raw materials

If you have been by the store in the last couple of days, you might have noticed (or been drawn in by) our new sidewalk sign. James spent more hours than he would care to admit on it, but I think that it looks fantastic.

I may have mentioned before that we are using MYOB AccountEdge to do our bookkeeping. They are on the cusp of releasing information on their next version, as they kept reminding us when trying to sell us the support plan that would get us a free upgrade.

Because a new version of QuickBooks for Mac was just released, I decided to download the free trial and make sure we didn’t want to switch before signing up for the support contract. The new version of QuickBooks looks pretty good — a lot more Mac-like than AccountEdge, for sure. The showstopper was reading about their support plans, though — the software cost is lower than AccountEdge, but the difference in price on the annual support plan bridges the gap, and doesn’t include software upgrades.

So while I wish that AccountEdge were better, there didn’t seem to be much about QuickBooks that made me want to make the leap. If I had any sort of spare time to speak of, I would probably try to whip up something that did the minimal accounting we need. The integration between AccountEdge and Checkout has turned out to be rather minimal, and there is a ton of stuff in AccountEdge that we just don’t need and mostly gets in the way. For example, there’s a lot of workflow for printing invoices and bills and checks and so forth, none of which we use at all.

If you have been following our Twitter updates, you may have noticed that we have been getting in a number of magazines. There aren’t a lot of distributors for magazines, and particularly the sorts of fine-art magazines we’re trying to carry. Today we learned that one of them, Ubiquity Distributors, won’t even deal with us because we won’t be bringing in enough titles that they carry. So here we are, a small, independent art supplies store who can only get Ingram Periodicals, pretty much the biggest magazine distributor, to let us buy magazines.

Unfortunately, Ingram doesn’t carry every magazine we wanted to carry, so we’re having to get in touch with some of those magazines to either get them directly, or encourage them to let Ingram carry them.

As I have mentioned before, we are using a piece of point-of-sale software for the store called Checkout. It is, despite all the complaints I am going to make about it in this and future posts, a pretty good piece of software.

My overall summary would be that it is very good, but it could use a lot of polish based on some real user feedback. There are just lots of little annoyances that I am running across in the interface, especially things that make the system harder to use.

For example, receiving an order requires either scanning every item, dragging and dropping each item from one list to another, or manually selecting the number of received items and typing in how many you have received. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Today we received an order with 522 items of about 150 distinct products. This is mostly our racks of M. Graham gouache, oil, and watercolor paints. With our barcode scanner out for repair, receiving all of these items into the system will require manually clicking on a column (not the whole column — just the existing 0!) and entering the correct number of items of that product that we have received.

There are a couple of things they could do to fix this problem. A cheap shortcut would be to have a way of saying you have received a whole order. Long-term, I hope they can make the spreadsheet-like receiving form actually keyboard-navigable, like a spreadsheet would be. This is true of the other similar forms in the application.

And this is just the warm-up — one of the shipments we receive on Monday has over 1,000 items of about 250 different products. I don’t even want to think about what our drop-ship of Golden acrylic paints and mediums is going to entail.

There are some perks to having a computer nerd (me) as part of the team. To load information about the products into our system, I was able to save the HTML listing of the different colors each line of paints came in and cobble together some Python code to transform that into a format that Checkout could understand. But I still had to manually set the supplier for all of these products because Checkout won’t set that information from the import.

Something nifty I learned about Checkout today is that the printing system is based on using Cheetah templates that are rendered using WebKit. I was able to take the template that the Checkout support team sent me when I asked about printing a signature line on credit card receipts, and improve it so that it only printed the signature line on orders paid via credit card. It is a little fragile, though — an error in the template causes the whole application to exit.

I know I’ll have lots more to say about Checkout, like complaining about the undocumented AccountEdge integration. But like I said in the beginning, it is a pretty good piece of software.

Over the last couple of days, we’ve finally gotten set up with our merchant accounts so that we can accept American Express, MasterCard, Visa, and Discover. We’ll still accept that old-fashioned cash, too.

(We haven’t decided whether we will be accepting checks or not.)

It isn’t located in the store yet, but we just got all the equipment for our point-of-sale system and I’ve been putting it together and making sure it all works. Because all of us are Mac-based, it is also Mac-based.

The heart of the system is a 20″ iMac, and it’s hooked up to a Symbol LS2208 barcode scanner, a Star TSP143U receipt printer, and an APG Vasario VB32-BL1616 cash drawer.

We will be using Checkout as our point-of-sale software. It’s beautiful software that integrates well with the MYOB AccountEdge software that we’ll be using for our bookkeeping.

We got the iMac through the Apple Store, but it’s a refurbished model, not brand-new. The scanner, printer, and cash drawer all came from Barcode Bonanza, who did a great job of calling me to add a necessary cable that I forgot to order, and dealing with my credit card being rejected because my spending spree had raised the fraud flags.

Now all we need is a counter to put this on, and some products to sell!

We are organized as a general partnership, and one of the many documents we had to file with local (city, county, state) government is the Statement of Partnership Authority (GP-1). We mailed this to the state back towards the end of May, after we formally inaugurated our partnership, and recently we have been itching to get the certified copy back because we need it to complete opening our bank accounts.

After a call to the Secretary of State’s Document Filing Support Unit last week, I found out that they had indeed received our documents on May 27, but that it had been referred to an examiner because there were attachments. They forwarded me to her voice mail, but I didn’t get a call back. I called again yesterday, and left another message.

Today, I finally got a call back — and the news that our filing was going to be rejected because it didn’t have the proper number of signatures, and the attachments we had included were not appropriate.

It took them about seven weeks, from the time we sent the documents, for them to tell us this. It made me long for the easy days of waiting in line at the other government offices. At least any problems with the forms there were dealt with on the spot.

So we’ve had to re-file, without the attachments and with enough signatures. But this time we’re utilizing the services of Sun Document Filings (no relation to my other employer, Sun Microsystems), which should result in a one-week turnaround.

When a production approached us to film in our space, we tried to be accommodating and worked with them to find a way they could get some of the shots they needed, but not interfere with our ongoing exhibition. At the last minute, the production backed out of using the interior of our space because of problems in securing permission from our neighbors.

But they did actually use our building, particularly the residential entrance that is immediately adjacent to our space, and they also ended up paying us to keep our rolling door up while they got some of the shots they needed.

The production is apparently being run by a producer more used to low-budget fare, and they caused chaos throughout the block as they tried to do this all on the cheap, and probably ended up spending more money than if they had just kept it all on the level.

In the end, it probably wasn’t worth it for us. But it was a good feeling to have even a little money come in the door — that will help offset some of our startup costs.

I spent some time today at Los Angeles City Hall getting registered for our city tax registration certificates. The other day, I sent in the paperwork for our “fictitious business name” registration using DBAStore.com, which our accountant recommended. We still have to get our seller’s permits from the state, but they don’t have a convenient office in downtown Los Angeles and we don’t really have the couple of weeks it will take for the registering by mail. That’s a task for next week.

Getting the city tax registration certificate was pretty painless. It took about an hour for my number to be called, and the clerk was patient as he helped me correct some mistakes I had made in filling out the forms, and in sorting out how many certificates we needed.

Raw Materials is something new. This is the website and blog.