Welcome to Fall 2016 and a NEW SCHOOL YEAR!
The beginning of a new school year always excites me as much as it saddens me: the end of summer, especially this summer (currently titled “BEST SUMMER EVER” – not far from the truth) always brings with it an excitement about re-engaging with work, with learning new skills (right now it’s ping pong), and with developing better ways of helping remodelers make sense of their numbers.
This morning was spent with a potential new client discussing the many ways his current chart of accounts might be re-aligned to provide a cleaner way to look at company operations. We also discussed how efficiently to apply all the components of labor burden – including benefits and insurances and indirect costs – to jobs. And when I mentioned that upgrading just those two structural components of his QB would make job costs more accurate and therefore WIP calculations more complete and therefore financial statements considerably more accurate I became so excited about working with him, about the reports he’d be able to generate that all the end-of-summer sadness disappeared.
In its place is BACK TO SCHOOL EXCITEMENT! I hope you feel it too ….
Now, onto that list of projects left undone from the spring – welcome to my new website! It has been over a year in the realization primarily because it has been so difficult for me to determine exactly what I want from a website when retirement looms in the next few years.
Although I hope never completely to retire – want to continue writing for Remodeling Magazine, to facilitate a few RA Executive meetings where an understanding of financial and job cost accounting is so critical and to work on a couple book ideas beyond the QB Manual – the large collection of presentations, articles and spreadsheets amassed over 30 years of my working exclusively for remodelers wants to be shared.
That collection of work might be useful – so I intend to clean up and curate and make much of it available here. Look for quarterly presentations for various Remodeling and JLC shows, look for Excel spreadsheets which I’ve developed over the years in an attempt to clarify various metrics, look for links to individual articles from the Remodeling Magazine archives or from the Remodelers Advantage archives pertinent to a given topic.
And please chime in, send comments and questions so that I continue to focus on what you need. Please and THANK YOU very much.