It is essential to keep an eye on running costs in any business, no matter how large or small. Your business must reach a point where it makes more money than it costs. It is acceptable to plan for a period where you run at a loss, while investing in start-up costs.Tracking and controlling the costs during this period are essential to long term survival.

This need not become a major chore, but the process of keeping simple records, once set up takes only a moment to update regularly. Decide on a limit for your monthly expenses, then open a simple spreadsheet in Excel, with just a few columns.

In an earlier article we discussed the importance of carefully considering your personal finances before commencing the business start-up steps. Given all other expenses versus income it should not be too difficult to arrive at an affordable monthly amount. Include your partner in this planning period, so that you have support and commitment to work through this phase. You'll need help to carry the costs for a period.

If you have Office or similar on your computer, there are numerous ready-made templates available for your use, and if not, a quick search on the internet will find many options freely available. Keep this simple and straightforward. You basically need one side of the spreadsheet for income, and the other for expenses.

A date for each entry with enough space for brief details - the amount carried forward to a column for each type of expenditure and a total at the end. Excel will do the arithmetic for you, as you simply add up each column at month-end, and carry totals to the monthly figures at bottom-right for income and expenditure. If you were fortunate enough to do a little book-keeping at school, this exercise will be a breeze, and if so I apologize for boring you with silly details! In the interim, a little time spent each month will enable you to keep track of how well you're doing, and enable you to have a little celebration when you start to make a profit!

What we're doing in this exercise, is laying the foundations for later on, when your business really gets going. It's also important to keep copies of invoices safely stored somewhere. You may not need them now, but you will need to show income for your version of Internal Revenue, one day.

Remember - you're not doing this for fun! You're starting your business with your own goals in mind, and your plan is to work from home. If that income is sufficient for you to live on, then someone will come looking to tax you one day... One of the few things certain about life is that you will pay tax! If you have kept your records carefully, you will be able to show that you have incurred legitimate expenses in generating your income. (Won't this be a nice problem to have, anyway?)

Tax laws vary around the world, and you may need to take professional advice one day to keep on the right side of the law. Keeping copies of invoices, for recording in your spreadsheet, will make the job much simpler.

Now that you've signed up for your affiliate programmes, and you've hopefully worked your way through the "getting started" training provided by each, we'll discuss some more steps to take to make things start to happen.