My assumption is about $45 per hour for the writing and graphics combined.

Is that reasonable?

others will have to weigh in about that.

Squarespace is some decent templates, and the reviews generally say it's user friendly.

(JZ, insent to your profile address.)

Bonny, that's quite reasonable. It's actually somewhat low for a professional, but prices are all over the map. You may be happier estimating your time and coming up with a project or per-issue price, with a caveat that work beyond the agreed-on scope will be billed hourly at X rate. Sometimes hourly pricing is awkward with someone you work with regularly, because conversations may include a lot of time talking about the newsletter, but it's hard to know how to bill that time.

I'd charge $60, and come down to $50. Iffn you want, I can also send you my writing contact template, though you may have one such. You'd need to tweak it, but the tweaks would be easy. It was vetted by a Real Live Lawyer.

Make sure you have a rider about # of revisions or edits, or a job you get paid $250 for ostensibly 5 hours of work will be for more like 15 hours of revisions.

JZ, go to the recalcitrant one with a plan and budget in hand, with backup info on how vital branding is when one is a small press? And that he is doing too many vital tasks that HAVE to be done by him, but that this DOESN'T, and it will leave him time to focus his energies on what he's needed for? Maybe?

Strix, the other business partner is gearing up to do just that. It definitely helps to have some specific options and a budget range to point to, as well as confirmation from folks who aren't either her or me that this stuff does matter and absolutely needs to be either a constant top priority or handed off to someone else, so thanks hugely to everyone who gave input. It helps so much.

Thanks Strix! I would SO appreciate your template. Many, many thanks. You know the address.

It's time for me to work on taxes for 2012. It's one of the aspects of owning a business that really get no enjoyment from. There are hundreds of receipts to make sure we have entered correctly into quicken for the year. No matter how hard we try to keep up on this during the year there is always a huge pile to go through before we can fill in the tax packet. Then I need to go through the tax prep packet from the accountant and check all the items that have a depreciation schedule to see if we retired or sold them during 2012 and if so find the selling price so that he can update all of those, then it will be time to work out what new items in 2012 deserve to have a depreciation schedule set up.

I'm tired just thinking about it.

I am so with you. What kills me is that I actually offer tax prep services as part of our business, BUT there is no way I can do my own taxes because it is just too complicated.

I think I do a decent job of staying on top of it during the year (the extra attorney regulations sort of force me to) but still, the minutiae of all the receipts and what got sold/where I drove/etc, just wears me out.

It's just paperwork and documentation in general. It seems like I'm always shredding a metric ton of outdated or irrelevant paperwork and yet no matter how much time I spend I always have another huge pile that needs to be filed and saved, just in case I need to reference it. I'm currently trying to cull things that have been essentially cold filed for 10 years or more. I just had to purchase another four drawer filing cabinet just to house receipts and tax paperwork going back to 2005.

Yup. Me too. And crap, I'm glad you said something 'cause I forgot I still need to do depreciation. Which is doubly stupid in our case 'cause we're a nonprofit and they're not getting written off, but I still have to depreciate.

I have literally cases and cases of receipts to go through. Has anyone used a NeatDesk type product? The IRS will accept electronic receipts under a certain low dollar amount, I think, so I can do some of it through Expensify. But that still leaves piles to be sorted and filed and the important receipts I do have to keep are in the same piles as the coffee receipts.

If it worked well and integrated with my Quickbooks, I would totally pay that $500 to get it all behind me for once. And then maybe I could stay on top of it with their mobile app if I could just get into the habit of snapping and shredding the receipt right away.