Collaboration Chronicles

Quickbooks accounting for outsourced work can be categorized two ways:

1. Subcontractor invoices directly.
2. Subcontractor invoices a broker, who invoices you.

Subcontractors who bill directly are easy: enter their invoices as bills balanced against Direct Cost expenses, proceed as usual.

The difficulty here is with brokers who want to act as a sort of “bank” by requiring escrows and holding monies internally. This is a very good business for them as I believe they are able to generate short term interest income from such holdings (which they keep of course).

So how to set these up in the books? There are two ways to do it: using an asset account, or using an expense account treating the broker as the subcontractor.

The first way to do it is to list the broker, let’s say “CodersRUs.com” as an asset account, similar to Paypal. This makes sense on one level as the brokering service does handle money. The difficulty with this is how the Direct Costs for services is handled, which is tax deductible expense account. In other words, the broker takes in your money for different purposes using the same mechanism (i.e., credit card, Paypal, etc.) This leads to confusion.

For accounting purposes in Quickbooks, it’s easier to use the second method and consider the broker as the subcontractor, instead of the person actually doing the work.

Escrow monies can be considered as direct expenses, and recorded as refunds when necessary.

Keeping track of who actually did the work requires either categorizing each broker transaction by job, or making a memo entry listing the person and purpose of each transaction. I prefer not to categorize by job because the default report lists the job on the transaction rather than the subcontractor, which is not helpful to me.

Back in college (’02?) I visited a friend of mine who had just finished bottling a batch of homebrewed beer he had cooked and fermented in the previous weeks. Not only was I shocked that one could make their own beer with minimal effort (he was an engineering student after all) but that you could do it in your own apartment…in the closet no less!

After asking him all of the questions I could think of at the time, I bought a homebrewing kit and a quick “get started” type book from http://austinhomebrew.com/. I made a Pale Ale first, which I bottled too early and most of the bottled exploded during hte conditioning phase (when it’s carbonating itself in bottles).

In the next years, I made quite a few batches, but I never got that feeling of “holy shit, I can’t believe this!” like I did when I saw all of the non-labeled bottles on Eric’s kitchen table.

Last Friday, I made cheese for the first time. Figuring out that I could do this happened after asking for books about appreciating cheese, and being recommended a book about making cheese in your kitchen. Again, I did some quick research, and found out that cheese is as easy as adding two things other than milk, straining, and potentially coating and aging. The two things are acid and rennet.

Acid curdles milk slowly. Rennet is found in infant cow stomach and contains Protease, which coagulates milk. Adding rennet makes curds and whey (like the nursery rhyme). There is vegatable rennet, which is what I used, to help ease people’s minds about murdering baby cows.

I made 2 lbs. of mozzarella in less than 2 hours. It was one of the best tasting things I’ve ever made in the kitchen in such a short time. None of the beer I ever made tasted as good.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about opening a store to sell cheese, beer, vinegar, miso, and other baceteria made processed awesomeness online…which would lead to having a shop or tutorial store to teach these skills to the public. I’ve also wanted to video tape making cheese with friends from Collab21 or elsewhere, to see what their experience was with it.

So, look for some advances on the yeast and bacteria front in the coming months.

I’m Pat, and I’m guest posting about Saturday’s event, Sharks in the Park. It was to promote our company, Collab21, by giving out snow cones in Delores Park in the Mission (coinciding with the incredibly busy dyke march.)

It was a fannnn-tastic time and place to be for promotion. (Some years ago, I spent a lot of time doing business as a book dealer, and it gave me ideas about which events were worth going back to. The student-run gamer convention was golden… the shady broken-down flea market, not so much.) For our thing on saturday, giving out spiked snow cones was an awesome idea. Hardly anyone who’s attention we caught said no. We made the cost back from donations without even pointing out the money jar.

The people who gave us attention were probably 1/10th of the potential. We didn’t have a sign. Most people didn’t even make eye contact, because we looked like people having a party among ourselves. We can measure the notice by looking at new mailing list sign-ups. Here’s some preparation ideas that could use the potential better next time:

-For presentation- bring a big, nice-looking sign, good to re-use any time there’s an event. Not a little piece of ripped-off cardboard with a note on it like we had. (That was nobody’s fault- it was our first time public event. I’ll help make a sign next time.)
-Stacks of flyers, not a little pocket full.
-I wonder if there’s a way to custom print snow cone sleeves? Maybe not a good idea because they’re guaranteed to go in the trash. Dual purpose small napkins with our info could be better.
-Once you get people’s attention, you have a short minute to give them a reason to care. If you don’t give them a reason, the flyer probably goes in the trash when they get home. Flyers don’t do much by themselves- I flyered a city once for a film fest I promoted, with a couple hundred at 11×17. You’re lucky to get 1 interested body for every 100 flyers you put out. To get people to care, just start with some random conversation. They will say “oh really, that reminds me of — I want to do —” and you say “well here’s the service/thing we do that can help…” I used to sell 4 times as many books by just talking to people about science fiction I used to read, as a fan myself, not a salesman. Then they would buy on my recommendation.

When people did give us a minute to talk about what we were doing, it could have helped to show, not tell, that we’re a group of creative people. We were just hanging out. Beth mentioned we could have been doing sidewalk chalk drawing (well, if it was a regular day, not a parade)… or drawing up a real sign… or caricature art. We originally planned to have poker games. We stopped those because of wind, and it’s kind of hard to get a random passer-by into that (but it’s a start.)

Being fun is important- the people next to us had it down. They put a satirical initiative on the ballot to rename the city sewage plant in honor of George W. Bush and were collecting signatures. They had a megaphone, patriotic music, and uncle sam costumes. If we had some unifying clothes, it could help show we’re not random people having a party. Of course, it’s best not to look like salesmen, more like people having a party… for a cause.

It could have been a great opportunity to fund raise. A lady selling veggie sausages for $5 was raking it in hand over fist. She must have made a few grand. Beth mentioned doing vegan baking to sell, another great idea. I was pretty sad that I didn’t have a chance to put out all my crates of leftover stock from my book dealer business. At $1 apiece, I probably could have made a day’s pay just sitting there.

Weather probably affected people’s interest in snow cones. It was slightly grey and not very warm (still OK for t-shirts). A hot day would have increased the interest a lot. Even so, we went through an entire 50 lb’s of ice in 3 hours.

I think doing snow cones is such a good idea that we should do it again this summer, at least once.