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Want to make a ton of money during this busy holiday season? Then your preparation should start well before you sell your first item. One of the first areas in your business you should get under control first is your finances – if they’re in disarray, you’re going to make more mistakes and not be able to pay total attention to making sales. Here are five financial to-dos to take care of now.

1. Financial Tracking

Nobody wants to take time out of their busy day while selling tons of items during the holidays to balance their checkbook. Even simply tracking expenses and invoices can be a huge pain when you’re swamped with a zillion orders and other tasks.

So the first thing you should do before the holiday sales period hits is to track your money with GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping. This automates your business’ finances so you can safely run your business and not worry about things like running out of cash when a big order comes in.

2. Automate Bills

Another thing you really don’t want to worry about during holiday sales are your bills. If you’ve got a thousand orders to fulfill and a mountain of emails waiting on you, you really don’t want to wonder if you’ve paid the electricity bill. Automate as many bills as you can, making sure to get the really important ones like Internet and electricity so you can still operate your business without interruption.

3. Go Digital

You don’t want to deal with a ton of paperwork while you’re stuffing boxes and running to the post office. Instead of working with actual, physical paper, start going the digital route. This is a choice you can make for the rest of the year as well.

Not only does this get rid of clutter around your office and that closet you never go into because you’re worried boxes of old papers might tumble down on you), going digital with receipts and invoices can streamline your business. Suddenly you can find everything you want with one simple search on your computer.

4. Pull Reports

Want to know where your business really stands? You don’t really know until you pull some reports like Profits & Loss, Expenses, and Best Customer. While it seems like this might be pointless right now, knowing exactly how your company is doing can make your holiday sales that much better. For example, if you know who your best customers are, you can isolate what makes them so special and use this info to make even more money during the holidays.

5. Get on Schedule

One of the most important things to do with your finances before the crazy holiday sales period comes is to get on a schedule. Do you have any sales tax payment deadlines coming up? Any other big payments you needed to handle? Get everything on a better schedule so you don’t forget anything important and cause yourself needless stress. (The holidays will do enough of that for you!)

Naturally this can help you with your business year round. You won’t even have to think about it next year as you’ll be totally set before summer even ends. This should free you up even more than before so you can concentrate solely on having the most profitable holiday selling season ever.

What steps did you take before the holiday season started to ensure a less stressful holiday?