Following a conversation with my brilliance buddy (chum I’ve been phoning every week so we can egg each other on to bigger and better things) this evening I’ve set myself the challenge of writing down 100 goals. It’s something that he’s read in a book but he reckons he’s got stuck at about 65. I’ve just paused at 70, so I’m now officially winning (not that I’m competitive or anything).

Are 100 goals too many? Am I destined to be perpetually disappointed because I can’t possibly achieve that much?

Yesterday I started re-reading the excellent How to Be Brilliant by Michael Heppell. This means that when I have followed the 90-day plan I will officially be brilliant. Causes Mik great amusement when I say ‘brilliant!’ every time he asks me how I am.

One of the things that I’m particularly keen to be brilliant at is running our business. I want to find the time to follow through on all the plans we have to develop the business as well as keeping on top of our client projects - something that I can see will need quite a bit of work over the coming weeks as we have a lot on at the moment. It’s not all about being brilliant at the business stuff though, it’s also about having a more balanced life - so I’m going to be amazingly brilliant at running the business but also find time to have a life outside of that. Sounds great doesn’t it?

Bit of advice for anyone thinking of running a business from home - be aware that people don’t have any concept of ‘office hours’. I think the worst we’ve had was when a client phoned us at 9pm on a Sunday, but this is closely followed by the phone call I got this Sunday lunchtime. Yes, this Sunday which was a BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND. I have to say that I’m absolutely astounded that it didn’t occur to them that it wasn’t an appropriate time to call.

This is a warning to anyone who may be considering using QuickBooks for their accounts. Don’t, it’s not worth the hassle.

We’ve been using it for about 4 years and have been reasonably happy until now. However, they have now decided that our current version isn’t supported any more (which is fine because we never got any support from them in the first place) and that to continue using it for payroll we’d have to upgrade. However, they’ve discontinued the ‘regular’ version we’ve been using so our only option is to upgrade to the next version up at a whopping £400 (or we can choose to pay them £30 a month and get automatic upgrades). Erm no thanks!

So, we decided we wouldn’t use it for payroll anymore (and discovered that it would actually be cheaper to get our accountant to do that for us!) but just continue with the non-supported version. Even told our account manager at Intuit as much and he didn’t see a problem with that. However, it turns out that our license was directly tied in with Payroll and the darn thing started threatening to expire!

Now, the real point of this post is that when I phoned the support line to figure out how to stop it from expiring and denying us access to the last 4-year’s accounts, the very unhelpful member of staff in the Indian call-centre insisted that to continue using the software at all we had to pay to upgrade and refused to give us our account manager’s details. He eventually put me through to sales (UK-based) where I finally got some sense. The sales guy’s response was ‘of course you don’t have to pay, ignore him’ and promptly gave me a new activation key which has stopped the software from seizing up.

What was that all about, eh?

Moral of the story is:
a) don’t use QuickBooks - you never know where you are with them, or
b) if you’re already using it don’t believe a word they tell you.

Phewee, that was a big job for a Sunday! I’ve just filed our employer’s annual return. I’m never very confident with stuff like that. Actually our’s is pretty straightforward - our accounting software did all the figures for me so I just had to log on and fill in the form. Hopefully that will be it now. And next year our accountant is going to do it as she’s taking over our payroll for us this year - one less thing for us to muddle through!

I was going to do our company annual return today as well but randomly the Companies House website won’t let you do it on a Sunday. Erm … that seems a bit odd for an online service.