Better Money Management

This awesome book, "Dollars and Sense", taught me how my mind works when it comes to spending and saving. The authors outline a variety of techniques marketers know well, and now you can too. 

Problems with spending and saving include the following:

• ·         We forget to consider Opportunity Costs.
• ·         We spend Relatively.
• ·         We use Mental Accounting to budget.
• ·         Anchoring causes us to spend relative to our anchor.
• ·         We overvalue Fairness & Effort.  
• ·         We overvalue what we own already, also called the Endowment Effect.
• ·         We value Loss Aversion more highly than increases.
• ·         Language and Description affect our purchasing decisions.
• ·         We Discount the Future Value of Money.

After you hear all the ways you get into trouble financially, they outline ways you can succeed:

• ·         Consider Opportunity Costs as you budget.
• ·          Consider the Pleasure the purchase will bring to you
• ·          Consider the true Benefit a purchase will provide.  

If you think these tricks and techniques don't apply to you, what do think of this epigram:

"A wise woman knows herself to be a fool;

a foolish woman opens her wallet and removes all doubt."

QuickBooks Desktop Bank Feed Gone Wrong

As a systems analyst, I've developed a way to both do and teach QuickBooks Desktop bank feeds that utilize all the best practices, so that you'll have the best experience possible.

First download the bank feed file to the hard disk before importing it into the QB file.

Second, always run a backup before you import.

It may take a bit longer, but very little time if you do it automatically, and the disasters prevented more than make up for any time savings. It's when you least expect it that things go wrong.

Last week I did a bank feed for a client with a bank account at Washington Federal. I ran a QuickBooks backup, download the .qbo file to the hard disk, and then imported it. There was no vendor information and no memo field. How useless could that be? I went back to download it again and the bank website knew I had downloaded that date range and would not allow it again. So I ended up having to type in all the expense transactions to do the reconcile. The next day, the client called and asked me, "Did you run a backup before you imported the bank feed?"

He was stunned when I said, "Yes".

He was stunned because almost no one follows a systems approach to accounting. I've never had a single problem with a bank feed before, so why bother to run a backup every single time? I've seen a couple of problems from bank feeds because people call me when it goes wrong for them but I've never had one myself. After I explained to them that it's best procedures to download the file to the hard disk first, and did it that way, their bank feed was fine too. I never imagined that today's bank feed would be a disaster but it was. The bank feed hosed his customer list. Absolutely trashed it. I didn't even imagine that could happen as the bank feed is technically not inside of QuickBooks data file yet, and I had not imported a single transaction. But looking at QB data file before and after backup, that is exactly what happened. I only had a backup because I automatically make a backup before every bank feed. Every single time. Follow a systems approach to accounting and you'll have a much better experience in life.

Accepting Bitcoin Payments

Have you thought about accepting crypto currency in your business?

 All these definitions are thanks to Wikipedia. A Cryptocurrency (Crypto-currency) is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange, that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and very the transfer of assets.


Bitcoin, Litecoin -- these are types of crypto-currencies.

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency without a central bank or single administrator that can be sent from user-to-user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.

Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin. Litecoin is a peer-to-peer crypto currency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Creation and transfer of coins is based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority.

It's all techie and complicated. Youtube videos by Andreas M. Antonopoulos are a good place to start. I tried to read his first book but it was too technical to be helpful.

Do you conduct business internationally? Is it time for your business to accept crypto currency? I could help you with that business feature. Here is a great article on how to accept Bitcoin. I'd be setting you up with Coinbase and optionally Bitpay too. 3 ways to Accept Bitcoin Payment

Then you would need help in how crypto currency is taxed in the USA, which I now know about too. Therefore, I know how to do the accounting for buying and selling.  Also, if your need is for specialized bitcoin tax preparation help, I can refer you to a crypto tax preparer. Her name is Laura Walter. She calls herself the "Crypto Tax Girl". Her website is Crypto Tax Girl Website.

This is 100% more than I knew a month ago about this subject, and 100% more than the month before that. Perhaps my learning curve is as radical as the rise of Bitcoin. Between being out there working for very sharp small business owners (and very sharp non-profit managers), plus constant studying, I learn more about this subject every day!