By Display Name I’m referring to what your name shows up as when someone receives an e-mail from you. For example when I send someone an e-mail, they will see “Matt Inglot” as the sender of that e-mail. Straightforward enough. Unfortunately there is no real consistency in display name, so “Bob Rogers” might set his display name as:

• Bob Rogers
• Rogers, Bob
• Rogers Inc - Bob Rogers
• Bob Rogers (Rogers Inc)
• bob.rogers@bobrogersinc.com

Who cares? Those of us with a high e-mail volume do! Especially those of us stuck with Outlook rather than GMail (where search actually works). Typically to follow an e-mail from someone I will sort my inbox by Name and then try to find this person. This usually works great. If I’m looking for Bob Rogers I will look in the B’s and find him pretty quickly. Unfortunately if he used any variation of Display Name that didn’t start with B, suddenly finding him is a chore (especially if he started his name with something other than B and R).

See the problem? It gets worst when someone e-mails you from multiple addresses or multiple clients, which happens a lot. Now I might have e-mails from “Rogers, Bob”, “Bob Rogers”, and “Rogers Inc - Bob Rogers” all sitting in my inbox and all from the same conversation thread. Trying to find something in this mess becomes really hard!

So please. Take a couple minutes right now. Change your Display Name to “Firstname Lastname” format. It’s not a standard. But it’s what most people seem to use, so it’s got the greatest chance of catching on. Help us high-volume e-mail users find you.

After a trip to the accountant’s last month I was introduced to a terrific QuickBooks feature for dealing with a nuisance of mine - entering repeat transactions. I have a number of clients on a monthly billing cycle for recurring services, and until now I have been entering each such transaction into QuickBooks manually. I’ve become quite good at it, but I can’t emphasis how much of a timewaster it has been each month.

Memorizing a Transaction

The simple trick here is to have QuickBooks do most of the work for you. Let’s say you have a client that is billed $150 per month for some sort of recurring service, and that you invoice this client monthly. If this is a new client, enter the first invoice manually as you would always do. If this is a past client simply bring up the last invoice. With the invoice open, you will find a Memorize Invoice option hiding in the Edit menu. This will allow you to have QuickBooks either enter the transaction automatically every “xx” amount of time, or set it as a task in reminders (this is your only option if you work with foreign currency, however the invoice is still automatically filled in for you). The same applies for other QuickBooks transactions too, most notably bills.

Now when I need to make my regular invoices or pay regular bills I simply click the transaction reminder for that bill and QuickBooks does the rest. The speed difference is incredible, and it’s always comforting to reduce the chances for human error through automation.

Compatibility Note: I write this from the perspective of the QuickBooks 2006 Canadian Pro edition, but I suspect that other QuickBooks versions and competing accounting packages have similiar functionality.

In spending countless hours putting together my financial statements I’ve learned quite a bit this year. I’ve taken what I’ve done well with the mistakes I’ve made along the way to provide some tips to owners of small businesses panicking about the dreaded notion of bookkeeping.

Reasons to Keep Your Books Up to Date

Most of the small business owners I’ve spoken to are a few months behind on their books on any given day. It’s natural to want to toss it all in a pile (or more likely 1000 different places) and catch up a few times a year. I’ve done this plenty of times, but as of February 2007 I vow to never let it happen again. Here are a few motivators for keeping the books up to date:

• Tax filing becomes much easier. Come tax time you will have to do an exponentially smaller amount of work when the books are all up-to-date.
• No playing detective. Putting off bookkeeping inevitably results in coming across purchases and payments with missing information that were made months ago. Inputting everything right away ensures you aren’t hunting through old statements and receipts trying to figure out what you bought for $14.95 4 months ago.
• Take advantage of valuable financial analysis. Any decent accounting software package can provide a wealth of information about your financial situation at any given moment. Want to compare your Profit & Loss statements for the last 3 months to see if you’re on track? It’ll take about 3 minutes to generate these reports if your records are up to date. You can also keep on top of your cash flow situation, view financial ratios, track your sources of income, make sure money is being collected, and generate more graphs than you could ever imagine.
• You’ll know if you’re making money. If you haven’t tracked all your expenses and all your income, how do you know if you’re turning a profit? How can you judge if you’re expenses are running amok? A positive bank balance means you have cash, but it won’t tell you much else.

You get the point - bookkeeping is a good thing. However it’s not a particularly exciting task and only starts feeling urgent when someone else needs your information, be it the tax agency or a potential investor. At that point it becomes a race to put everything together in time. It’s a stressful and time-consuming approach, and denies you the use of your own financial information when you yourself need it.

If you are a small business owner that isn’t standing smirking right now, knowing all the accounting is done, join me in making 2007 the year the books stop being a thorn in our sides.

Tip #1: Get a Decent Software Package

Far too many people that I have met use Excel spreadsheets as their accounting solution, and they all insist that their spreadsheets are coded correctly and work fine. Unless you have a very good reason not based around saving $200, buy a decent accounting software package rather than trying to come up with your own solution. You’ll thank me when:

1. Your books always balance.
2. You can generate a wealth of financial reports on the fly (and be confident they are being generated correctly)
3. You realize the amount of time you’ve saved over trying to maintain your accounting own system.
4. Take advantage of all the extra features put in to make your life easier, like invoice generation, customer management, online banking integration, etc.

I’m personally a QuickBooks user and love it, but choose whatever fits your requirements and has an interface you will be comfortable with. Initially working with an accounting package can be intimidating and you can find yourself looking through help far longer than actually doing bookkeeping. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is one of those things you can only ever learn by diving in and doing it, so don’t let not knowing how to enter everything keep you from starting.

Tip #2: Learn the Basics of Accounting

It’s not as boring as it sounds! I’ve actually enjoyed taking accounting courses and will happily take more. If you aren’t interested in taking a course a book will do just fine. Regardless of how you choose to learn, by taking the time to understand basic accounting principles such as Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity and how these components are calculated and linked you will understand what your accounting package is doing behind the scenes and have a much easier time understanding how transactions should be entered (not to mention what your financial statements are telling you!).

Tip #3: Automate Your Books

Not all transactions can be entered immediately, nor is it particularly efficient to enter every $4.95 customer payment the moment you receive it. In keeping updated books I’ve found it’s much more important to put a process in place that ensures the data gets captured in a regular and consistent manner instead. If you are lucky enough to have a sufficiently digital business, automation for you may literally mean importing data from an e-commerce system or a cash register automatically. For most of us there is a significant amount of record keeping that involves a human, and being a small business that human is often the owner. This is where the system breaks down, as regular tasks are put off for days, then weeks, then months. Luckily humans can be automated too by putting the right processes in place.

To make sure these regular tasks do indeed get done regularly a trigger is needed. At the moment I have my Outlook calendar setup to remind me of important monthly accounting tasks. These are recurring appointments setup with actual times booked off, which ensures that I will do the tasks when the appointment actually pops up. I experimented with flagging all-day events with no specific time, but I found that I simply keep snoozing the Outlook reminder until I accidentally dismiss it and the task ultimately doesn’t get done.

I have a number of situations where setting up recurring automatic tasks makes a lot of sense. For example there are a number of PayPal customer payments that I receive on a monthly basis through the PayPal subscription system. I could enter these each time the transaction occurs and have my sanity slowly wither away, or I could export an Excel file once a month and put the transactions in then. Before I booked off time to actually do this every month it simply piled up, but now it’s a regular appointment that I can adhere to.

Tip #4: Reconcile your Bank Accounts

Ideally you should reconcile your banking statements against your books each time you receive them. This is an invaluable check to ensure that all your records relating to this month are in fact entered and helps greatly in avoiding things falling between the cracks. QuickBooks has a feature built-in specifically to do this, and I’m sure other packages do too. For example by reconciling my main checking account I know that I have entered all the payments that I received this month along with all the expenses, and I know everything required to have been able to enter those transactions is done as well (for example if I have recorded a customer payment, I also know that the invoice was done).

The process itself is quite simple. You take your bank statement and ensure that each of the transactions on it match with what you have entered, and once this is done that the beginning and ending balances are. If you have mistakes, duplicate entries, or omissions this will highlight them very efficiently. I’ve found it particularly helpful in catching small discrepancies as a result of minor typos or incorrect rounding. In QuickBooks there is a separate function available to do reconcile, which tracks which transactions have been reconciled and generates a reconciliation report for each statement you do this for.

To make sure reconciliation gets done you need to setup a trigger as explained in tip #3. The natural temptation is to use receiving the statement itself as the trigger, but I’ve found it’s far too easy to toss it on your desk and leave it for “later”. In this case I again cast my vote for a calendar appointment, made several days after you expect to have received the statement. A subtle bonus is that if your statement gets lost in the mail you will notice its absence.

Tip #5: If You Get Stuck, Enter it Anyway and Seek Help Later

I still run into transactions that I’m not sure how to enter correctly, and when first starting out with QuickBooks it felt like half entries fell into this category. I used to let this stop me dead in my bookkeeping tracks since I refused to enter the transaction until I could find some help on how to get it entered correctly. I had quite a few of these unentered transactions, and once I knew that even if I entered what I could my books would still be missing lots of data there was no longer any motivation to keep them updated regularly.

I’ve realized now it’s much better to do my best at entering anything I’m stuck on, write down the questionable transaction, and double-check the list with a bookkeeper later on. In going through this improved process I found that I had in fact entered most things correctly after all (if not necessarily in the most efficient way), or had only minor errors to fix.

Tip #2 really helps here since by understanding the underlying accounting principles it’s much easier to make an educated guess with an entry and to know when something doesn’t seem to be entered right (ie. the wrong accounts have changed). Accounting packages also do a lot of work to ensure your books are balanced, which makes it harder to really mess things up.

Get those books up to date now!

That ends my five tips, although I can come up with more (future article perhaps?). Note that these tips have all focused on setting up a system for keeping your books up to date. This is key since trying to do bookkeeping adhoc and promising yourself you’ll keep at it just won’t work. We’ve looked at remedying this through tips on getting the right tools and knowledge, setting up regular processes to ensure your transactions get entered, and verifying this data.

Disclaimer: I’m neither accountant nor attorney nor likely live in the same country as you. This article is not intended as tax or legal advice and does not replace such advice. Consult a professional before acting on anything you have read on this blog. I’ve found the tips above helpful personally, but cannot guarantee the accuracy of the article.

When I first wrote about the business usefulness of mind mapping I came up short when it came to recommending mind mapping applications. Mindjet’s MindManager is great if you are willing to foot a $349 bill ($229 for basic version), but unfortunately that places this invaluable tool out of the hands of the entrepreneurs and small business owners that could benefit greatly from it.

FreeMind 0.80 is the first free replacement I have been able to find that is intuitive and slick enough to provide a worthwhile replacement. Mind mapping is a rapid process requiring an intimite link between the mind and the resulting mind map. The clunky basic interfaces that I previously experienced with other free (and commercial) applications just weren’t suitable for the process. Creating a map in FreeMind is a freely flowing process with minimal interface gripes (I strongly recommend setting the “Selection” setting to “Click” to avoid your selected node changing when you hover the mouse over a different one). It supports the nifty and arguably essential concepts of clouds and icons as well, and with some playing around with formatting the maps don’t need to be the dull grey color.

I have successfully used FreeMind the past week in all my software design work. I’ve decided the application is stable and useful enough to actually entrust my work files to it. If you haven’t had the chance to experience mind mapping due to the relatively high entry barrier for software, I highly recommend this.

Case in point: I’m putting together my yearly accounts for Tilted Pixel, inputting all those transactions that haven’t quite made it in yet. In doing so I had to dig up a customer’s information and found an interesting note I must have made years ago in the customer’s file - “Last payment - $74 CAD” - no date of course. I honestly don’t remember why I ever thought to store that information, but at the time it was written it presented reliable data. As time moved forward the note rapidly lost any usefulness it may have once held. Was $74 really the customer’s last payment? Doubtful considering this was never my accounting system, and that I currently use QuickBooks. So when was this payment actually made? What if I was backtracking to fix an accounting error? The information is useless.

Luckily I’m much more organized now and recognize the importance of dates. This is the only reason I can now take a two month stack of papers and input them just as easily as if I had done so each day.

Bonus tip: when writing down a phone number write down the name too. Seems obvious, but I just threw out a whole stack of scrap papers with unidentified numbers that I had written down hastily when on the phone.

Steve Pavlina already explains the difference between urgent but immaterial tasks and highly important ones that can be put off indefinitely. There’s no sense repeating what Steve has already done so I will leave it to you to read his article for perspective and tips on avoiding falling into the trap that I describe above. I’d like to focus on the class A and B types of tasks that Steve describes, in other words the tasks that will provide a meaningful future result. Steve describes them as tasks that yield benefits over 5+ and 2 year timespans respectively. I find myself thinking of the class A tasks as Great Pursuits, and the class B tasks as mostly ones that feed back into accomplishing the Great Pursuits (why would your shorter term accomplishments not be harmonious with your longer term ones?).

I recently learned some valuable lessons and made some tough decisions to re-allocate my time so as to be able to pull myself further ahead. I have a natural tendency of taking on too many tasks, something that I need to consciously watch about myself to avoid overload. In August I chose to challenge myself by simultaneously running Tilted Pixel, teaching two labs for first year business at Laurier, taking on a full time course load (I am pursuing business and computer science degrees), and continuing to write this blog. For the most part this actually worked, but starting mid November things got too hectic to reasonably handle. Everything had to suffer some level of stress fracture with this kind of load, but with the lack of firm deadlines it was inevitably the blog that simply had to be put on hold. Side note: In six particularly horrendous days in December I wrote a final exam, spent the next two days up all night fixing a web server emergency, slept for for a day, then studied for and wrote 3 exams in three days.

This experience got me thinking on the importance of not only allocating enough Class A task time to get somewhere, but of the importance of carefully choosing the Great Pursuits to be taken on. Achieving anything great inevitably requires a substantial regular effort, and certain life-long goals like being physically fit don’t provide much opportunity for rescheduling into the future (yet due to their far off nature are easy to dismiss). Being an entrepreneur and loving variety and ambition I constantly have more opportunities than I can possibly take on. I have found very quickly that not all great sounding opportunities are great for me. Much more painfully I have at times had to re-allocate time away from unfinished Great Pursuits, sacrificing one ambition for the good of the success of the whole.

Clearly there’s a limit to how many goals can be effectively chased at a time. With too many great opportunities at once it becomes impossible to accomplish any. How do you choose these Great Pursuits? I don’t have the full answer, but the approach I am taking now places heavy emphasis on favoring those that are:

1. Strongly in-line with my beliefs and eventual goals.
2. Within my existing or desired circle of competence.
3. Holds a high likelihood of success given the appropriate attention.

In coming up with these I adopted the spirit of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, a rather amazing research project and must-read.

These sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to get distracted chasing opportunities based on immediately attractive criteria like fast cash, easy results, or a particularly glamorous end-result. These criteria happily ignore the feasibility or real results of the chosen pursuit. One such mistake I made was in spending several months on a terrific business idea that I was perfectly suited to develop from a technical standpoint, but had not the resources nor knowledge to have any hope of growing the business idea beyond a business petri-dish. My mind happily skipped over this core competence gap, instead choosing to focus on what I could accomplish immediately and the money making potential of the venture. The business is now closed, the lessons have been learned, and I am unlikely to attempt it again.

More recently I decided to experiment with affiliate marketing and Google Adwords due to my interest in the success stories and popularity of this particular money generating fad. This time around I was much more realistic with my expectations, setting aside money I was prepared to lose and ensuring that the knowledge and experience I gleaned would be proportional to the time and cash I was putting into this (in this case my ulterior motive was learning more about using Adwords to advertise effectively). My approach allowed this failed experiment to still yield worthwhile benefits, but looking back I don’t feel that I would have attempted this if I had been using the criteria that I outline above (there are simply closer matching ways I could have used the time and capital).

In contrast to the misadventures above, a venture like Tilted Pixel meets the criteria that I’ve outlined. It’s not easy or low risk by any stretch of the imagination, but it falls within my core competence (strong website development background, entrepreneurial capability), lines up with my long-term goals, and gives me strong reason to believe that determination will equal success. It’s a Great Pursuit that I can carry out, and be confident that my efforts are working towards a purposeful goal.

What are your Great Pursuits? What kind of tasks should you venture forth with the fullest ambition and make your priority? What seemingly good projects aren’t going to realistically mix with your competencies and goals, even if they are good opportunities?

Where’d Matt Go?

Two months ago I disappeared almost entirely from blogging since I wrote my previous post. I stopped writing my blog, I stopped reading other people’s blogs, and I most definitely stopped paying attention to the myriad of statistics that I normally track for this blog. I did this because I simply ran out of time, much more so than I had ever imagined. This shortage repeatedly extended itself as I found myself picking-up more website work, marking business student exams, finding a better place to live, handling a failing hardware emergency, and finishing off what was technically a school term.

Truthfully I didn’t intend to stay away this long, but I fell into the trap of breaking the blogging habit. Much like exercise, dieting, or anything else that requires a regular commitment, a short pause became a very long one. By the new year I could have been writing again, but I put it off longer. Today I decided enough was enough.

The Blog’s Been a Bit Neglected

The break has proved to be an interesting experiment for this blog itself. A big deal is made about how blogging encourages links, viral spreading of content, search engines love it, it prevents global warming, and so on. Not blogging for two months is a massive setback. Inevitably daily readership is lost, RSS fails, rankings crumble, and traffic goes down the tube. I’ve noticed all of these happen and in my return I’ve prepared for the worst. Here’s the sometimes surprising good and bad of the past two months:

1. December was terrible: it must have been the holidays, as traffic and Adsense revenues both plummeted at an alarming rate. January has shown an awesome rebound.
2. The Comments Keep Coming In: real human beings are still reading. I still regularly receive comments on my previous articles.
3. Search engines still love me: my page rank may have dropped from 5 to 4, but the search referals are going strong. A single well written article really does mean a lifetime of traffic.
4. I no longer remember my Amazon Associates password by heart.
5. I have a back-up business opportunity: thanks to my lost virginity article, I will forever have a strong presence with people searching for “virginity stories”. It’s one of my top searches.
6. This blog does have serious passive income potential: the fact that I have continued to earn money and receive traffic while doing absolutely no updating or promotion of the blog is proof positive that it does have passive income stream qualities. Every penny I have made since I stopped writing is money that has come in regardless of what I have been up to. In the blog’s current form this hasn’t amounted to much, but hey it’s less than a year old!
7. Most blog’s don’t make it a year for a reason: this has been a very time consuming project and I can understand now why I hear about the failure rates of blogs so frequently. It can be demoralizing in these early stages to see a relatively low return on your efforts, and when much higher return activities are available it can be difficult to put in the proper time to this blog. Nevertheless I am determined to beat the statistic, and I am positive that with patience I can make this one of the top blogs out there.

I’m going to continue on writing about entreprenurial topics, and now that I get to manage my business fulltime I hope to have some interesting new insights and stories to tell. To anybody that’s been checking this thing for two whole months, thanks for sticking by me!

I like the idea of this service thanks to two important points:

1. Reviewers are not required to write positive reviews.
2. All paid posts must be labelled as such.

Due to the impact that blogging has had on the internet, marketers have been trying to get bloggers to write about their stuff in exchange for products or cash. Many of these are intended to be hidden advertising masquarading as the writer’s personal opinion. Other blog marketing attempts are simply brutually misguided. Neither situation is really good.

Review Me sounds like it’s on the right track to fix the above. Part of the reason to read blogs in the first place is honesty that doesn’t exist in mainstream media and advertisements. If people’s words start being purchased secretly, this credibility will be diminished. Indeed any blogger who becomes known to secretly endorse products will very quickly suffer reputational problems. Additionally who on earth really wants to read paid endorsements labelled as reviews? Clearly you won’t get both sides of the story. The points I stated address both these issues, and I applaud Review Me for instituting these rules despite the potential for them to lose some sales.

So how does Review Me actually work? You sign-up and provide some very basic information about your blog and preferred payment method (cheque or PayPal). It took me all of 5 minutes to sign-up and my blog was approved automatically as well as being assigned a ranking. This is very refreshing in a time where most services require confirmation of your payment info through some lengthy authentication process taking weeks to setup. Once signed-up, a blog is then listed in the Review Me marketplace where marketers can offer to purchase spots on the blog. If the blogger accepts the review then he/she becomes obligated to write it within 48 hours. I’m still not sure if products are delivered to the reviewer, or if the reviewer is limited to products they have used in the past. This will be interesting to find out.

Provided I’m actually offered reviews to write (the Review Me one is automatic, but after this advertisers have to actually request a review on my blog), I pledge to only to accept reviews for relevant products and to say only my honest opinion even if that means tearing a bad product apart. I signed-up for this service in the first place since I already do the occassional book review, and as part of making this blog pay for the time I devote to it I am always seeking ways of generating income from it without harming the blog’s credibility. If the service does take-off it certainly may provide a solution that fits the needs of advertisers, bloggers, and most importantly, readers of blogs.

This is an unbiased paid advertisement.