Your Business Math Links and Tips

These tips are related to our Your Business Math books. Choose from a Pet Store, Book Store, or Sports Store “living math” kit that reinforces math skills for ages 8–12! If you have some resources that you’d like to recommend, let us know!

Extra Pages

Need more Inventory Tracker pages or Order Forms for your Student Kit? Download free extra pages below.

• Pet Store Inventory Tracker
• Sports Store Inventory Tracker
• Book Store Inventory Tracker
• Pet Store Order Form
• Sports Store Order Form
• Book Store Order Form

Tips

• When my daughter selects her AISS and Chance cards, we tape them to the page so we don’t lose them before she gets to the Ledger a few days later.
• If you want to offer a shortcut for figuring Profit and Loss in a given month, you might allow your student to simply calculate the difference between the first figure entered on the monthly Ledger (Beginning Balance) and the last figure entered (Ending Balance). My daughter likes to do a quick mental comparison of the two and see whether she has more money (a profit) or less money (a loss) at the end of the month.
• Andrea over at the Elliott Academy of Excellence had a great idea: she’s teaching her son to use a spreadsheet as they go through the Book Store kit. If you’re interested, Google now has a free online spreadsheet app that might work well just to give your child some experience using one.

Ideas

• One dear lady at an SCM workshop shared how she had encouraged her children to create promotional flyers for their stores and send them to their relatives (Grandma and uncle, I believe). Those wonderful relatives placed orders, and one even submitted a “return”!
• Karen C. had a great idea for expanding on the ad section for her child’s Pet Store: “For the Advertising on p. 19, we assigned different media to each of the cost levels. For example, $25 was a promotional flyer, $50 an email ad or web banner, $75 a newspaper ad, and $100 a TV commercial. We plan to spend time creating copy for each option.”

No Sales Tax?

An Australian resident e-mailed us, wondering how Your Business Math would work for her son: “Hi, I’m interested in the Your Business Math series, and wondered if it would still work in Australia where we don’t need to calculate sales tax (its already included in the price of the item, so the price listed in the store is what you actually pay). I’m American, so would like my son to learn to calculate tax eventually but he’s only 8 now so it can wait. Can this component be easily left out? The other interesting thing here is that there are no pennies ..everything is rounded to the nearest 5c. That would be okay though, it would just give him practice in rounding.”

Our reply regarding sales tax: “You could simply leave off the sales tax calculations on the orders. That would mean that the answers in the teacher book wouldn’t match up, but you could always use a calculator and just check his figuring. The only other place that sales tax comes up is a separate step each month in which the “store owner” adds up all the sales tax he has collected from the orders so he can “send it to the tax division government entity.” You could ignore that step quite easily. (And ignore the reference to it when entering the month’s transactions in the ledger.)”

Our reply regarding no pennies: “Looks like the Pet Store’s and Sports Store’s prices and costs are already 5-cent compatible. The only rounding he would have to do is with any bills or Additional In-Store Sales that might be otherwise.”

E-Book Backup

We encourage you to make a backup of your e-book file for safekeeping. Feel free to copy your file onto a CD, an external hard drive, or another type of media, and store it away from your computer. If something happens to your computer or the files on it, you’ll still have a copy of your e-book in a safe place.