***Reading Tarot as a Business—Record Keeping for the Sensitive Entrepreneur

This is the fourth in a series of articles designed to be a handbook on what is required to be the entrepreneurial psychic, the sole practitioner who owns his/her own successful psychic business.

So now our psychic businessperson has her (or his) skill level perfected, and has done market research by listening to the people she is serving well. She has framed an ad describing what she really does best from the clients' point of view. She is answering her phone and doing her sessions with the end in mind of staying in business by honestly delivering to the client what the client has come to her for. She is successfully avoiding clients she cannot serve in this manner. This is a so-far solid beginning.

Basic record-keeping things required for success as a sole practitioner in a service business are:

*A toll-free telephone number,
preferably one that is catchy, easy to remember. It can spell your name or your company name or even a word; it can have repeating numbers in a pattern. Calls come to me from people who called only once ten years ago because my phone number spells my company name, which describes me; and the caller, when asked 'What brings you back after all these years?' says 'I remembered the phone number.'

*A record-keeping system: The Day-book
Buy one of those full-sized 4-person appointment books with the time listed down the sides. In these columns you will write the name of the person you have served; the telephone number they called from (even if it is a hotel); the amount you billed along with the elapsed time if that is applicable; how they paid (and when if that is a different day). This book is your complete record for all the business of each day.

On the bottom of that page, or on a separate loose page you leave in the book (or ideally on the opposite page of an eight-person appointment book, which is more expensive), write each of the phone numbers that called you for each telephone line you have (even crank callers and wrong numbers), when they called, and who called. Ideally, also write each number YOU called, who that was, and when you called it. Some of those entries also appear elsewhere in that day-book, if the person had a session.

So your entry for a client who did business would look like this:

Esmeralda Pascua........408-000-0000.......7:15-7:45, 30 $100.........Approval #__(4-5-10)

You will put your telephone records somewhere near, or attached to, this book. You will bless yourself for this when someone disputes a credit card charge: As a telephone merchant, you have to document your transaction in detail in order not to be cheated out of income. Some banks are unreasonable.

When you 'settle' or 'batch out' your trans-machine, attach each of the printouts the machine does, to the day it is for. Now you can prove you charged what was appropriate, all on one neat record.

*Record-keeping system: The Customer-card
And buy some paper and some lined 5x8 index cards. Write the customer's name, address, telephone number, etc. and credit card information (or however-they-pay-you information), their email address, etc., on the paper. Turn the index card printed-lines out, blank side in. Scotch tape these two together at the top. Now you have a customer card with the name on the front to alphabetize, and the financial information conveniently on the flip side. Inside, you attach the customer's copy of the trans-machine tickets, overlapping one another showing the amounts.

This is all the record-keeping you need do. Psychic businesspeople often do not keep records, which will sooner or later be a problem. This system allows the businessperson to photocopy the customer card and the page of the day in question for proof the client DID call you, and how long you were on the telephone with him/her. This system also allows the entrepreneur to deliver to a tax accountant orderly records if, as is true of most Tarot readers and psychics, she is a stranger in the land of math.