megan, I didn't know you were freelancing! I thought you took another job after leaving the crazy-bad one!

I'm glad it's going so well. My thing has always been to cultivate as many regular clients as possible and deliver good stuff on time, and keep them coming back. Which, you know, is easier said than done.

Well, almost all my work in the fall came from my previous employer (the publisher, not the crazy one). They never replaced me and have to freelance much of the French/Italian stuff anyway now, so between that and them passing the word, I had all I wanted. Frankly, after working 12-hour+ days for much of the summer, I was happy to take it a bit easy.

Oddly enough, my former boss is much easier to work with on this basis. But I know I don't want to be relying on one client, even if it's different areas of the company. The fall was sort of a trial run, but now I need to make this support me long term.

I finished my thing due today! I have four hours left! Whoot!

Man, I gotta get my shit together. I can't be pulling this stuff much longer. It wouldn't have been so bad without the computer crash in the middle of it, but it's my own fault for leaving it so late.

There was a discussion a while back about tracking business expenses and come curiosity about the Neat Desktop system.

I've owned one for a few years and tried it for a bit and then didn't use it. There were some issues with the Mac software. I used it as a standard scanner and it worked great. When I redid all the software on my iMac last week I noticed that the Neat software had been updated to version 4, so I decided to give it a try and it looks like I've gotten a decent workflow going. Since folks were interested I thought I'd lay it out.

The Neat software now includes a mobile app for iOS and Android as part of a cloud service and some other things. This is what is making it work for us. I can scan receipts as I get them, then add the business expense category that matches what K tracks in Quicken, which is where we keep all of our books. I can also scan receipts immediately with my phone. K and log into the web interface and see a report of receipts which she can then use to make sure that she has the correct categories assigned.

In the long run we'll be able to shred all of the receipts and just keep the digital copies, but I want to give it a month or two before we go that far.

Ooh.

Glad to hear it, ND. I put it on the back burner because of all the other tech expenses that came up, but since donors ended up covering all that, I may put this back on simmer. I think it would be really helpful to me both in the initial catchup and the long term workflow. Does it integrate with Expensify as well as Intuit, do you know?

In my workflow I'm not trying to do any direct integration. It's being used as a double check and document archive. K downloads all of the statements from the banks directly into Quicken and then will use the reports from Neat to reconcile those statements and make sure that things are assigned to correct categories.

There is an option to export data in quicken format, but we have not played with it yet.

Okay, gotcha. That's probably close to what my workflow would be. It would replace the part of the process where I manually enter the data into Quickbooks from the paper receipts. I would still download and reconcile the bank statements.

I'm getting ready to do my first major remote deposit to my local bank, the last step in the migration away from the Big Bank. So far so good.

I love being a liberal except this one day per year.

Signed, Just got my tax bill

Yeah. I feel your pain.

This is where there are people for hire, right? I'm thinking about having someone do some quick-and-dirty Photoshop stuff for me because I don't know how to and don't really want to learn it. What would it cost to send someone a bunch of photos of my back yard and have that person paste various shots of different kinds of building materials shopped as retaining walls in various locations? I'd take the photo with string or whatever outlining the retaining wall area, and could send either photos of the materials I'm interested in seeing or references. If they look like a middle schooler cut and pasted them with scissors and glue, that's totally fine. I knew that I couldn't visualize construction things and now that I have two retaining walls where it is now obvious one would have been fine if I'd only been able to visualize it first, I'd like to try photoshop first for the rest of the hardscaping.