You can have your orders shipped straight to you for a modest delivery fee, or choose to pick up the items at our store. We’ll bring them in with our next regular order, and give you a call when the items are ready to be picked up.

Go get started!

I’ve mentioned the performance problems with Checkout before. This little pop-up window is one of the signs it is time to re-start Checkout. It is summoned by using the barcode scanner, apparently, but you’ll find no mention of it in the product documentation. Hitting the Escape key seems to get rid of it, although it’s not even clear to me that the window is modal.

I’m sure this thing is there for some reason, but our only experience with it is that it’s a sign of the wonkiness that comes with the degrading performance the longer that Checkout is running.

(Side note: I reported the performance problems we see to Checkout support, and they asked me to repair permissions to see if that helps.)

This will be the first in an ongoing series of posts that will be of interest to almost nobody, but will let me blow off steam about Checkout, the point-of-sale software we use.

When a new purchase order is opened (what is used to track inventory orders and receipt), it presents this friendly list of suppliers. You’ll have to take my word for the fact that navigating this list is, for our setup, brutally slow. (Consider the overall slowness of Checkout my biggest gripe, but I can’t really show it to you via a screenshot.)

But take a look at those “Needed Products” values. Look useless? It absolutely is. You can set up what you want your minimum stock for each product to be, and that and your inventory drives the numbers in this list. But if you have an extra product of one SKU, that will balance out a product under the minimum of another SKU. The more products you source from a supplier, the more useless this number becomes.

Seem like a small gripe? It is. I’ll try to come up with something better next time. (Want a big gripe? You can’t import or export the data in purchase orders. I’m in the middle of entering a purchase order of about 250 SKUs right now. Something I have to do every week. And just working with purchase orders makes the rest of Checkout go slower. Nothing fuels rage like having to spend an hour hand-entering data that would take a second to import.)

It was a year ago yesterday that we first put all of the markers in our Prismacolor tower into stock. (Now that I’ve done some digging, keep on eye on our Twitter feed and Facebook page for some specials timed to when we first brought in some products.)

And of course, that’s not even the anniversary of our first sale. That was on August 14, 2008. It was for a 4×3 Pentalic “A la Modeskine” traveler’s sketch journal. 

But we’re going to put a pause on that while we figure out how to display it all (like the cool architectural model trees and people from Woodland Scenics), and work on paying down all those bills before they come due at the end of the year. Keep an eye out for specials when we decide we’re tired of looking at some of our overstuffed racks and want to clear a little breathing room.

And don’t worry, we’ll be backing to bringing in more new products before long. The new holiday sales catalogs and deals will start hitting our inbox any minute.

The single biggest functional problem I have with it now is that it is dirt slow. Painfully slow. The reporting functionality is nearly useless, it is so slow. And on top of that, the date selector for the date range on reports is just terrible, and you have to wait for it to regenerate the report as you change each part of each date value.

I think my biggest problem overall, however, is that there is now a huge amount of valuable data that is trapped in one of the more byzantine database schemas I’ve ever seen. I haven’t had the stomach to deconstruct the whole thing, or maybe I’m just not taking the right drugs. The import and export functionality in the application itself is nearly useless, of course.

I wish Checkout worked as well as it looks.

I am sure some of this will be addressed in some future version, but it has been months since the last maintenance update and no word on when a new release of any sort might see the light of day.

So if you’ve noticed some of our prices going up, please understand that it is just because our costs are going up. We’re doing all we can to get the best deals on things that we can.

The good news is that this won’t effect our 50%-off canvas sale, or the sketch books we’ve been selling at 50% off on our clearance table. The last price increase on those actually set in right before we opened, so the prices should be stable for a while longer.

Something else to keep in mind is that the sales tax will be going up twice this year — by 1% on April 1 to 9.25%, thanks to the recent state budget woes, and then by another 0.5% on July 1 to 9.75%, thanks to the passage of Measure R (which will fund transportation projects).

We don’t have anything to announce yet, but keep your eye out for some special sales before and after summer.

• 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.

If you are looking for some boxes for moving, and packing paper, just let us know. We’d be more than happy for you to take what we’re just piling in our storage area!