The summer months are a busy time for mystery shoppers. The job boards are usually loaded with assignments that are just waiting for you to snatch them up. Plus, some mystery shoppers take a break for part or all of the summer to travel, spend time with family, and more, which gives those mystery shoppers who do want to work throughout the summer months plenty of opportunities to do so. With so many assignments available to you during the busy summer months, it’s easy to get caught up in the here and now and fall behind on your organizational tasks. Here are some tips to help you stay organized through this busy time of year:
On-the-Go Organization. If the passenger seat or center console in your car is cluttered with a hodge podge of papers for your mystery shopping assignments, you need to invest in an organizational system for your car. A great idea is to get an affordable cardboard or even plastic organizer from the office supply store, and this can be used to organize those papers and keep them all together where they belong. Plus, this type of organizational system makes it easy for you to take your papers back and forth between the car and your home work area.
At-Home Organization. Your travel organizer is a great way to organize those papers that you need for the assignments on a given day, but you will find that you also need some at-home organization to stay on top of the paperwork for assignments that are pending or even that having payments pending. A simple file system at home can go a long way towards helping you to stay organized. You can put all of the papers for a given week together, or you can separate them by “site visit pending” and “payment pending.” You can also organize them by provider, too. You simply have to find a filing system that works for you. Keep in mind that you don’t have to keep all of the paperwork you print out, but rather only the papers that are necessary for tax purposes. Once papers become unimportant or unnecessary, by all means, toss them into the recycle bin!
Accounting. For many mystery shoppers, keeping track of the paperwork associated with the assignments is only part of the headache that leads to disorganization. The other major aspect to consider is your accounting method. Each time you head out to do an assignment, you have new entries in your accounting to keep track of. Some mystery shoppers will save all of these accounting entries for the end of the year, but this truly creates a nightmare situation at tax time. Instead, make an effort to spend just a minute or two each day to enter your receipts for purchases, your miles traveled, and your payments received into an accounting spreadsheet. Then when tax time rolls around, you have all of your items entered into a spreadsheet that you can quickly and easily refer back to.
The summer months are truly a very busy time of year for mystery shoppers who want to stay busy with work. Use some of these hot tips to stay on top of your organization during these busy months!
As a new shopper this, as well as most other articles you send are helpful. Thank you, Cheryl
Thank you for your great tips. I agree a filing system is a must in and out of the car. I like your spreadsheet idea I think I’ll use it. Anything to be more organized come tax time. Your tips are helpful even to an old timer like me.