we realized there wasn’t going to be an easier time to make this trip. So we decided to do it, because we could make it work. Besides, that was the whole point of being in business by myself. That was why I decided to have a virtual bookkeeping business in the first place. And as much as it was extra stress, it was cool to really see this business and all the systems I built in action.

 

One nosebleed, a fever, and the copious use of a grabber toy later (seriously people, trust me: you need a grabber toy on long road trips. You can thank me later), we were on our way. I drove most of the sixteen-hour drive (that’s right, sixteen hours with all those kids), but there was a point in the afternoon when I took a break. My sister took over at that point and drove for about four hours, and in that time span, I opened up my laptop and used my hotspot on my phone to connect to the internet. And do you know what? I got so much bookkeeping work done.

 

It was insane. It felt. It allowed me a different level of focus to have my phone notifications off, since It was a Sunday, and I wasn't trying to be an active mom. I was there, but the kids weren’t going anywhere, and they were content. And once all that was done, I was able to pass the baton back to my bookkeeper’s assistant or out to my clients. I schedule-sent emails for the next day, I got through a good chunk, and then throughout the rest of the week, I was able to work as needed while still being able to take a vacation.