I began my search for companies with this site, which I found at Google. Check out the Reviews page and the Updates page. They are non-commercial and have no ax to grind. You might save yourself some heartache avoiding certain companies.

[www.mysteryshopsmart.com]

This is a good site, but the info isn't always very up to date.

Yes, that is Reviewer's site. She is pretty good at keeping it up to date and is a member of several forums I know of where shoppers throw eggs or flowers.

I vote for flowers
I don't like V eggs.

I agree on the V But actually I was referring to the shoppers' opinions of various MSPs.

What's "V flowers?" I'm not into all the lingo yet. The thing about shoppers' reviews is that they can vary so much one one to the next. I've seen that here on the polls. One shopper's experience in a few jobs may not be enough to judge a company's overall performance. But if that shopper did dozens of jobs, the judgment is more accurate. It's like any other statistical research.

But how is she on this page? Would you say she's accurate or out-of-date? Is this based on shoppers' experiences or some kind of sneaky research she did herself? I've been using this as a guide, but also what I find here at the forum.

[www.mysteryshopsmart.com]

Overall, the site's good with good info, but the "watch list" seems to not be updated as frequently as the review portions. "V" refers to Volition which is another forum/discussion site. At times, there have been some pretty nasty exchanges between posters there (the eggs being thrown). That being said, it also has some good info posted.
Two sites to look at:
www.forumcityusa.com/index.php?mforum=ms
forum.volition.com/default.asp?CAT_ID=2

I was really thinking more about shopper opinions about various mystery shopping companies.

If I were putting together a watch list, I would certainly check the forums to see if different shoppers in different forums were experiencing the same types of problems. I would be involved in those forums enough that I would be able--from past experience with the shoppers on line--to know whether they were a credible source of compliments (flowers) or complaints (eggs) about a particular company.

We all have problems with the companies from time to time, but do we make a federal case out of one slow payment or one shop rejected because we didn't do it right? Is one shopper having a problem enough to put a company on my watch list? Well, it really depends on how well I have come to know the shopper. Similarly, are enthusiastic comments by one or two unknown shoppers enough to keep a company off my watch list? No. I have been convinced for a long time that there are shills on every public forum hyping companies to get shoppers to sign up. While I find this dispicable if it truly is happening, on an open public forum there is little if any way to curtail it. When all shoppers on a private forum have had consistently bad experiences with a company that is "one of my favorites" in public forums, one has to wonder.

I haven't checked Reviewer's watch list lately, I know she is fairly conservative, so waited with one company until most of the screaming and yelling had died down before listing them. In that sense her list may be out of date. But even with an out of date list it is important to be wary and realize what companies have posed problems for shoppers in the past. Even more important to shoppers, I believe, is to be aware that this is an unregulated industry and the chances of you, as an Independent Contractor, not getting paid or getting paid very late for your work is a real possibility.

On the other hand (and I am almost afraid to say it for fear of jinxing myself), during 2007 I had only a $2 fee difference that I was unable to get resolved and paid; about $40 in reimbursements that the client denied but the company quickly made up to me in bonuses on additional shops; all shops for January-November have been paid or worked out and I have only $389.95 from December still to be paid. That is one payment from one company and has been promised by the end of February. Pretty good track record considering the overall amount of fees and reimbursements done last year. 2006 I had $46 in unpaid shops or underpaid shops and reimbursements with three companies involved.

Wow, no shi*, you keep good records. I bought all these binders and have all my jobs and there info, with stapled reciepts, hole punched and lined up with binder seperators, my husband says I look like the biggest DORK ever. Today I got out of the car with my binders, stapler, brochers falling out everywhere, business cards, pens, highlighters, plus all my regular stuff. Teach me your ways old wise ones.............
I just might make a federal case out of one of my jobs if they don't pay me, I tried to speak with the employee I was hired to talk to, but the other associates were not having it. My mission was not accomplished, and not by any fault of my own ( which is rare) lol

Kristee--you can save much of that info in a Word table, unless you know how to use Excel. Anything physical I keep in my filing cabinet. I keep onsite shop notes only until the report is OKed, then toss them. There's no need to carry around anything except requirements for today's jobs.

Where is my word table? I am so ignorant to computers! Don't laugh!!!!!

For today's jobs I use one of those little paper pocket folders that your kids use to submit their reports for school that can't just be stapled in the upper corner. Huge investment of about 10 for $1 in the back to school sales. The pocket on the right has at least one sheet for each job I'm doing that day with the address and a paperclip on it. The sheets are sequenced in the order in which I will do the shops. Notes on that sheet are the odd things I am most likely to forget so I can take a last minute look before going in. When I come out I will make some quick notes right there in the parking lot with my cell phone to my ear as if I was talking to somebody. I clip the receipt or business card to the sheet and move it over to the other side of the folio. Now I'm ready to move on to my next shop. I keep spare clips hooked onto the folio for the "just in case" scenario and the pockets are also great to capture brochures etc. I may be picking up.

Once the report is entered, all my paperwork staples together if I don't have to mail it in, and goes in the front of the month's file folder. That way it always stays in date order if I have to find anything.

When a folder is 6 months old it goes out of my little milk crate size bin of hanging files and into one of those plastic shipping bags that UPS and FedEx have as supplies in their curbside deposit boxes. I can get about 3 months shoved into a bag. The bags get labeled and when they are a year old, they get sealed and thrown in the box in the attic.

I am comfortable using Excel, so my shop sheet is a workbook of monthly pages and pages for other information that is live and active on the computer. Pages and totals link back to a recap sheet where I can see exactly where I am for the year. Expenses entered also feed back to the recap sheet by category. I have a page at the end of the workbook to copy and paste each month's jobs so I can keep track of the productivity with each MSP I have worked with and check when I last did a certain location to see if I meet the rotation requirements for the current job. Because rotation can be as much as a year and a half, I copy the full production for one year onto a sheet in the back of the next year's workbook. So when I open my shop sheet I have at my fingertips everything I need to know or keep track of.

My shopping clutter is 1 milk crate type hanging file folder bin, a pencil box with pens, card reader for the computer, paper clips and scotch tape. I then have a little tote bag that has batteries, DVR, microphone, cables for the DVR, a couple of back up jump drives, my camera, my spare SD cards for the camera and my stapler. In the bottom of the tote is a zippered shaving kit that has a spare power cord for my laptop, the voltage converter for when I get sent abroad, the power converter to use my laptop in the car and spare cords to recharge my cell phone. All cables are labelled and are stored, coiled in ziplock baggies except my spare power cord for the laptop. Batteries and my microphone for the DVR are also stored in ziplocks. Now if I could only remember to take the empty soda cans out of the car at the end of a route of shops I would be in great shape

Kristee--
You can create a simple little table in Microsoft Word. Sorry, I can't teach you this by email, but you can open Word's help file and search "Insert table."

Flash--
If it ever gets that complicated for me I would quit.

Why would you want to save notes from jobs done 3 years ago? You do it, you get paid, you only have to save the income amount and expense amount for taxes. The rest is just litter. These are temp jobs; when the job is paid, it's history. You're a pack rat.

I've owned my own business for 26 years, do my own bookkeeping and taxes, and have one-hundredth your paper.

And you're scaring Kristee.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/14/2008 06:56AM by sneakers.

Some ICA agreements require that you keep notes for 2 years. Not many, but some. Especially on compliance type shops there is a slight chance that you could be called to testify in court as to what you observed. If you read your ICA agreements you will see that with some companies you agree to do that if/when the need arises.

Since my notes and receipts are stapled together and filed for mystery shopping purposes, yet the receipts also support the "necessary expenses" on my tax return, I just save the folder of stuff until such time as my tax return paperwork retention requirements expire. I was audited in 1983 for a question about my 1982 and 1981 tax returns (unrelated to mystery shopping). I was delighted that my record keeping (or pack ratting) had all appropriate documentation in place. IRS was completely satisfied and I walked out of their offices in 30 minutes. They haven't messed with me since, but I don't like to tempt fate. And it is definitely not time efficient to separate the receipts from the paperwork to file them with the tax return. Nor is it efficient to try to remember which MSP wants records retained for 30 days, until payment, 6 months, 1 year, 18 months or 2 years and try to weed through that stuff after the fact. So once shops hit the folder they will probably never be looked at again and the folder just moves through the process on its way 4 years later to the burn bucket.

I too do my own bookkeeping and taxes and have run home businesses on the side for a long long time.

OK, everyone keeps books in a different way. I still have 1/100th of your paper, and I do 150 home repair jobs a year. I scan a copy of receipts that need to serve 2 purposes. Anyway, I have no room for such a system in my apartment.

We don't leave laptops and DVR's in our cars here. That's tempting fate. Why would you need either on a shopping job? You can't pull a laptop out and take notes on a job.

"All happy packrats are alike, each unhappy packrat is unhappy in his own way" --Tolstoy
......................

Might we suggest an easy system for Kristee, since she brought up the topic?

Kristee-
Do you have word processing program? Word or Word Perfect or even Wordpad? I won't laugh, but you have to be proficient on a computer, especially word processing and the internet, to be a good MS.

Where would I find out that info? Control panel or where? My dog was just hit by a acr. bye

Laptop and DVR are rarely left in the car. When I get sent out of town to do hotel and resort shops for a day or two I need my laptop. When I am doing a long route of shops I am likely to take it with in the trunk and half way through take a break and check email and perhaps start putting in shops at a place with wifi. The DVR stays in my pocket where I can hit the "On" and "Pause" buttons easily. It is connected to me because of the microphone I wear for some shops.

Oh, a DVR is a voice recorder. Good!! Approx price for a cheap one?

We're not living in the same universe. I forgot about your out-of-town jobs. All good ideas.

Kristee--
Take care of your dog. I wish him/her well.

Approx. $60-$80 for a decent one. Olympus is good/has lots of different folders. Absolute necessity for me. It helps with quotes and timings.

My dog was killed and I can't stop crying, so i came here to try to stop. Its not working I can't see the screen

Get off and go cry. You don't have to stop. It's natural.

I have been crying for 12 hours, my head hurts and my face hurts as well as my heart, I did 3 shops today, crying and all. My husband took off work to bury her and they stray she was chasing after, he has cried more than when his best friend over dosed and died back in 2001. What the hell kind of Valentines Day is this?

I think Flash has a good idea about record keeping, my husband has worked for himself for 4 years and not one record, the few records he has are the ones I kept up with. we have a seriously large shop and 4 storage barn/houses and other barns and out houses and plenty of places to store stuff. I will probally just pack it up throw it in there. An auditor can open his peepers and find'em. lol

As long as there is some sort of order going into storage the stuff will be accessible if/when you need it. I just find having an open plastic bin of hanging file folders under the table to shove the stuff in works for me, but no point in letting it get so full it is a pain trying to put more in one handed.

As for DVRs. I bought a cheapie Olympus for abour $30 and used it for a couple of years. It did the job but not terribly well. I found that trying to place it where it could "hear" well what was going on was often a problem. It also had user unfriendly controls so pretty much needed to be left on during a full 1 to 2 hour shop and then fast forward through the table chit chat to find out when things were served or the table checked, etc.

Last year I decided to bite the bullet and try voice recognition software again. I had tried it a decade ago and it was pretty miserable. Dragon Naturally Speaking was software that had excellent reviews. It supposedly works with some DVRs. So "my business bought" the package that included the software, a Sony ICD-MX20 DVR and a headset. Spent a week or so of evenings training the software to recognize my voice but it still isn't good enough to just speak at a normal pace and get reasonable results. Maybe in a few years better software will be available. But the DVR with that package was so outstanding that I bought a second one reconditioned on Amazon.com. I still had the placement issues for a shop because in my pocket there was so much noise from the fabric when I walked that it was annoying. I got a small condenser microphone that I just slide into the cleavage, run the cord out the bottom of the bra to a pants pocket where the recorder is and I am in heaven. Humans tend to look you in the eye but talk toward your chest, so I catch every word spoken either by the associate or me. I can whisper toward my chest to record my notes as I go and the buttons are easy enough that I can turn it on, hit pause or stop it in my pocket. It downloads or plays back on my computer and although I can have it transcribe the shop, I don't bother because that tends to be pure gibberish. When I go out for a number of shops I carry both DVRs, one in my pocket and one in my purse and switch out about half way through the shops just for the ease of dealing with fewer files when I am doing my reports. Timings, especially the more elaborate ones of a restaurant, are super easy because I only have to remember the minutes and seconds until the server leaves the table and mention them. My total recording time for an hour to an hour and a half restaurant shop is generally less than 10 minutes of timing and notes--descriptions, whether they exhibited the desired behaviors and the crucial timing. The rest of the time we can just enjoy our dinner. My next purchase will be a cheapie bluetooth headset because people block out folks talking to themselves with one of those in the ear. My cell phone is not bluetooth enabled, so this is strictly as a charade.

Kristee - considering your luck with computers - maybe you should just get an accounting book and keep hard copy notes. I carry a pocket calender and record shops, fee, mileage, etc. then come home and put it on my Excel spread sheet, which I back up on my thumb drive. Any of us that has had a computer crash remember to back-up that important stuff. I also print each month's file and attach it to that month's paperwork.

Jude, This is all new stuff to me. (computers) So far it has been trial by error. I am still having a tough time scaning and getting the scanned reciept to attach to the reports. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Last night it kept saying ERROR after about 1/2 way through. So even through they said not to fax it I did anyway. I sat here for almost 2 hours trying to send the scanned reciepts.