Accounts, Websites and the Self-Sufficient Lifestyle
Growing and harvesting our own food, maintaining our own gravity fed water system and getting our own firewood are just some of the ways we are self-sufficient. Our in-house accounting and maintaining websites are other ways of how we are self-sufficient. Seems like a contrast, 21st century technology and old-fashioned living off the land, right? Well, with this story I want to show you how they are different sides of the same coin.
Both learning how to do bookkeeping and how to create and maintain websites were not things that I ever planned to do, but as things do in the wilderness, the circumstances arose that we needed to increase our self-sufficiency, and it was me who needed to step up and do so.
Our websites had been maintained by a past guide, she worked on them on the side while she was at university. But then she graduated and was onto other things. So, the websites sort of fell into the hands of external website developers and anyone at the ranch who had a basic understanding of websites. So, in short, no one was responsible and with 20+ websites to maintain, things weren’t getting done. When things went wrong with the websites, we were in a predicament because we didn’t know how to fix them, and the external people didn’t understand what we did well enough to fix things. I learned a bit about websites from a great intern, Ethan, who was really into websites. But he was only here for a few months before going home to finish his studies.
We went back and forth with external website developers, but this just ended up in frustration where no one understood each other and things we thought they were doing didn’t get done.
There was a similar story with accounting. One of our guides did the bookkeeping from his home and then it came time for him to move on. Also, he didn’t live on site, so bringing receipts and other paperwork back and forth was always a challenge.
What were my experiences with websites and bookkeeping? When I was fourteen, our school had a work experience day where we were supposed to go to work with one of our parents to see what work life was like. My dad’s work wouldn’t let anyone under sixteen on site, so I ended up at my best friend, Connie’s, dad’s work – an accountant. We spent the day stuffing envelopes (this was before everything was digital!), running the printer and, as far as I can remember, not doing anything related to accounting. But from the impressions I got, I wasn’t interested in becoming an accountant.
My website interests were similar. At about the same age in high school, we had a project to make a website. In short, I hated it and thought it was pointless. When would I ever need to make a website? It makes me laugh to write that now.
But it was now necessary that someone in-house could do accounts and websites. And that turned out to be me. Not knowing a debit from a credit or what SEO meant, I got to learning. Ethan had made lots of procedures about how to set up new websites, but not so much on how to maintain the ones we already had. So, there was lots of Googling involved. In a short time, I was making new websites following Ethan’s procedure and building up a more detailed understanding of how to make new pages, edit current pages and do SEO.
We still had things I didn’t know how to do that meant we were still reliant on external website people to fix things that went wrong. But gradually, I learned more and more and last summer we were finally able to cancel our last contracts with external website people. We were now self-sufficient on our websites. Not only did this save us money, but we were empowered to do it ourselves. And because we were creating the content ourselves, knew our target market and how we wanted our website to look, everything was easier. Things got fixed the moment we noticed them because I could change my schedule to fix them, rather than waiting in the queue for the external people to do it.
The same was true for accounting. But here I didn’t have any procedures. Between Google and the online Quickbooks help pages, I found a lot of the answers. Or so I thought. You don’t know what you don’t know. And when it was time to do year ends, all the problems came out. So, then I knew what I didn’t know and could research how to do it. I created a whole procedure binder of how to file the different taxes, record payments and make sure everything was balanced.
For our books to be official, we still needed the accountant in Kamloops to finish them up, which was a good thing as there was still things I didn’t understand. But doing the bookkeeping part in house simplified a lot of the process and once again made us more self-sufficient.
Now, as with everything else at the ranch, everyone here knows a bit about bookkeeping and websites, and there are detailed procedures on how to do it. That makes everyone more self-sufficient and empowered. But it is my primary responsibility. I have come a long way from my teenage self who didn’t want to do either bookkeeping or websites. Now I enjoy doing both. I wouldn’t want to do either of them full time, but that is one of the best things about life at the ranch. There is always such a diversity of things to do, there’s no time to get bored with an activity and there is always something new to learn.
Charlie, UK
