Some people lead charmed business lives whilst others have to really work just to avoid going under.

What is the difference? What is the secret? What makes them successful?

You’re not going to like the answer. But it will help.

You see, the secret is something we all know, but forget. It’s one of those “yeah, yeah, I know these things”. It is easily glossed over. It is easily ignored. BUT IT IS CRUCIAL.

Business is very simply about profit. Simply said but not so simply done perhaps? It is for some – and it can be for you too.

Okay then, so how is it done?

Some things in business are a total drudge. Tedious beyond belief. And most people get on with the interesting stuff instead. Customer focus IS important, and fun – customers are people and they’re always interesting. Having a good product IS important. People are buying it so it had better be good or you’ll be the most hated person in the world. Products are fun. They are your “babies” your creations even if only because you picked those specific ones to sell.

People and Products aren’t THE key to growing your business. There is a step that must be done first if you are to succeed. It’s the drudge one.

When I was mentored by a multi-millionaire that owned more commercial and residential property than I could visit much less own or even manage, the first thing he had me do was a budget. Income and expenses. What did you make? What did you spend?

I knew all about budgets. I’d done them before.

I failed to notice that I’d never gotten rich out of how I’d done them before.

I followed the letter of the law, as I understood it. I did a budget. Every month. For what seemed like forever.

That’s a lot of budgets. A lot of work.

But it turns out it isn’t the amount of sweat you put in. It isn’t how hard you work at it. It isn’t how deserving you are of success. It isn’t the doing that counts. It’s what you do with it that counts.

Okay. You probably already knew that but it takes me some time to catch on.

To grow a business you need to examine your current income and expenses and you don’t just budget for “next month will probably be similar”.

It’s your business. You run it. You’re at the helm. There’s rocks to the left and smooth seas to the right. If you’re drifting to the left, “probably similar” won’t get you to smooth seas.

The secret to growing a business (even keeping it afloat) is to do the books, examine the cash flow and do some steering. “More of the same” always leads to the circumstances you are currently in. No steering equals going nowhere.

You need to work out your income and expenses each month AND THEN see what you can change.

If you can cut expenses somewhere, you make more money each month and the business can get bigger. You have to know what you are spending to know what you can cut.

Cutting doesn’t have to mean getting less. It can be getting just as much but at a better rate. Shop around. How do other people do this? Does it cost them as much as you’re paying?

If you don’t do the drudge work up front you don’t know what your main expenses really are. A gut feeling, a “its probably …” can lead you to a lot of wasted effort. Fixing the phone bill when your internet costs are out the roof may feel good but it will achieve little. Growing a business requires focusing on the things that matter.

There’s a second part to the income and expenses, to the cash flow report. That’s the income. You can only cut expenses so far. At best you can get close to zero. But then there’s nowhere to go from there. Business growth depends on growing your income too. That doesn’t have a limit like expenses does.

You need to look at your Income and do some steering there too. Okay. This, this and this are doing well. What about that one? How can we improve that in the coming month? What would cause that to contribute more?

I hope this has got you thinking and your future is looking rosier.

Remember it isn’t the nobleness of how hard you sweat over the books. That doesn’t count for anything. It only gives you less time to do something with the information.

If you’d like to cut out the effort and focus on making your business succeed, you might want to check out our tool to do the income and expense drudgery for you.

It costs $25.00 USD and you’ll easily recoup that as you save time every month thereafter.

I spent eight hours yesterday trying to get a webpage for another site working in HTML5. It just didn’t make the slightest bit of sense.

I’d make changes to the CSS file and nothing would happen. I’d refresh and clear the browser cache but it still wouldn’t work.

Yet adding style to the element in the html file worked.

The CSS file was there. You could even see it as a Resource in the Chrome Developer’s Tools.

However, the Developer’s Tools was only showing some of the CSS information.

Cause

It turns out that Chrome ignores your CSS file if it isn’t served with a MIME type of “text/css”; despite being in a tag that says ‘link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=…’.

I’m not sure if it is only this fussy when you stick in a <!DOCTYPE html> tag (html5).

Solution

The CSS file was being generated by a PHP script on the server so the solution was to add a line at the top like:
header(‘Content-type: text/css’);

The version of GnuCash that I’m using at the moment (2.4.2) doesn’t have an option to export the data.

It makes sense – a lot of programs these days are happy to import data from other programs they are replacing; but are reluctant to provide information for anything replacing it. Still, it’s not really a very “Open Source” attitude.

It is really just a minor annoyance because GnuCash is Open Source and they’ve done a lot of good things which does make exporting possible. One example is the use of XML for the data so, * in theory *, you can get the information into anything else in any format imaginable. In practice, it is a little harder.

The Easiest Way

It really was very very simple to Export. You just pick Reports, Transaction Report, Select All Accounts, Sort by Date, include the things you need, and don’t do any totalling.
You got a nice report listing everything.

Then you click the top left and drag to the bottom right of the report, copy, and paste wherever you want (Excel worked great).

The only slight inconvenience was the report was fairly long and you had to drag for some time (Ctrl-A = Select All, would have been nice).

Unfortunately, when I upgraded to 2.4.2 I could no longer select All Accounts. Maybe it is a feature. Maybe it’s a bug that is being fixed.

The Workaround

You can still make it work if you select Assets and Liabilities, export that, select Income and Expenses, and export those.
It is a bit harder, and you do end up with duplicates that aren’t totally obvious, but it does work and it is easier than any other option I’ve tried.

The report settings I use are:

To QIF

There is a great little tool that will take a GnuCash data file and create a QIF file from it. This is neat because we usually get data in from a QIF file. Going back to QIF makes it a symmetric process – you can get back what went in.

The other neat thing is the author wrote it in Java so it should run under any Operating System.

You do need to un-ZIP the gnucash data file but that is easily done. On Windows I use 7Zip but you could just as easily use WinZip or Windows’ built in tool. With earlier versions of GnuCash you had to fix the XML header but that has already been fixed in 2.4.2

The program is GnuCashToQIF.

It simply asks for the XML file to convert and where to put the QIF.

You can open the QIF file in Notepad, copy the content, and paste it into Sheet1 of the following Excel spreadsheet. It has a macro which will read the raw QIF information and make a transaction list in Sheet2. Use Alt-F8 QIFtoSheet to run the macro.
NOTE: Excel loses “$” at the start of split lines in the QIF so this doesn’t work well if you have a lot of splits.
Also, the Java program outputs unix style newlines which looks wierd (no line breaks) in many Windows programs. However, Excel will happily process the information.

The spreadsheet is QIFtoExcel-Example

Easy Ways for Lucky People

If you have installed GnuCash with a MySQL database there is probably an SQL select statement that will export the data in one step.

GnuCash is a free accounting package based on double-entry bookkeeping.

It supports multiple accounting files (so you can have multiple businesses) but you can also have a separate file for each financial year of the business.

If you do use a new file for each year, each year you need to create a new file with the same account structure (Chart of Accounts) and with a new set of opening balances. The way to do this is not as obvious as it should be.

The Hard Way

Use “File”, “Save As” from your current year’s file to create a new file with a new name. Open the new file. Delete all the transactions.

This isn’t as easy as it could be because you can’t select multiple transactions: Open the first account. Select the first transaction. Click the “Delete” button. You are now on the next transaction. Click the Delete button again. Repeat this for every transaction in the account. Open the next account. Delete all transactions just like you did with the first account. Repeat this for every account.

If you have lots of transactions and lots of accounts this can take some time. At least a couple of hours in my case.

The Seemingly Easy Way

GnuCash has a menu option “Tools”, “Close Book”.

This is well-intentioned but doesn’t remove any transactions. It adds two more. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It does say this in the manual or guide.

What it actually does is add one transaction to all of your Income accounts transferring the money to another account (such as Equity:Opening Balances) and one transaction transferring all of your expenses to another account (often the same one: Equity:Opening Balances). Each transaction is split across all of the Income or Expense accounts and the total is balanced by a matching amount in the nominated transfer account (Equity:Opening Balances).

It is a neat solution from an accountant’s point of view. No information is lost. The Income and Expense accounts are all zero-ed ready for the new year and the opening balances have been tweaked to reflect the new starting position.

However, for those of us that don’t think like an accountant, it is a pain in the neck. We’d reconciled all of last year’s transactions. We’ve been through that pain, and we never want to have to re-reconcile those transactions ever again. We don’t want them there to edit by mistake (and mess up the starting balances). We want a clean slate. We wanted an empty file and a new start for a new year. It would also have been nice to have had new opening balances for each of the asset and liability accounts. Their balances are correct but not because of a fresh opening balance transaction. They are correct because every transaction in every asset and liability account is still there.

If you do “Tools”, “Close Book” and want to reverse it, that’s pretty easy. Go to the “Equity:Opening Balances” account (or whichever you specified) and delete the two transactions. That will undo all of the splits entered into all of the Income and Expense accounts.

Anyway, this menu tool does a very good job for accountants and does it very well and eligently; but it isn’t what most of us are looking for.

The Solution

Anyone who has been using GnuCash for a while has probably already said, “What on earth are you doing?”
It is actually incredibly easy. Provided you know how. It is one of those “You have to be there to be able to get there” things.
It is probably even documented somewhere and I just didn’t notice it.
Maybe it is self evident and so obvious that no-one would even think of explaining it.

You create a new file by “File”, “Export”, “Accounts”.
Choose the directory where you want the new file and give it a name that matches your convention for business and year.
Now, pretend you haven’t created an export of some information from your existing account file. Pretend it is a new account file just like your current one. Use “File”, “Open” and select the export file. It opens. You can add transactions to it. It has your existing accounts. There are no transaction in it (until you add one). All of the Income and Expense balances are zero. So are the Asset, Liability and Equity accounts; but it is a much better starting point.

Add the opening balances of your Asset and Liability accounts and you are up and running.

GnuCash is a free accounting package that allows you to manage multiple businesses. You place each business in a separate file. You can have as many businesses as you need. It is a very workable arrangement.

What are the downsides?

The version I am currently using (2.2.9) saves some settings globally that I sometimes prefer were specific to a file. For example, importing data saves mappings globally. If you have a bank account common to two businesses you may want map it as an expense (or loan) for one company and an income source (or liability) for the other company. It needs to be mapped to different accounts depending which company you are importing into.

You can’t look at the big picture. Each business has a separate GnuCash file so you can’t see the overall result. The alternative is to put the lot in one big file but then you can’t see how each business is doing on its own.

GnuCash records the movement of money. Where this is internal to a business or between the business and the wider world this works fine. Money moving between related entities ends up needing to be entered twice. Once for each business.

If you forget to load one half of the transaction (ie in the other business) it will show up when you reconcile the other business. However, it would be better if you could load both bits at the same time.

The Longer Term Solution

The people that develop GnuCash have done lots of improvements over the years and they’ll probably come up with good solutions to these. In the meantime the issues are minor.

The Shorter Term Solution – Excel

On my small laptop, GnuCash takes a while to load. This is surprising because something as big and complex as Excel loads faster. In some ways it is easier to load GnuCash transactions into Excel than into GnuCash. The downside is Excel doesn’t have the nice data entry features that GnuCash does. For example in GnuCash you can enter “ex:4:ra” for “Expenses:4 Main Street:Rates”.

The other thing about Excel is it isn’t GnuCash. GnuCash does a lot of good things that accounting packages are supposed to do. These are things like keeping track of account balances and producing useful reports. A spreadsheet is good for recording transactions. It is not, without a lot of additions, an accounting package.

The following file will let you add transactions in Excel and then generate a QIF file for each business. Use Alt-F8 to run macros and then choose “ToQIF”. It creates QIF files in the same directory as the spreadsheet. You can Import these into GnuCash.

Transactions-Example

My kids have icons for lots of different online games on their desktop.

How you do this depends on your desktop (Operating System) and your browser.

Internet Explorer

For Internet Explorer and Windows (XP/Vista/7) the following works:

- Copy the URL from the browser address bar (select the text, then press Ctrl-C or right-click then choose Copy)

- Right-click the desktop and choose “New” then “Shortcut”.

- You should see something like:

- Click in the “location of the item” box and paste the URL (Ctrl-V or right-click then choose Paste)

- Click Next.

- You will see something like:

- Type a name for the shortcut. This is the text that appears under the icon on your desktop.

- Click “Finish”.

- You will find a new icon on your desktop. It won’t look like this:

(unless you are doing a shortcut to this website).

Chrome

With Chrome (on Windows) it is even easier.

- Click the spanner icon (top right)

- Choose “Tools”, “Create application shortcuts…”.

- You’ll see:

- Click “Create”. You end up with the tab in its own window AND a desktop shortcut that will open it at any time in the future.

The question concerned zero-click scanning multiple pages. The idea was to just replace pages and have the computer scan the next.

It is actually a pretty good idea. The only “gotcha” is telling the computer to stop. Still, this is possible by terminating a looping program (press Ctrl-Break).

One of the people (scruss) answering suggested using CmdTwain with a time delay which was a pretty good answer. Here is how you could do this:

'
' Zero-click Scanning (after you run this)
'

NumPages = 10      ' scan upto 10 pages (you might not want this to be 1000)
TimePerScan = 5000 ' 5000 mS ie 5 seconds to change pages

Dim FSO, SH
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set SH  = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

' outdir must end with a \
outdir=SH.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%USERPROFILE%") & "\My Documents\"
opts  ="/DPI=300 /JPG100"
prog  ="C:\Program Files\Gss Ezisoft\CmdTwain Free\CmdTwain.exe"

for page = 1 to NumPages

    ' Get a filename that doesn't already exist
    for i=1 to 10000
        fn="scan-" & right("0000" & i,4) & ".jpg"
        if not FSO.FileExists(outdir & fn) then exit for
    next

   ' Quoting allows it to contain spaces
   SH.Run """" & prog & """ " & opts & " """ & outdir & fn & """",0,true

   ' Wait for next page
   WScript.Sleep TimePerScan

next

set SH  = nothing
set FSO = nothing

Save the above in scan10.vbs on your desktop then:
- Load the first page,
- Be ready to load the next nine pages, and
- Double-click the desktop icon.

Feel free to edit the NumPages and TimePerScan to suit your preferences.
The pages end up in “My Documents”.

To control archiving in Outlook, select Tools, Options, the “Other” tab, and click on AutoArchive:

You’ll see something like this:

The checkbox I’ve circled in red turns AutoArchive on or off. If you don’t want to AutoArchive (for example because it: is annoying, takes up processing power, or doesn’t save a copy of any of your emails) untick the checkbox.

If the checkbox is ticked, your emails will be archived.

The other checkbox is the one I’ve circled in blue. That one determines whether Outlook tells you when it is AutoArchiving or not. The main benefit of being told is that you can say, “Not right now” if you’re on a computationally challenged laptop and are already trying to get it to do stuff you need done.

Why Archive?

Mainly it is about moving old email out of the main Outlook .pst file so that Outlook has fewer things to look through when you ask it to find something. It also speeds up performance (a little) for other things too.

One benefit is that if your main Outlook file gets corrupted, you still have a chance that the email in your archive file is intact and readable.

What AutoArchive doesn’t do is save a copy of any of your email. If you lose email in Outlook (e.g. deleted and emptied, had a disk fail, reinstalled Outlook over your existing email) it is gone. It is always a good idea to backup important files and many emails contain crucial information so that means email too.

SaveMail Pro is a good tool (by us) for backing up Outlook email. With all the features it has now, I think you’d have a hard time finding one that is better value for money.

Well, here’s a starting point: Timesheet2.xls

Please feel free to replace the logo with your company’s one and to tweak it as you wish.

If you need help, you can always contact us.

If you’d like to avoid retyping the information into your company database or accounting system, get a copy of EziFiler.

SaveMail Pro version 1.00.0045 was released last night and it has some really great features.

It still allows you to save your Outlook email as MSG files that you can load back into Outlook somewhere else. It still allows you to save emails as text files or emails as text files and attachments as normal files you can open in Windows Explorer.

However, this version adds two more fantastic features (I like them):

• You can save email folder names with the email.
  This means if you’ve organized all your email, it stays organized.
• It has ClickYes support built in.*
  This means no more having to “Allow access for XX minutes.”

The new output (with Folders and DIR turned on) looks like:

Pretty cool, eh?

* You have to install ClickYes for SaveMail to use it – but that’s easy because we’ve included it as an optional install.