Getting Organized and Helping You Stay Organized

Professional mystery shoppers juggle several assignments at once and must keep track of expenses and income for tax purposes. Organization is the key to success. Can you imagine if you made a mistake in your records and forgot to file your taxes? What if you promised to perform a shop and forgot to show up? Many other people are affected by what you do and don’t do each day, so it’s important to figure out what type of organizational system works best for you. Some people like to keep everything in the computer. Others prefer to see it all on a calendar right in front of them. Others use a book called a ‘Day Planner’ to keep track of business and personal activities.

The method doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you’ve got a system in place that keeps you on track.

Staying Organized

One easy system some mystery shoppers use as the number of assignments they are handling begins to grow is the simple filing system. Set up a folder for each assignment and put all the paperwork for that assignment in the folder. Decide how you want to sort the folders by company, due date, alphabetically, or some other way. Your folder will not only hold all paperwork, but receipts, notes, and unfinished reports. Before you send all your paperwork to the company, make copies for your records and place in the folders in case questions about this assignment come up later on.

On your desktop, you can also organize these electronically. For example, you may create a folder on your desktop called “Mystery Shopping business”, and create subfolders for each new client or assignment, all of which can be named after the client with a date of completion.

Get a large desk or wall calendar and record all the assignment due dates on the calendar. This way, you’ll have folders to keep all of the paperwork organized and an ‘at-a-glance’ way to see what deadlines are coming up.

If you’re good with Microsoft Excel, set up a spreadsheet to track your assignments. You’ll want to include columns for company name, client name, location, due date, fee, date of reimbursement and any other columns of information you feel it is important to track. You can also write formulas into Microsoft Excel that can calculate an estimated portion of income tax that you owe. It is possible to modify formulas in Excel to merge your business with your regular household budget. The program also comes with added benefits of a query tool, a function that can search the database and cull together all matching results.

Routine is an important aspect to successful mystery shopping. If you follow the same basic organizational routine with every shop you complete, you’re sure to stay on track and be successful.

Comments

[MzCerez]

After getting a PDA and a plan to go with it, I've found that my organization skills have improved. Getting an accordion binder with labels has also helped me.

It's the worst when a company will refuse to pay you until your recopy/resend that receipt they can't read. It's definitely a must to stay organized! It has always saved me when things came up!

Thank you for these useful posts!