I have recently started mystery shopping. I've read a lot of your forums and still have a couple of questions. Currently I am doing some grocery shops and storage unit shops. Fast food shops don't really appeal to me. I am wondering how some of you keep track of all the companies you sign up for? I have signed with roughly 20 so far (some are duds), most companies are from references here. I am checking Jobslinger also but I just feel so lost trying to figure out which shops are worthy of my time! I would appreciate any feedback you have.

When I sign up with a new company I note it on my Excel spreadsheet. I list the company name, the website address to log in (just a copy and paste of the URL from the sign in page), my login name and password. I also note the date I signed up with them (though I have never found a use for this information). Then as other information becomes available I will add it onto the sheet, for example how long to pay, phone numbers, scheduler names and emails etc.

My signup is a systematic process. When I register I put the basic information on my spreadsheet without the website address. When I get an acceptance email I add the login information and go directly to sign in at the website. That is when I do the copy and paste of the URL for the sign in page and then I save the spreadsheet. I then set a bookmark in my folder of "New MSPs" and a bookmark in my alphabetical list of "MSPs" with my browser, login and have my browser save the login and password. By making it a defined and systematic process I can find and enter the website frequently during the first month or two to see IF they have anything around me and WHEN they tend to post. If, after a couple of months I have found nothing, I delete them from my "New MSPs" bookmarks (they will still be in my alphabetical list and on my Excel spreadsheet). If they have things of interest in my state but just not around me at the moment, I am likely to leave them in "New MSPs" a bit longer to continue watching. If they have things in my area I will take a job or two to see how they are to deal with and if they work out well, I will take them out of "New MSPs" and bookmark them in "Useful MSPs".

When I am exploring job posts with any MSP I will make notes on another Excel spreadsheet about clients shopped. That is a sheet that is alphabetical by company, so if I see that this new MSP shops Subway, they will be included in the list of other MSPs that shop Subway. (Subway may be shopped by different MSPs in different markets across the country and by different interests such as soda manufacturer, the franchise itself, the gas stations that house them, or even by their competitors such as Quiznos etc.)

Flash Wrote:
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> When I sign up with a new company I note it on my
> Excel spreadsheet. I list the company name, the
> website address to log in (just a copy and paste
> of the URL from the sign in page), my login name
> and password. I also note the date I signed up
> with them (though I have never found a use for
> this information). Then as other information
> becomes available I will add it onto the sheet,
> for example how long to pay, phone numbers,
> scheduler names and emails etc.
>
> My signup is a systematic process. When I
> register I put the basic information on my
> spreadsheet without the website address. When I
> get an acceptance email I add the login
> information and go directly to sign in at the
> website. That is when I do the copy and paste of
> the URL for the sign in page and then I save the
> spreadsheet. I then set a bookmark in my folder
> of "New MSPs" and a bookmark in my alphabetical
> list of "MSPs" with my browser, login and have my
> browser save the login and password. By making it
> a defined and systematic process I can find and
> enter the website frequently during the first
> month or two to see IF they have anything around
> me and WHEN they tend to post. If, after a couple
> of months I have found nothing, I delete them from
> my "New MSPs" bookmarks (they will still be in my
> alphabetical list and on my Excel spreadsheet).
> If they have things of interest in my state but
> just not around me at the moment, I am likely to
> leave them in "New MSPs" a bit longer to continue
> watching. If they have things in my area I will
> take a job or two to see how they are to deal with
> and if they work out well, I will take them out of
> "New MSPs" and bookmark them in "Useful MSPs".
>
> When I am exploring job posts with any MSP I will
> make notes on another Excel spreadsheet about
> clients shopped. That is a sheet that is
> alphabetical by company, so if I see that this new
> MSP shops Subway, they will be included in the
> list of other MSPs that shop Subway. (Subway may
> be shopped by different MSPs in different markets
> across the country and by different interests such
> as soda manufacturer, the franchise itself, the
> gas stations that house them, or even by their
> competitors such as Quiznos etc.)


Although I have only been acquainted with flash a short time, I am totally in awe of her organizational skills. I learn a lot from her, and this sounds like a great method to me. I do some, but not all of what she stated here. I think I am going to implement her method into mine. :-)

Thanks for the tips, you sound very organized!! Personally I have never been organized. I'm the person who always has a 2 foot stack of paperwork sitting around. Doing it on the computer sounds good though. Thanks!!

I have also the 2 foot stack of paperwork and as I age I no longer remember necessarily what a particular item was before or after time-wise to help me find it in the stack. Getting organized and making myself be systematic cuts down a great deal on those frustrating "senior moments". I figure my memory function is not likely to improve, so I rely on the computer's "memory" to get me by. And to make sure it is there for me, I backup everything at least monthly (I have lived through the agony of a hard drive crash and the anxiety of what all has been lost and the time consuming task of trying to recreate as much as I could). Also as I age I am taking more care with file names so I can use a "search" feature in case the file is not saved where I thought it would have been. I plan to keep shopping for a long time and will use any crutch I can.

I'm not near as organized as Flash. I like to have hard copies of information too. I have a folder set aside for all my MSP's.

And I generate an invoice for each company in Quicken whether I do work for them quickly or whether I have nothing at all from them.
I've learned when I sign up for a new company and there is nothing in my area, if I just wait long enough there will be shops. :-)
When I am assigned a new job I enter the pay in the Quicken invoice for that job with the title and date of the job. And when I get paid the pay is added with the date of payment. And with Quicken when I add the pay it automatically goes to my income total with each transaction.
Makes it easy to know who and when they pay after a job. And the reimbursment amounts and what pot each item to be reimbursed needs to be replanted.

It makes it easier to have an exact balance of pay after expenses.

And I keep a calendar on my PDA and a hard copy calendar. I sprung for a really nice hard copy calendar. I have all my companies listed in alphabetical order and I can see my week at a glance. And beside each job I have the name of the company listed.

I have senior moments too and I expend a little more energy keeping things straight in my mind.

It's basically what ever works best for you.

I like to know at the end of the month my exact clear pay for that month.
If I see I have gone in the "hole" on jobs for a particular company I most likely will not do any more jobs for them.

My preference is to keep track of all that just with an Excel spreadsheet that will move seamlessly forward onto new versions of Excel. It means that when I save a year's worth of work it is on a standardized format (doc and xls and pdf) that will always be available.

By setting up monthly pages to feed onto a single recap sheet and having an expense sheet for expenses that are not shop specific--such as cell phone expense, bridge tolls, parking, office equipment and supplies--I can at any point tell you what the bottom line of my tax return's Schedule C will be (I am an accrual tax payer, not a cash tax payer, though with minor rejiggering it could be changed to a cash tax payer) just from my recap page. From the monthly pages I can tell you how my month-to-date is going and what payments are still outstanding both for fees and reimbursements and from the recap I can tell you the year-to-date earnings and reimbursements, how much has accrued but not yet been paid, my expenses in the relevant categories and, of course, my current bottom line. I use this in decision making. At the moment I am a little "rich" on fees (i.e. I do not have offsetting expenses to keep me below $400 net income so at the moment I would be subject to social security and medicare taxes), which helped with the decision to take a fine dining about 38 miles away. The reimbursement will be around $200, the fee $20 and the mileage deduction at 58.5 cents per mile will be around $45. That mileage deduction will offset the fee and provide an additional $25 offset against other profitability and the reimbursement will not be taxable. Plus, of course, getting to enjoy a truly outstanding dinner (I've done this place before and it is close to poetically good). While in theory this job is "in the hole", in reality if we take the hybrid we will use 2 gallons of gas or less. If we take the truck it will be closer to 5 gallons.

While it is rarely useful to go "in the hole" over a job, if there is a decent benefit it can be worthwhile. With the "fun" shops where you must spend $50 and are reimbursed only $25, because $50 is REQUIRED the difference between the reimbursed $25 and the $25 is tax deductible as an "unreimbursed business expense." And of course you got the benefit of the $50 worth of merchandise.

Oh the one thing I do is the Restaurants. We like the restaurants. I have one company I can do a restaurant on Friday or Saturday night and I'm reimbursed by Tuesday. I do as many of those as I can for the weekend dining out. But I've never gone in the hole with these restaurants.

The shops I mean are the $5-$8 shops with a reimbursment that doesn't cover the cost of getting a receipt and buying exactly what they want you to buy. In other words the shops that you basically have to pay to shop for them. Anyway that's the way I see them...I buy what you want me to buy and by the time I buy that item I have gone in the hole cause the reimbursment doesn't cover the actual cost of the item. Most of these are fast food shops.

Believe me...I don't do these anymore.

I did one of those $50 shops this week. Worked out great!! These are a gift.

I have so much bookkeeping in my primary business, that I try to keep this simple. If you can't do Excel, (and I can't,) you can do something as simple as a pen and notebook with a list of the companies you sign up with, with notes in columns.

I save the bookmark (Favorite in IE) of each login page in my browser, and have them alphabetized. That way I can also check regularly for shops, unless they do only email. In that case, it still serves as a list of who I'm registered with --about 160 companies now.

I keep track of jobs to be paid in a small notebook, with one page per company. When I get paid the job is highlighted in yellow. Last week, for instances, I saw X Co hadn't paid yet for June, and I know they pay the last day of the month, so I called them. Actually they cut the check on July 31, but by the time the mail is sent out and received, it was Aug 9. I can make a note of that for next month. In another page of the notebook, I write each payment as it comes in, totaling at month's end.

sneakers Wrote:
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> I keep track of jobs to be paid in a small
> notebook, with one page per company. When I get
> paid the job is highlighted in yellow. Last week,
> for instances, I saw X Co hadn't paid yet for
> June, and I know they pay the last day of the
> month, so I called them. Actually they cut the
> check on July 31, but by the time the mail is sent
> out and received, it was Aug 9. I can make a note
> of that for next month. In another page of the
> notebook, I write each payment as it comes in,
> totaling at month's end.

That sounds very much like I would have done it in my pre-computer/Excel life. I probably would have gotten a columnar pad that was punched for 3 ring notebook so that I could keep the sheets in alpha order by company and would have set up columns for "client", "job report date", "fee", "bonus", "reimbursement", "unreimbursed expense" and then a "total" of the first 3 as the amount expected, then "date paid", "amt paid" and "over/under" to show any overpayment (ha!) or underpayment (to still try to collect). My monthly receipt sheet would have the same info plus company name.

I used to just lump "fee" and "bonus" together but have found that is the most frequently "forgotten" information when jobs are paid, so having it separated makes it immediately obvious that I didn't just record the fee wrong for the job but rather they failed to pay the bonus promised. It also gives me a baseline that the $15 I was paid for the job last year was not some bonused number when this year they are offering the same job at $9.75

Any chance of sharing your basic spreadsheet, Flash?

Thanks for all the great ideas!!

Flash Wrote:
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> sneakers Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------

> > I keep track of jobs to be paid in a small
> > notebook, with one page per company. ...
>
> That sounds very much like I would have done it in
> my pre-computer/Excel life.

Right, because as good as I am with computers, I haven't learned Excel, and I'm still a 2-finger typist. It's easier for me to do it in a notebook. I don't even have as many columns as you. I'm rebelling against almost 30 years of record-keeping with my primary business. And those are in handwritten ledgers, too. Hey, I can't be a superb contractor and a master computer repair person and a superb typist too, so I've chosen

If I were hand entering in a notebook I would have fewer columns as well because they would not have the usefulness of being able to automatically sort by column that Excel allows. My sheet gets resorted by date to shop during the month as I generally just add new shops to the bottom and re-sort the jobs to be done by their earliest shop date. At the end of the month they get sorted by MSP so that when payments come in it is easy to do an automatic summation of the amount due to figure out what they are paying for and whether it is correct. There is relatively little typing involved as I copy and paste from the email or shop log as much as possible to ensure accuracy.

I pretty much do the same thing but I use Quicken. I generate an invoice for every shop by the date, company name and shop name and the pay separated by reimbursement amount. I do a "split" transaction. Then when I am paid I can look at my invoice and know exactly what I was supposed to have been paid and the amount of reimbursement and where it needs to go.

Then at the end of the month I can print out my Quicken statement and have a hard copy to include in my file for that particular month. Clip all of them together that have been paid and separate the paid items from the unpaid.

I'm not good with Excel either. But I've used Quicken for years.

All my companies are listed on my PDA with log in information. Then when I upload my PDA it automatically put news items on my desk top PDA.
I can print out my contacts from my desktop PDA.

I have the program from Flash(thanks) but I am not good in excel and the computer I know the basics and learn something new every day. I can make copies of the sheet and fill it in, it helps alot instead of looking at my calendar and seeing what I did and when and where and pay....its not good enough. I also am starting to keep all receipts of office expenses,and lots more. It costs alot of gas,supplies,paper,ink,etc.....It adds up quick.