Accounting satisfaction

Bought and started setting up my new accounting package today – after much soul-searching and accountant-harrassing I finally settled on iBank. I think it’ll do the job admirably, and if it doesn’t they have a 30-day money-back guarantee when it’s bought from their website. So now I’ve started importing transactions. Just going back to July 2008 for the Australian accounts (start of FY2009) and April 2008 for the UK accounts (ditto). The import’s been really quite easy – nice and streamlined, although I do need to go over transactions and search out those that needed split categories as the splits can’t be notated during import. But so far, so funky. And now it’s nearly 3am so definitely time to call it a day.

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Finished a whole bunch of little tasks

Cleaning up tags in Evernote, cleaning completed tasks out of my to-do list, setting up Max on the newly reinstalled Snow Leopard machine, sending a bunch of emails, extracting a list of accounts in use from MYOB so I have something to base my new accounts list on, pulling together figures for how much I spent on internet access for the server in Australia in the first 3 1/2 years we were over here – along with how much djeli owes me for his part (which basically wipes out what I owe him over there, so it looks like I get to keep my tax refund – YAY!). Quietly satisfying

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Finally completed 5 years of overdue tax

Now if that doesn’t free up the creative impulses, I don’t know what will! Sent off the signed documents authorising the go-ahead for my Australian income tax returns for 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, then went on to complete the data input and report generation for 2009, which I then sent to my accountant. Mmmm… warm, fuzzy feeling!

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Started a clean-up blitz

Very tired after the intense socialising of the weekend (1, 2, 3… awwww!) so have had trouble applying myself to anything much today, so I’ve focused instead of trying to get some housey stuff done – I want everything to be in order with the house and with all my lists and tools before I go back to work, which could be next week, so I have to get cracking! So I did a load of laundry, changed the sheets on the bed, swapped the summer doona out for the mid-season one, tidied my in-tray (didn’t actually do anything with the stuff in it though), did a mountain of washing up, made teriyaki meatballs for late lunch/early dinner, made a batch of home-made apricot muesli bars and wrote to my mama. Now I am procrastinating over finishing up my Australian tax returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007, but in doing so I have gone back over all the accounting software I’ve assessed in the last few days and decided that iBank comes closest to meeting my needs. Next task with that is to email my accountants (Australian and UK) to make sure that the reports it produces will provide them with the data they need. But I can’t do that until the tax returns are done, so I guess there’s an end to my procrastination – nose back to the grindstone!

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Have found a way forward

with djeli over dealing with our accounts. we’re working on a solution that will mean he won’t have to spend so much time dealing with keeping up with the joint account transactions and so can instead focus on keeping the business finances together. yay!

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Assessed accounting software

Alas, yes. For many I suspect this wouldn’t count as creative activity, however it was all a learning experience, and quite aside from learning what I want in an accounting programme (multiple currency support, budgeting, loan tracking, import of bank statements and export of proper accountant reports), I learnt a lot about website design for software and the sorts of first impressions that totally put me off. Very valuable experience for the super-secret project, I suspect!

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Started ripping the Chandos Milestones box set

Half the Chandos box is done now – and in only about 2 1/2 hours too! Yep, 15 CDs! I ended up running them on both the laptop and the new Mac Mini so as to get through them faster and even though I had to type in the track listings on about half of those, and edit all the others to get them correct (librarian-brain at work – composers do NOT go in the artist field!), it all just shot through. The Mac Mini’s 4Gb of RAM makes a huge difference.

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Ah, backup

Have spent a ridiculous amount of time today trying to back up excess photos to CD in a bid to make my computer run faster. First I went through 5 of the discs we had, none of which would validate, however many of the internet’s “solutions” I tried. Then I went up the road and bought a spindle of Verbatims, which seemed fine and I ripped 6 of them, but now they’re throwing the same error. Grr. Thinking it might be a heat thing, so I’ll leave the next lot till after the laptop’s had a chance to cool down, I think – but at least I’ve already saved about 5Gb of hard drive space!

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Spent a very long time on a train

very profitably, actually. My book has progressed by about another 4-5 pages and I’ve managed to cut down my read/review list by about 30 items too, thanks to the Bristol to Paddington train being delayed by two hours. Then this evening I’ve been trying out a bunch of utilities for my Mac, including the amazing Quicksilver, WideMail, iTool, MailTags and Disk Inventory X. I’ll definitely be keeping Quicksilver; the others are on probation but I think there’s a fair chance that MailTags will be useful enough to actually pay for…

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Clean-up

Yesterday morning we took djeli’s lovely niece off to the airport at 5.30 in the morning (*ugh*) to see her off on the next leg of her gap year trip – 3 months in India. And now we have the house to ourselves for the foreseeable future – I think for the first time this year, which feels AMAZING. So we’re launching ourselves into a programme of sorting ourselves out.

Djeli has reclaimed his office, but this time has put his desk along the wall beside the window, instead of with his back to it and it looks a much more comfortable working space for him. The sofa-chair-bed is, for the first time in I can’t remember how long, folded up into its chair configuration and the room feels really welcoming now.

I’ve got my own desk back, which isn’t perfect, but at least the junk all over it will be all mine. I am rapidly accumulating a rather long list of things I want/need to buy to either make my working environment more comfortable or help me continue working on my own stuff when I’m out of the house (in particular when I have to take on another contract job in September): a lamp, a cushion because the chair I’m using is really too low, an iPod Touch so I can compose and catch up on my read/review file on the go, and so I’ll have (finally!) a numeric keypad to make using Finale easier, not to mention a control for our about-to-be-set-up music server. This is the cushion I want to get – it matches the gorgeous apron my mama bought me while she was here:

Oh, and a flute of course – I’ve had to give djeli’s sister back hers and now I’m missing it badly And then there’s the software upgrades – there’s always more software upgrades – Snow Leopard when it comes out, Pro Tools, because the version I have doesn’t seem to play nicely with Leopard, Finale because my version is 4 years old and frankly rather a crappy iteration.

And we have so many projects to work on! I don’t have time to get a job! This week I’m back on the film score, but still working on a couple of secret squirrels with more lining up. I think I need to review everything I’m trying to start and relegate some of them to the Someday/Maybe list!

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