Irene came into Vermont early Sunday morning, bring a lot of rain, which resulted in a lot of flooding in the southern and middle part of the state. Here, in our own little piece of the Northeast Kingdom we fared pretty well – mainly because we live pretty high up on a hill. While Irene did dump 5 1/2″ of rain in 12 hours on us, luckily we didn’t loose our power, our telephone, or our internet – others were not so lucky. Some towns in the southern part of the state got up to 10″ in that same 12 hour period, many lost their power, some still have no way to get in or out of town, due to the rivers flooding and washing out roads and bridges.
This is what the Vermont road closure map looked like at about 8 p.m. last night.
For everyone effected by Irene along the East Coast, our thoughts are with you.
Small business owners frequently experience stress and burnout – and I have to admit that I’m no different. Last week was a very bad week – in reality it wasn’t any different than any other week, but it did effect me differently. By rights it should have been a great week because our company celebrated 11 years of being in business on August 16, 2011.
Last week I read a really great blog post from blogging painters called Summer Blues or Burnout? (I really suggest that you pop on over and read it to). As I read it, I felt that John (the author) was talking about me instead of painting contractor when he mentioned:
lack of enthusiasm he was feeling about his business, his chosen profession, and life in general. So what are the symptoms of burn-out? Stress is the main culprit to causing burn-out. Another contributor is boredom. Do you see yourself unable to get excited about your business? Are you doing the same thing day in and day out expecting different results? Perhaps it’s time to step back, take a break and re-evaluate your situation from a fresh perspective.
Pretty much all of these thing describe me perfectly at the moment. I’m tired, I’m stressed, I’m crabby and quite frankly I have way to many things on my plate at the moment and feel totally overwhelmed.
So, I’m going to take John’s advice and step back and re-evaluate until I get some of these things off my plate. If you are wondering what some of these things are, well here is the short list:
- finish installing software and then move all my data to a new computer (my main computer has been displaying that not so wonderful “blue screen of death” followed by crash dumps more frequently – so I ordered a new computer last week and it arrived on Monday and I’ve been an installing fool every since). With luck I’ll be cutting over to that by Monday or Tuesday.
- get the theme for the blog straightened out – I’ve been playing with it quite a bit.
- move our existing website from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.7 – this is a huge project and I don’t expect to have that finished until the end of the year.
- I have 2 other brand new websites that aren’t mine that I’m working on.
- I’m testing, debugging, and documenting 2 new software programs – one of which is a rewrite of our existing AIA Billing program which we want to release later this year.
- the garden is going wild and canning season is about to start! Anyone want cucumbers, zucchini or yellow squash?
- the 3 cords of firewood that we ordered in April will arrive next week, so we need to get that stacked in the greenhouse.
- speaking of our greenhouse, it currently doesn’t have any plastic on it – that’s tomorrow’s project!
- and then we need to prepare for hurricane “Irene” —- oh boy!
It’s very difficult to spend any time on any of the above during normal business hours – so it’s all done before and after my normal workday and on the weekends.
As a small business owner I need to remember the Pareto’s Principle, the 80/20 Rule, it should serve as a daily reminder for all of us to focus 80 percent of our time and energy on the 20 percent of your work that is really important. Don’t just “work smart”, work smart on the right things.
Until things are more under control, I’ll be cutting back blog posts to just Tuesday and Thursday.
How are you managing stress and burnout in your business? Are you like me and beginning to “freak out”?
This QuickBooks payroll tip discusses how to create various reports for hours worked before creating paychecks – to ensure that your employees are being paid correctly and that your job costing will be accurate.
An important part of running any business involves keeping track of how many hours your employees work on a specific job and/or task and then accurately paying your employees for those hours. This is especially true for accurate job costing – no matter what type of business you run.
The amount of time spent on record keeping for payroll can be overwhelming for anyone and usually involves multiple people.
This is especially true if you are still using mostly manual methods; for example back when I used to do the payroll for a contractor who had 125 employees working on 5 different jobs – we had a job time sheet for each job every week. The foreman on each job would turn in a handwritten report each week that listed who worked on the job, what their classification was, how many hours they worked each day, etc. Sometimes the employees worked under more than one work classification or task (each involving a different rate of pay) and other times a small group of employees would end up working on all 5 different jobs we had going on during a single workweek – and I would have to take those 5 job time sheets and enter them into QuickBooks in order to run payroll. Not a fun job and highly error prone – especially if I had an issue reading someone’s handwriting!
It’s important to run reports to verify the accuracy of the data entered into the QuickBooks Weekly Timesheet before cutting payroll!
Reports for hours worked to run in QuickBooks before creating paychecks
QuickBooks offers several reports that you can generate and use to verify that employee hours have been entered correctly.
- From the Reports menu
- Choose Jobs, Time & Mileage
- Here you’ll find several “Time by” reports, I like the Time by Job Detail Report
- Set the dates to be the workweek and employee hours by job will be displayed
This by itself is a very useful report, but it only displays the hours and the service item (cost code) that the hours were posted against. My payroll item list was always pretty specific (I named my payroll items by the work classification that the employees worked under) and I wanted to include that information in the Time by Job Detail Report – if your payroll item list is pretty specific; you too can include that information.
- Once the standard Time by Job Detail Report is displayed
- Click the Modify button at the upper right
- In the Display box, place a checkmark next to Payroll Item and click Ok
Once you have this overall report, the possibilities are endless. For example, you can go back into the Modify option and Filter it for a specific job, print it out and give it back to the foreman along with his original timesheet for the job for his approval – get him to sign off on the report.
If you memorize these reports it will make it so much easier for you each week.
We hope you found this tip to be helpful, if so please feel free to share it, or leave a comment.
Top 10 Tuesday includes our favorite tips and news stories from around the web. This week there are some important articles for you to read and information to be aware of, split out into the following categories:
QuickBooks News & Tips:
- The Wall Street Journal | How I Built It – For Intuit Co-Founder, the Numbers Add Up (an interview with Scott Cook)
- QuickBooks & Beyond – An Overview of the Apps in the Intuit App Center (Part 1)
- QuickBooks & Beyond – An Overview of the Apps in the Intuit App Center (Part 2)
Tax News:
- accountingTODAY for the WebCPA – IRS Lowers Interest Rates in Fourth Quarter
Construction News:
- Construction Law in North Carolina – The NC Court of Appeals Upholds Contractor Lien Rights
- Construction Advisor Today – Nearly Half of All States Have Adopted a Residential Energy Code at Least as Stringent as 2009 IEC
- Orlando Sentinel – SunRail project finally starts to leave the station
Business, Social Networking, Customers & Websites:
- TechRepublic – Three Tips for working with bullets in PowerPoint
- Rebecca Tervo – Financial Roadmap Part 7; Budget and stay on the map!
- BRASS TACK thinking – Consider This: 24/7 Access, Work, and Social Media
Well there you have it, these were the top 10 most interesting articles that we found on the web last week – I’m sure there are a bunch more that I missed, do you have an article that you’d like to share?
Top 10 Tuesday includes our favorite tips and news stories from around the web. This week there are some important articles for you to read and information to be aware of, split out into the following categories:
QuickBooks News & Tips:
- Bookkeeping in Bunny Slippers – An Update for Your Software is Available: Do You Really Want It Yet?
- QuickBooks and Beyond – QuickBooks 2011 R8 Has Problems
- Intuit QuickBooks Support – Resolve Problems after installing QuickBooks 2011/Enterprise 11 R8 Update
Tax News:
- accountingTODAY – Companies Had to Cope with 270 Tax Changes in Q2
Construction News:
- Construction Law Blog – Legislative Update for the New York Contractor, Part 1 of 3
- Construction Law Blog – Legislative Update for the New York Contractor, Part 2 of 3
- The Contractor’s Perspective – Reinstating the contractor’s role in past performance evaluations
- Construction Advisor Today – The Cumulative Impact of Multiple Change Orders
Business, Social Networking, Customers & Website
- American Express Open – Balance of Work And Life Is A Myth
- American Express OPEN Forum – Building Buzz: Responding to Negative Reviews Online
Well there you have it, these were the top 10 most interesting articles that we found on the web last week – do you have an article that you’d like to share?
Have a great week!
