If you are like me then you love the show Storage Wars. I love the characters on the show and I love the business side of it as well. They make it look so easy to make money! I love Barry Weiss for his style and Charisma. He is my favorite for sure. I also love Dave Hester for the pure and straight business man that he is. He is all about making money and I love that about him. He takes his business seriously and he should – I can relate and he definitely seems to be doing an amazing job of branding. Yuuup!

I of course wonder about the business side of this

Now as an accountant and someone who LOVES business I of course wonder about the business side of this. Let’s face it, these guys are buying storage units and taking a gamble hoping that they will be able to sell the stuff for more than they paid for it. So far so good, that much is pretty simple. Once they’ve bought the locker it’s time to go in and assess the value of what they got. When they’re finished they will probably have a lot of junk to throw away and what’s left is what they will be selling either out of their warehouse or on Ebay. The Assessed value determines what they will be selling these items for. In other words, that’s the price tag that goes on the item and that’s what you or I will pay if we want to buy it from them.

But what about the cost?

These items weren’t bought individually. A sum was paid for the storage unit and on the business side this cost has to be allocated to the surviving items that will be sold. My video here shows you how I would calculate this and offers a template which if you happen to be in this (or a related) business you will no doubt find to be a very helpful time saver.

What about QuickBooks?

In the video below I show you how I would use QuickBooks to account for the cash they have to take to the auctions as well as the inventory they buy and sell.

Get the template and a copy of the QuickBooks file in my Knowledge Store:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Every year QuickBooks comes out with a new edition. Some people complain that they “force” you to upgrade every year. The truth is they don’t force you to upgrade every year. You could go for up to 3 years without upgrading and still enjoy the full use of all of the features you use in your current edition. They do retire the old versions after 3 years. I know this seems unfair, but imagine what the cost would be for them to pay staff to support all of these old editions.

So the question is whether or not QuickBooks 2012 is worth the upgrade, especially if you are already using QuickBooks 2009 or newer. I am not going to tell you what to do. My only objective here is to present you with the features and then let you decide if this is something you want or need! If you are like me and you love to play with all of the new bells and whistles then go buy the upgrade right now because I will say that some of the new features are really cool!

Download the full 1 hour review of the new features in QuickBooks 2012 and how to use them in my Knowledge Store:

Intuit liked this video so much that they asked my permission to use excerpts from it in their e-mail campaigns for QuickBooks 2012

Click here to view the embedded video.

Missions on Empire Avenue are a great way to help others.

They are also a great way to promote yourself.

Most of the time when people take my missions I notice that some of them will apparently go check what they’ve got invested in me and if they aren’t maxed out in me they buy more shares. That really isn’t the point though. For me it’s just fun. Fortunately the money isn’t real, that helps

Missions are really easy to run on Empire Avenue.

Just click near the top where it says “Missions” and then you will see a tab called “Create a Mission”. The rest is pretty straight forward.

Before you run a mission you have to consider one important thing.

What do you want people to do? What action do you want them to take? Often it is something along the lines of Liking a Facebook page (either yours or someone else’s) or a YouTube Video, or subscribing to a channel on YouTube. I have a feeling these typical kinds of missions are going to get old soon, so what I have done in this video is I have listed some of my “friends” on Empire Avenue in a Tumblr blog that I have. The mission was simple, take 1,000 EAVs and go invest in one or more of my friends. I listed the links to the people’s profiles in a post on Tumblr and that was it. During the making of the video (below) I couldn’t know for sure what would happen but now that a day has gone by I can tell you that my friends were grateful for the acknowledgement, many as it turns out were already fully invested in many on my list. That should (hopefully) tell you something about the company I keep on Empire Avenue. These are great, fun, and really positive people.

Personally I think the best missions are when you do something to help someone else! You decide what works for you and please post your comments and questions below!

Click here to view the embedded video.

 Empire Avenue gives you points for actions to encourage activity both on their own network as well as any others you’ve connected such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and Google Plus.

In this video I show you some navigational tips based not even on any features that are specific to Empire Avenue, but they are based on what your browser will let you do and this works on all browsers.

Watch the video and please post your comments questions and additional suggestions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some of us have had Facebook Timeline for a little while now, but for most of us Facebook Timeline is the next dreaded change that you are resisting with everything you’ve got. Many people from what I’ve seen are worried about how they will “design” their page.

Relax! The hoop you have to jump through is pretty wide. All that is required really are 2 pictures. One you already have – your profile pic, which leaves you really only needing to decide what to put up as your “Cover”. You want a larger than life image and you want something that really represents you. Guess what. You can change this at any time just as easily as your profile picture. Everything else will fill in on your page just fine as long as you’ve been posting for more than 5 minutes on Facebook.

So don’t stress about it. Adopt – eventually you will be forced to anyway and instead of being afraid of it? Just have fun with it. This stuff just isn’t that serious! Relax, enjoy, watch my video and then post your comments below!

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the challenges of setting up and maintaining your QuickBooks file, especially after you’ve been in business for a while is keeping the information organized. Over time there is a tendency to add accounts, rename accounts and generally create a mess in your chart of accounts. This becomes a problem when your Balance Sheet and your Profit and Loss statements become difficult to read. One symptom of this is when you are reviewing your accounts and as you are going down the list you look at an expense account and think, “haven’t I seen this already?”

You can fix a disorganized chart of accounts in QuickBooks very easily with 2 features that QuickBooks offers.

Creating sub accounts in QuickBooks

QuickBooks lets you easily create sub-accounts which means you have a parent account and a series of accounts underneath that, indented so that groups of related accounts can be shown in a way that makes the profit and loss statement presentable and logical without looking like someone simply threw the oatmeal on the floor and said, “hey look how we did!”

There are a few ways to do this, but if you are dealing with accounts that already have transactions posted to them then you have to be careful. The video below will demonstrate how to do this without creating the dreaded “Other” category when you run your P&L. Simply put this means you want to make sure that you don’t have any accounts at the parent level with transactions posted just to the parent.

The rule on sub-accounts in QuickBooks is that you never post to the parent account.

Merging Accounts In QuickBooks

If you realize that you have 2 separate accounts that really represent the exact same thing, or for that matter you don’t care to distinguish then you can easily merge accounts in QuickBooks. All you have to do is re-name the losing account to be the same as the surviving one. In other words whichever account has the name you want to “keep” is the surviving account. The other one is the losing account. Rename the losing account to be the same exact spelling as the surviving account and when you go to save it QuickBooks will warn you that you already have an account with this name and ask you if you want to merge this account.

Note if you merge 2 asset or liability accounts in QuickBooks and they were reconciled then QuickBooks will warn you that you will lose those reconciliations. In other words you will have to re-reconcile the account.

Memorized Reports

Another way to organize information in QuickBooks is through the use of memorized reports. The real trick to this is adding the Memorized reports list to your icon bar and then creating reports that are useful to you.  I like to create a “report group” called “Seth’s Reports” and then memorize key reports there.

Of course this will save you the trouble of having to re-create the reports every time you want to look at them and also it will make it easy for you to access these reports quickly which for me is so important! One thing I have noticed while training many small business owners in QuickBooks is that they will almost always have very specific reports that they want to be able to look at. This is where you really want to develop your skills at customizing reports in QuickBooks and then of course  memorizing them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Empire Avenue is a Social Stock Market. Yes that means it’s social! We make investments in hopes of gaining in net wealth and share price, but the main goal of anything “social” is to be.. well.. Social!

As you may already be aware I am part of a couple of groups on Facebook that discuss Empire Avenue and other topics that come up. One of the issues that comes up is that sometimes there is a discussion that we want to find but it gets buried so deep in the thread that it’s basically gone. So I decided to create a “Forum” which has a structure that lends itself much better to finding these discussions and even sticking certain discussions to the top if we feel they will be worthwhile for a time to come.

The idea here is that we have seen a community begin to grow up amongst us. Truth be told this is the most fun I’ve had online because we really just have a great group of people and Empire Avenue just happens to be the thing that has tied us all together at the end of the day.

My Forum is meant to give us a place that will make it easier to communicate and maintain our discussions which often start with Empire Avenue and how it works to everything from Decks, Barbeques, other social networks, and life in general. I hope you will join me here and watch this video to see what it’s all about and how it works on The Empire Avenue Moguls Forum.

Click here to view the embedded video.

com·mu·ni·ca·tion

[kuh-myoo-ni-key-shuhn]

Noun

1. the act or process of communicating; fact of being communicated.

2. the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs.

3. something imparted, interchanged, or transmitted.

4. a document or message imparting news, views, information, etc.

5. passage, or an opportunity or means of passage, between places.

Always be clear in your communications. We are all traveling at 1,000 miles an hour on the web so the important thing here is not to make people think.

Always be clear in your communications. We are all traveling at 1,000 miles an hour on the web so the important thing here is not to make people think.

Be specific. If you are e-mailing about a date and time to get together on something, always include the exact day, date, and time (eg I am available Sunday Jan 1, 2012 at 2pm pacific time). It seems like a lot but we are on the Internet which means we are dealing with people all over the place. Don’t assume that everyone in your e-mail thread is in your time zone. For one thing it’s arrogant!

Always include your contact information. This seems so basic and obvious but all too often I am reading an e-mail from someone and I want to call them and there is no phone # there. I am actually shocked at how often this happens. Every e-mail client provides for a signature. Don’t attach a Vcard. It may look cool in some e-mail clients, but not in all of them and I cannot copy and paste the information which is often what I want to do! You also want your website included here so I can easily forward your information to someone if I want to refer you business.

Use the phone. So much gets lost in translation in an e-mail which can lead a conversation to go sideways very quickly. People behave better on the phone because they actually have to deal with your reaction. This is a HUGE time saver too. You can get right to the point and get there quickly. Then send a follow up e-mail to confirm any understandings that need to be confirmed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Do you have a small business, or are you thinking of starting one? If so then you will most likely find this helpful. When you start a small business or even long after it is up and running you will likely experience situations where you are both putting money into the business and of course taking money out.

The question always comes up as to how to handle owner contributions and distributions in QuickBooks. As with making a cup of coffee, and I do love a good cup of coffee, everyone seems to have their own way of doing it and everyone seems to feel theirs is the best way! That is until they see MY way of doing it and then they see the light! Just kidding. The bottom line on these things is that as long as my balance sheet and my profit and loss are accurate, and as long as these financial statements are in good form then your solution is “right”.

Another question that comes up along these lines is what happens when a business owner pays for something on behalf of the business? How do we record that in QuickBooks? Again there are several ways and any one of them can be “right” as long as the same two principles mentioned above hold true – that the financial statements are accurate and in good form (presentable). Ask yourself, would you be comfortable submitting your Balance Sheet to a bank to get a loan in its current form? If not, call me (866) 945-8070, I can get you there and I am not even kidding about that!

As a QuickBooks Trainer I am face with finding a balance between accomplishing the important objective of making sure the financial statements are accurate and in good form balanced with giving the business owner or accounting/bookkeeping professional a way of accomplishing this that is easy to follow.  The first way to handle expenses paid for personally by the owner (ie with cash) would be a journal entry. This is the efficient way, but a lot of people are really not comfortable with journal entries so in those cases I show you another way, and you’re in luck because this method is presented right here in this video.

Click here to view the embedded video.