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Every Friday, I post a small insight into running Curio City and/or Blue Hills Editorial Services. My most recent posts are directly below. You can also start with the first post, or use the subject labels to the right to home in on particular topics. Feel free to comment on anything that interests you.
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Friday, February 24, 2012

Big Black February Numbers

Yes, I know today’s only the 24th, and I know that this February has 29 days, and I know that I ought to add a fifth week to fiscal February instead of shifting four days into fiscal March. But a five-week February would blow my mind. March will bring the accounting calendar back into harmony with the real calendar.
February
 

Total income: +59.4%
Total COGS: +96.6%
Payroll: +8.4%
Marketing: +69%
Net Income (Profit): +60.3%

Year to Date:

 

Total income: +14.9%
Total COGS: +34.8%
Payroll: +17.9%
Marketing: +33.1%
Net Income (Profit): -23.7%

Looks like a boom to me. Two big telephone sales kicked February over the top: The Create-a-Bird kite sale at the beginning of the month, and a big Animal Print Golf Ball sale today. Excel says I’m up $700 on LY and nearly $200 over plan. Quickbooks is downright breathless (as you see above), but QB doesn’t know that an invoice that I prepared as a price quote wasn’t a sale. As far as cash flow goes, it’s not all unicorns and daisies: I had to order inventory at the usual price to supply discounted sales -- hence the scary Cost of Goods Sold increase. I sacrificed bottom-line income to pay for that extra top-line income. From another perspective: Except in Q4, I want each month’s inventory purchases to be less than or equal to the cost of what I shipped that month; this month I had to order $200 more than I shipped.


March 2011 benefited from four unusually large Panther Vision cap and Switchables sales. I’m likely to lose the ground that I gained this month unless my Facebook advertising gamble hits paydirt. I made four sales of advertised items (Panther Vision caps and Switchables) within a few hours after the campaign went live on Tuesday. Then…quiet. I’ve picked up a few new followers but my FB referral traffic has barely budged from normal and I can’t trace a single sale to FB ads. But this was a school vacation week, and that means a lot of people are stuck at home babysitting instead of at work shopping. Next week will be a better gauge. So far, though, it looks like this is going to be a short experiment.


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Reasons to hate Quickbooks: I mentioned an autoupdate that will deactivate QB unless I buy the 2012 version. Fine. Requiring an upgrade instead of making customers want it is a fascist business tactic, but Intuit gets away with it. What I didn’t bargain for was losing the ability to resize the “Make deposits” dialog. That’s right: I can change the height but not the width, so now I have to use the scroll bar on this screen that I use nearly every day. How lousy does a developer have to be to break such basic Windows functionality?

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