Bank Account - Credit Cards

The next step in my journey has to with financial stuff. Once you have your EIN number and fictitious name paperwork (if you need it) - start calling your local banks to find the best business bank account. Many banks nowadays have small business accounts with no fee as long as you have under 200 transactions a month. I figured out that if I have sales everyday through Square - they only deposit once a day so that's 30. Paypal I can accumulate money in there and only take it out when needed so that's let's say 4 at 1 a week. Etsy deposits once a week so there's another 4 - that leaves me with 162 more transactions in a month. For a small business that's alot.

I need to make a very important note here - DO NOT USE YOUR OWN PERSONAL ACCOUNT FOR A BUSINESS!!!!!!! I cannot emphasize this enough. If you should ever get audited - co-mingling your personal and business funds will create such headaches for you and the IRS gets testy when you do this.

Now as far as business checks - I do not get the checks from the bank. For about the same amount of money you can get 4 times the number of checks from a check place like Artistic Checks and I have never had any problem with them.

If you are not going to do trade shows but only sell online you don't really need a credit card processor - you can get away with just using Paypal and other payment processors like it (such as Google Wallet, Braintree, Stripe etc.).

If you are doing trade shows there are many credit card places out there that are inexpensive.

I have been using Square since they came out - at 2.75% they are very competitive and easy to use. I also have a Paypal reader but personally I found putting items in inventory in Square is easier than Paypal. Other options include Intuit, CloverGo, izettle, spark , etc.

Don't get sucked in to buying a machine for hundreds of dollars and paying all kinds of crazy fees. For small businesses this makes no sense. I was a slave to this type of credit card processing for years. Once Square came out in 2009 - I switched to them, never looked back and have saved a ton in fees.

Square can also be used on several websites now as a gateway for processing credit cards. I like offering the option of both Paypal and credit cards on my website because not everyone likes Paypal and I don't want to lose business because they don't like my checkout options.

My store will be opening on Etsy and on Wix - which is one of the hosting platforms that integrates with Square. I use this on my other website The Ornamental Lady - and it works great.

Next - getting the store open online.