raw materials

Every month our store mascot, Wonton, picks a product for his special sale pricing: this month he recommends our conservation-framed commemorative L.A. Times “It’s Obama!” posters and metal plates. The Inauguration is scheduled for January 20th -this Wonton Special captures an historic moment and is 20% off.

If you’re a collector or a fan of great photography, you’re in luck. Photo LA 2009, an international fine art photography exhibition, is coming to town this month. Held every January, galleries converge on Santa Monica to showcase and sell fine art photographs from some of the most famous names in photography as well as some of the hottest emerging fine art photographers. This year, James Adams, one of the partners here at Raw Materials, will have his work on view at Photo LA 2009 in Jail Gallery’s exhibition booth (In case you don’t know, James is the bald, goateed, deeply cynical one).

James Adams received his MFA from California State University, Long Beach in 2008 and holds a degree in biochemistry from the University of Iowa with postgraduate studies in molecular biology at UCLA. A co-curator of the Greater Los Angeles MFA Exhibition 2007 (GLAMFA), James’ work spans across media and disciplines from video and sound to sculpture, printmaking, painting and installation. You can see more work by James Adams on his artreview website.

We wish James the best of luck in his first showing at Photo LA and if you’re in attendance, we hope that you can stop by to view his work.

For tickets and more information, please visit the Photo LA 2009 website.

Here is what the integration between MYOB AccountEdge and Checkout consists of:

• In Checkout, you can export journal entries in an AccountEdge format.
• This file format is basically just a file of tab-separated values with extra blank lines between journal entries.
• To associate the lines of the entries with the correct accounts, Checkout launches AccountEdge to get the list of accounts and you identify which is the correct “Cost of Sales” account, etc.
• (This didn’t work correctly for me — I forget the details, but I had to fight with it a bit for it to happen.)
• This handshake only needs to happen once — for all subsequent exports, Checkout just dumps out a file that you then import in AccountEdge.
• (This is actually a good thing for us, since we don’t run Checkout and AccountEdge on the same machines.)
• The entries are imported as journal entries, so nothing shows up as Sales or Purchases in AccountEdge, making a whole lot of the reporting functionality there less useful or useless.
• There is nothing to prevent the same journal entries from being imported more than once.
• If you use the integrated credit card process service, you get weekday deposits of credit card transactions, but after the import of data from Checkout, each transaction is distinct. This can makes reconciling these deposits rather tedious.
• You might find yourself deleting journal entries imported from Checkout because of things like it’s simplistic handling of purchases.

I am actually happy that the integration between the two is really just an import/export process. I do wish it protected me from myself as far as being able to import the same data twice, and made it easier to exclude the sorts of transactions I know that I don’t want transferred.

Now that I have a much better idea of what I’m doing, I might just re-do all of our accounting from our first six months of operation so that I know it is in better shape. I’ve made enough mistakes over the last six months in how I did things, and tried to fix them, that I’m not sure that our accounting is as correct as it could be.

I still don’t particularly care for AccountEdge, but I feel like I’m learning well enough which things to just ignore because they don’t matter for us, and otherwise getting my head around all of this accounting stuff again. (I suppose that I may get disabused of this when dealing with our taxes in the near future.)

What I find strange is that I find myself happier with Checkout, even though it is expensive, the documentation is out of date and not very good, and there is so much of the data that you can’t import or export or edit once you discover you’ve made a mistake. I know that the data in Checkout is wrong, but I can’t go back and redo or fix history as easily as I can in AccountEdge.