NOTE: With this article, Towel & Basin continues its celebration of Women’s History Month by serving and supporting, encouraging and empowering women who are making history today.
Setting up a home office can be challenging. You may have very limited space. And your office space might be a shared space with other activities of the home.
The desk at which you work throughout the day could be the same desk where you pay personal bills in the evening. This creates problems for your business on many levels. But in your excitement to get your business going, it is easy to not give this much thought in the beginning. It’s important you avoid making that mistake.
There are many reasons why having a designated workspace will benefit you. Not the least of which is keeping your workspace separate from your home items will be important to you at tax time.
Let’s look at some ideas for setting up your work-at-home office.
Determine exactly what you need the office space to do.
If you sell cooking items, you’ll need an area to store your samples (or perhaps those could be stored elsewhere) as well as files for customer information and catalogs.
If you run an in-bound calling business, you really only need a place for your headset and phone and perhaps a notebook and pens. You might also need files for your paperwork.
You want your home workspace to work well for you but without doing more than it needs to do. Don’t waste time or money making the space grander than it needs to be right now.
Select the location for your home office. If you are able to take over a room in the house, great. Your setup will be simpler than those who must share another space in the house, like the family room or master bedroom.
When looking at location options, consider any unique challenges that space poses to your specific needs. For example,
Where will you file your papers and other items that need to be organized? Is there a place for a filing cabinet?
Is there a space for notebooks or manuals that you need? Can you mount shelving on a wall or is there room for a storage cabinet?
If you sell physical products, do you have space to store those products, samples and display materials?
Purchase just enough organizing materials and supplies. We say “just enough” because many of us can go crazy buying organizational helpers. Files and boxes and whiteboards can send us into a purchasing frenzy. But if you buy too much, you can overwhelm yourself and create a situation that’s ultimately contrary to a solid and useful workspace.
Get organized before you begin working. You will thank yourself over and over again for making time to set up your home office and organize things before you actually began working. This can help reduce any friction of your transition into working at home.
All of this organizing can be more difficult if your space is just a corner of a room that is also used by your family. You want to delineate your corner as separate from the room with some kind of screen.
Working at home is ideal for many people. But many home businesses encroach into the family space. Your goal is to keep your business items organized and separated from your home living space.
When you have a designated, well-organized home office space, you increase the likelihood of a productive working environment and reinforce your mindset of treating your work at home as a real business. And when tax time comes, you’ll have peace of mind declaring business expenses of your home office as allowed by the tax code.
Sources
Image by Markus Winkler from Pixabay
Disclaimer
The content in this article, including but not limited to text, graphics, images, and other material, is for informational or educational purposes only, and does not substitute for professional tax advice or consultations with a tax professional. Always seek the advice of your accountant or attorney with any questions you may have regarding a tax issue. Never disregard professional accounting or legal advice or delay seeking it because of something you have read on this site.
