Hey guys just wondering how people keep track of their shops? Like filing, recording, keeping track of fees and reimbursements. Do you guys just save the CPI and guidelines or did you make an excel document?
Though I would get some insight on what other people do!
Thanks!

I keep a spreadsheet by year of all my shops. There is a tab for each MSC and a description of the shop, date, fee, bonus, reimbursement, pay date and notes. I screenshop my shop instructions and get a online copy of my report. I then backup to a external hard drive and another computer.

Under new Mystery Shoppers there is a great excel spreadsheet someone posted that I use. And I just add tabs for each year. I also added a tab for MSC that I'm registered with and have my log in and password in that tab and the clients I know they have currently. I update that periodically...

I also use a spreadsheet
Shop name MSC name shop fee, bonus fee, reimbursement, total just fees, total with reimbursement, expected pay date, actual pay date, Notes. Also can add columns for mileage which I have a separate log for.

My record for mileage and out of town expenses (meals, hotels, etc. that are deductible expenses) is a tiny notebook I keep in the car and update daily.

I keep page 1 of the CPI, guidelines, shop log sheet or whatever -- the page with the shop's address and phone number. I staple the receipt/business card/POV to that, and file in a box for the year. So far, each year has fit comfortably in one box.

But I'm old, old fashioned, and not tech savvy.

I keep a worksheet germane to the particular shop for each and every shop. On it are all of the pertinent details of that shop (date, etc). Stapled to it are the receipts, business cards or whatever was required by the MSC to obtain in doing the shop.
The worksheet is files into a folder of the month in whit the shop was performed. That means, all shops whether they are gas stations, banks, retail, etc all go into the folder for that month.
When I receive my pay detail for the shop of that month, I make a copy of it and add that to the folder. Often, the pay detail covers multiple months. I make copies of it for each month's folder of the occurrence. I hold onto it until I've resolved each shop's payment, checking off the payment received. Once resolved, I file the folder away into my file cabinet.
For mileage, I keep a yearly date book with a month by month mileage amount written down for each day that I performed a shop. As an example, for March 17, I might write down the name of the furthest city I drove to, then the number of shops I did for that day and lastly, my mileage total for the shops done.
I might also add that I write down on January 1st of each new year, I write down my odometer reading. I also write down the odometer reading at the end of the year too (should be the same).

I used to use Excel, but this year I switched to an app called Hurdlr. For $5/mo it auto-tracks milage, expenses, and income. It has a receipt tracker and can track expenses by client/MSC. If anyone else would like to try, it has a 7 day free trial.

**ETA**
I forgot to mention that it also keeps a running total of self employment tax owed, and can generate expense reports. You can also file your taxes directly from the app at the end of the year (I haven't tried this yet so I don't know how well it works or the cost).

The free trial says it will charge your iTunes account at the end of the trial, but it will charge other epay accounts like Google Pay if you prefer.

[driver.app.link]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/2019 04:38PM by stormraven73.

@Pat32 wrote:

Can you please tell me where I Campa find the spreadsheet your talking about

Pat32,
Click on this link. Once it opens, you will see another link. Click on that one, and it will open up into a spreadsheet template for mystery shopping. You can tweak it however you like. Hope this helps!
[www.mysteryshopforum.com]

Can you please tell me where I Campa find the spreadsheet your talking about

I just keep a running notebook with the same columns mentioned above for an online spreadsheet. I can easily jot down every shop I get as I keep in right next to the computer where i read,save and delete my emails. Then starting around now every year I spend a few late nights inputting into my computer spreadsheet that is sorted by msc instead of watching some rerun TV show I already saw.
For mileage, when I got my Prius and noticed right away my mileage was way off the promised mileage I started keeping track of all trips. That was to back up my possible claim of a lemon. I never stopped doing that and I also translate those numbers into a spreadsheet after each fill up. I date and have starting odometer for each tank so if I have to pinpoint a particular mystery shop ever for the IRS I can figure out which spreadsheet cell trip it was by approximate mileage and date cross referenced from my mystery shop spreadsheet. Yes, I am anal about these things but for me it is easier just to jot on paper on a daily basis and then input only once in a while.

Even those of us who are tech savvy, use the old fashioned way of keeping track. Dealing with IRS is not a dream everyone has.

I've only been shopping for a few months so my way may not be 'right'. I'm an Excel junkie and hate paper. I keep a spreadsheet with columns for job name, job date, company, location, pay expected, mileage, reimbursement expected, date pay received, amount pay received, amount reimbursement received, and method of payment. I update it each day I have activity. I also have a pivot table I use as a dashboard so I can quickly see how much is outstanding, etc.

Since I have to take pics of receipts anyway, I store them in the cloud on Google Drive. I keep the originals for a couple of weeks but once a job is 'okay for pay' I toss them. I don't download the completed reports. If I was doing narrative-heavy reports like hotel shops (hopefully one day) I probbaly would download those.

I am not sure that I am an Excel junkie, but I use it a lot and have since 1985 or so. I learned the hard way to input at least minimal information for shops that I apply for since some MSCs are not good at sending notices of accepted shops. With at least the name of the MSC and the date in Excel (and a column I use to notes names or times etc. which I color code yellow if the shop has been requested but not assigned to me yet) I know to go back and look. I tried several times to learn to use pivot tables but gave up. I do use VLOOKUP and =SUBTOTAL(9,x:y) and some other functions in my spreadsheet.

Many years ago, I printed reports after I submitted them. Now, I just print them to a PDF document and keep them. Storage on my PC and in the Cloud is so available, I see no reason not to. I have occasionally had a need to go back and look at a report that is a month old (some MSCs are slow) or even to go back a year or two for clarity.

@callinectes wrote:

I've only been shopping for a few months so my way may not be 'right'. I'm an Excel junkie and hate paper. I keep a spreadsheet with columns for job name, job date, company, location, pay expected, mileage, reimbursement expected, date pay received, amount pay received, amount reimbursement received, and method of payment. I update it each day I have activity. I also have a pivot table I use as a dashboard so I can quickly see how much is outstanding, etc.

Since I have to take pics of receipts anyway, I store them in the cloud on Google Drive. I keep the originals for a couple of weeks but once a job is 'okay for pay' I toss them. I don't download the completed reports. If I was doing narrative-heavy reports like hotel shops (hopefully one day) I probbaly would download those.

Spreadsheet tab per year:

For each shop: Date, Company, Location, Job Fee, Expenses, Reimbursed Expenses, Total Payment Received, Net Earned (Job Fee+Reimbursed Expenses-Expenses), Mileages Start/End, Trip Miles. (Miles are for the route)

Then at the top running totals for: Total Job Fee, Total Expenses, Total Reimbursed,Total Paid, Total Net, Payments Pending, Total Miles, Fuel Cost(Vehicle allowance for taxes), Total Earnings (Net Income - Fuel)

@callinectes wrote:

I'm an Excel junkie and hate paper. I keep a spreadsheet with columns for job name, job date, company, location, pay expected, mileage, reimbursement expected, date pay received, amount pay received, amount reimbursement received, and method of payment. I update it each day I have activity.

I too am an Excel junkie and over the years my shopping spreadsheet has become the spreadsheet calendar for my life. My base year of sheets gets restarted each calendar year and carries forward birthdays so I can make sure I have USPS shops and small gifts and cards out in the mail in a timely fashion to nieces, nephews, etc. Medical appointments and charitable donations are on the sheets to keep track of medical or charitable mileage, co-pays or valuation of donations. At the end of the year everything has been documented on a concurrent basis. On the Recap sheet of the workbook the business stuff gets sorted out from my medical and my significant other's medical and our respective charitable, ready to make quick work of taxes.

Edited to add: Any significant narrative is created in Word and saved. Some reports are saved as pdf and some are simplistic enough or difficult enough to pdf that I don't bother. Certainly with some MSCs I will pdf my report because they are likely to throw up issues. I save paper receipts and collateral for the 5 years IRS could audit.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/20/2019 02:59PM by Flash.

About saving pdf's of reports. I started saving some of the longer narrative ones just in case there was a question. Some companies do not re open the original for edits and I like to see what I had written about.
I also have some shops that I do over and over that require narrative in many boxes. Some of those are repetitive answers and as a slow typist I find it easier to copy and paste parts of what I wrote before and then edit it for any differences in my findings on the current report. This is especially helpful to me in things like describing uniforms twice a month that are the same or clean or dirty floors, walls, counters, well stocked etc. I get tired retyping those items over and over.

I keep track of all my shops in my Google calendar. Red when they need to be completed. Green when they have been completed . Gray when they are paid out.
In the calendar entry I place all information I usually simply cut and paste the assignment information .

My expenses and mileage are pre-populated through QuickBooks. I have the app on my phone so it is automatically pre-populated and all I have to do is go in and put it in the correct categories.

There are some categories if you know that a certain travel distance for a shop or a certain cost every month is going to appear you can set it up in QuickBooks. It can automatically pre-populate without you seeing.


Anything else that I may have bought outside of the cards that are connected to my QuickBook, I keep the receipts and take an immediate picture of them to pre-populate them in my phone. I go back to put on necessary information in later

I found this system works well for me because I can automatically glanced buy color code to the calendar. QuickBooks keeps a running total all year to show you if your business has made money or if you're in the hole on a minute-by-minute basis so you can adjust accordingly if you need to
it also tell me what my quarterly expenses need to be in terms of payment for taxes.

Lastly, some of the mystery shopping companies require you to submit your own invoice and they do not have one available for you to do so. I create my own invoices from QuickBooks because my LLC information is already populated and it will send an invoice directly out of that mystery shopping company for me

Excel spreadsheet each month with MSC/date/shop type/location/payment/due date/miles traveled. This rolls over to yearly totals for each MSC I work for. I also keep monthly spreadsheets on my bulletin board for 3 months (current and past 2) so I can fill in actual date I was paid (under due date). At a glance I can see who has not paid and when payment can be expected

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/20/2019 07:15PM by lbtweety47.

I use QuickBooks Self employed. I upload all my receipts and expenses and I book income on the day I'm paid. The reimbursements wash out with the expense (unless the expenses are higher then the reimbursements). I think it's much easier this way then keeping a spreadsheet.

Here is my concern about QuickBooks, Quicken and many of the other pieces of financial and accounting software that have been available over time. Some of these use a file structure that can be opened/upgraded years later and some do not. While we with our 'small business' are perhaps less vulnerable to IRS investigation that can go back to the inception date of our business with no statute of limitations if IRS believes there has been fraud, it still can be of value to us to be able to access any and all of our business records. Many years ago the 'standard' for file structures for record keeping was established to be .doc and .xls. I can open even the oldest of my files that are in these formats with free software (Open Office) whereas my old Quicken files I can only open by getting a copy of the software and importing the files, which may or may not work well depending on how many versions of the software have been released since my files were originally created. It was precisely my inability to get old investment account records in Quicken to update properly that led me to set up .xls format financial records. As for receipts and other images, I am careful to save them in .pdf or .jpg formats for the same reasons, even though there are other options which may be smaller files or have other attributes. Similarly, even if I am using cloud storage, I will save local copies that can be preserved on backups completely under my control.

Am I likely to be audited? No. Is my cloud storage likely to go away? Eventually. Since a decade and a half of shops and records can be preserved on a thumb drive costing less than $5, I find it is a good investment to create a couple of them every few months as backups and store one off site in addition to importing the full history of my business to any new computer I purchase. And yes, with Win 10 I can still install an old copy of Office 2000 I picked up from a garage sale for $1, an Adobe Photoshop 7 acquired similarly and a copy of Adobe Acrobat that is also more than a decade old. Newer versions may have extra features, but the basics are unchanged.

I can understand wanting to do everything with a smart phone, just make sure you have backups that can allow you to access your information even if you change providers, phones or have some issue. If your data is not in multiple locations it is vulnerable.

Actually, I've utilized QuickBooks for many years and have found no issues. I've been a shopper for 28 years. The days of technology for me outweigh my handwritten and excel usage. My accountant and financial planner find it easy as well when working on my finances.

Speaking from my IT hat, whatever the technology, you should always have a back up system. I personally don't utilize cloud as I'm way too familiar with it's ease of hacking.

Overall, whatever is used, you have to be comfortable it's best for you.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2019 09:33PM by Mrs.M.

I hope all of the people that are affected by the floods this year have off-site backups for any records they need to keep. It has been 20 years since the Arkansas River last flooded anywhere near this bad as it did last month and this month. Oh, and the wildfires in California off-site backup are really needed out there.