This weekend updating Quickbooks Online occupied a full afternoon. As with everything else of late, I’ve gone totally lâche with that project. Not, in this case, out of raw laziness but because Intuit seems to discourage users from backing up Cloud-based data onto local computers. Because I couldn’t find instructions for any back-up other than one that would download to an installed Quickbooks program, I’d decided I would enter transactions first in Excel and then, when time allowed, re-key them into QB Online so as to simplify my accountant’s life.
Well. As usual, time did not allow.
So I ended up entering transactions dating back to last May, for The Copyeditor’s Desk’s checking account and for its credit-card transactions. This of course entails creating new “client” and “vendor” entries and a number of other antics. Time-consuming but not at all difficult. The only annoyance is that my iMac is soooooo old it runs at the speed of a galloping snail. Having to wait anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes for each plug of data to upload eventually will drive you to tear your hair.
At any rate, moments after I contrived a workaround for the download issue (in Firefox right-click to “print frame”, then print to PDF; this will store the entire page—not just a screenshot), what should I find hidden away in an obscure corner but a way to download to Excel (create a Journal report, pulling all your data into one place; then on that page you’ll have an option to download to any of several formats, one of which is Excel).
w00t!
This will obviate the double-dose of work.
I’m pretty pleased with QB Online. That, I suppose, is because I don’t allow Intuit to reach out to my credit union and brokerage accounts. As long as all it’s doing is tracking data, you don’t enter any sensitive passwords. Thus the risk of hacking is low. About all a hacker can do is scramble your data, and if you’re backing up to Excel every time you go online, the world will not end if that happens.
This year I used QB Online only for the corporation’s account, and that at my accountant’s request. It’s very orderly, and because it standardizes the way everything is entered, it allows none of my creative schemes for entering various reminders and comments in Excel. This is good for the accountant, very good. And she can run her software on the data from the Cloud, hugely reducing the cost of tax preparation.
Because my personal accounts are fairly complex—counting the joint account into which M’hijito and I pour cash for the accursed mortgage, I ride herd on five checking and savings accounts and two credit card accounts—in 2011 I decided to try QB only on the relatively simple corporate books. But starting in January, I’m definitely going to take out a second subscription for the personal books. This will hugely simplify the bookkeeping, and especially the tax accounting.
Speaking of the books, despite a budget overrun in discretionary spending (yasss…in exactly the amount of the dentist’s bill for cleaning my teeth), I’ll still come in with $166 to spare this month. This is because nondiscretionary bills drop radically in the winter. Water and electric each dropped almost $100 in November. Lhudly sing huzzah.
If these bills rise much higher, though, I can’t imagine how I’ll get through the summers. One utility company in the West Valley has announced a scheme to raise customer’s water bills by 83 percent!!! That’s a private water company, but I’m sure if it gets away with that, the municipalities will soon follow suit.
LOL! That “$166 to spare” is a relative term: I’m having to draw down $2000± from savings each month to make ends meet. Some of it is reimbursed during the eight months the community colleges pay me an adjunct’s pittance, but that amount is nowhere near two grand and it doesn’t come in when bills are at their highest. So the truth is, every month I’m running in the red, since I can’t afford to use savings while the stock market is jerking around like a weather balloon in a hurricane.
In the catching up department, I finally got around to cleaning out the storage shed and the hidden corner behind it where pots and junk reside on brick-and-board shelves. What a mess! It took all morning of one day plus half the afternoon on another day to shovel through the debris, clean up the wads of composting leaves, and haul the junk to the garbage can in the alley.
This, in light of the possibility that I might put the house on the market.
As it develops, Gerardo and his sidekick haven’t been doing such a hot job on cleaning up the leaves and pods that sift down there every day from the devil-pod tree. They can’t be too severely blamed—I’ve left a great collection of broken pottery and other priceless collectibles laying around out there, to the extent that the place had begun to look like Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. Old leaves and bougainvillea flowers were packed tight under the boards that form the lowest b&b “shelves,” partly because you couldn’t easily walk around the junk back there to get at the mess.
Six years of dust had accrued inside the shed, which I haven’t seriously cleaned since I moved into this house. Think I breathed most of it in while sweeping it off the shelves in there—this morning the throat still feels like it’s made of sandpaper, and I’m still coughing. Should get up and drop a Sudafed, I suppose. Yuch.
Now, consider this: What happens when you begin to think seriously about putting your house on the market?
Yes. Everything breaks!
Saturday I turned on the oven’s self-clean cycle. Leapt back a half-foot when the thing emitted a jackhammer-decibel BDRDRDRDRDRDRDR! Dayum!
So now I’ll have to get a workman in here to see if that can be fixed. There’s an outside chance it’s a fan. But if its not…well. Satan and Proserpine, in the course of renovating the kitchen, installed a freaking double oven in there. They come as part of a single unit. You can’t just replace one oven. You have to replace them both!
Joy. A comparable 27-inch unit will run around $2,000, plus delivery plus installation plus the 10% sales tax. So we’re lookin’ at a $2,500 hit here.
And where is that hit gonna come from? Yup. Out of retirement savings. Just now monthly disposable/short-term emergency savings contains all of $1,379. So having to buy a new oven will clean that out completely and drain survival savings by another thousand bucks.
The inside of the house will need at least some paint, too. The white trim is filthy and dinged up, the door I put on my office so I could lock it securely never did get painted, and that terra-cotta orange hallway is going to have to be painted a subtler color. Ditto the puce orange accent wall in my office that never got painted over because it’s too much hassle to drag the heavy furniture and navigate the tangle of computer cables. God knows what that’s going to cost.
I…need…a…JOB!
What about taking the $166 or a portion of it and setting it aside for nex summers water bill? For utilities and the like, we actually put aside the same amount every month, kind of dividing what the total annual cost is expected to be and contributing 1/12 every month. The water bill fund grows over the winter but then shrinks over the summer. The gas bill fund does the opposite.
Just a thought?
@ Money Beagle: Normally I budget for summer all year round, so in fact if bills don’t go up much more, there’s enough to cover the summer bills…especially if I get teaching work in the summer. I’ll probably use the $166, or most of it, for Christmas presents for my son and the Christmas Eve choir potluck.
Wall ovens are so expensive. I replaced wall oven and cooktop with a range–at about 25% of the cost. Would I rather have a wall oven–yes. Wall oven cabinetry became a pantry.
For the dust-induced coughing, try a saline nasal flush. It’s the only thing that quieted my middle of the night coughing fit after cleaning out my parents’ attic. I’m not talking saline spray, I’m talking “I think I’m drowning” saline flush, using a Neti pot or one of the preparations you can buy in a chain drugstore.
Could you sell the house ‘as is’ and negociate the broken oven as part of the selling price. Does the other oven still work? Maybe just a few cosmetic jobs will make the house more ‘sellable’.
@ Ash: I’d need to get as much as possible from the house. Competition is so hot right now that if the appliances aren’t working, people will just go someplace else. You can get VERY nice places for well under 200 grand now…like that place in Moon Valley I covet. It’s much nicer than this house.
The other oven is small and not self-cleaning. For anyone who actually cooks, it’s the next thing to useless.
@ Frugalscholar: The wall oven is nice, but if the kitchen were larger I really would rather have the cabinet space there. Certainly I’d rather have an extra cabinet in there than an extra (useless) oven.
It is amazing how much utilities vary across the country!
“Water and electric each dropped almost $100 in November”
Water by me is like 15 bucks a quarter, but my 1600 square foot condo consumes about $200 worth of electricity and another $80 of heat per month.
@ Evan: Do you average your power bills over the year?
Because I have an electric heat pump, the cost of heating the house is part of the electric bill. But I rarely do heat it: the weather gets cold enough to turn on the heat only about a week or two a winter, and because heat pumps are highly inefficient when exterior temps approach 32 degrees, it’s hardly worth turning it on then. I use space heaters instead, which most days create nice puddle of comfort wherever I happen to be.
Water is heated by gas and the stovetop (not the oven) runs on gas. My gas bill runs from about $18 to about $30 a month.
If I averaged my electric bill over the year, the monthly tab would come to something around $200 or $220, so I’m told. How we arrive at that figure mystifies me, since the high bills of about $220 occur in only two or three months, but that’s what the power company claims. I’d rather have six or eight months of bills that run around $100 and take the hit in July and August than have summer-sized bills all year round. It’s just that…gee, it would be nice if my pretend job were in session during July and August.