Bookwork, and Some More Entertaining Work

Yes, I have finally been working on the books. Over the last two weekends I got all the 2013 transactions entered into my spreadsheets. 

I started the first weekend this month with entering purchases, which took a good chunk of Saturday. On that Sunday I did on-line sales. Not that I had a lot of them, but I had to go through and make sure I had copies of all the necessary bits and pieces of each transaction - Etsy, PayPal, and the USPS. 

Yes, these tasks would be a lot easier if I'd kept up with the books throughout the year. I'd started out the year well, but things went to heck in a handbasket about the time we decided to do ACen. Getting ready for ACen ate my brain for a month, doing ACen and going to Wiscon on back-to-back weekends killed it some more, and the bookwork never really recovered. 

Last weekend on Saturday we got all the sales done on the iWhatsit Point of Sale application in. The app happily spits out a CVS file that's easy to import into a spreadsheet, especially since I was willing to let the sales we'd done that way be in a different format in the books. But I also shift records from my inventory spreadsheet to my items sold spreadsheet. The POS (Point of Sale, not Piece of S***, which I always want to read POS as) actually made that easier - I dropped each event in as a individual spreadsheets, which I can sort, and re-sort as necessary to make various parts of the record-keeping process easier.

Sunday I was feeling very meh, so I didn't do any more with the books. We went shopping instead. We got a gate-leg table to put where the shelves were in the spare bedroom, for composing text on (on the wall to the left of the big bench): 

The table has been declared a "clean" surface - which means it should be safe to set paper on, as it shouldn't be grubbied up with ink, oil, etc.
 
The previous Friday we'd gotten two smaller kitchen carts, for the paper cutter and creaser:

Yeah, this Ikea thing is becoming a (very bad) habit.

The default state of the gate-leg table is with only the left wing up (facing it, big bench along the wall on the right). With the right wing up, you can't work at my press or open the end drawer of the big bench. But that wing can be put up if we need the table space. And if we want more space in the room we can drop both wings, and rotate the resulting very small thing parallel to the wall. An all-around win.  Ron modified three of the six drawers so that they can all be put in and taken out from one side, since the other is against the wall in the default position.

I need to get pictures of the whole room to give an idea of how its laid out.

Next furniture-ish purchase is probably shallow flat file drawers. A small set for the dining room for patterns, and a larger set for the print studio for paper, polymer plates (which should be stored flat), etc. I was planning on putting those where the gate-leg table is, but I have some other options. 

The 5-drawer units are about half the height of the larger units, same depth drawers, IIRC, as the ones in the dark large unit - pictures are not to scale.

Saturday and Sunday I also poked at new business card ideas/layouts. Still working on those.

Sunday evening we used one of the new polymer plates on a small piece of base in Ron's press, and printed "Letterpress Printing by Otter Necessities" and the website URL on the back of all 750 MuseCon coasters.