Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

How is it Friday already?? Scores on the doors...

(last week/this week/ + or - amount)
Business
Overdraft: -£-6044.43 / -£6291.45 -£247.02

Business total: -£-6044.43 / -£6291.45 -£247.02

Personal
Overdraft: -£3668.71 / -£3081.40 +£587.31
Egg card: -£3115.00 / -£415.00 +£2700.00
Barclaycard: -£2695.00 / -£2695.00 no change
Nationwide card: £0.00 / £2741.85 -£2741.85

Personal total: -£9478.71 / -£8933.25 +£545.46

Grand total: -£15,523.14 / -£15,224.70 +£298.44

Moving in the right direction again, but, as always, could do better. I was initially puzzled as to why the business account was down as I thought I'd barely spent anything from it this week....and then I remembered it was payday on Monday, so £1250 got transferred to my First Direct account on top of the quarterly broadband bill (£100.80), the Euroffice invoice for toner and labels (£81.02) and the 900 jiffy bags in various sizes (£63.36). To be less than £250 down after all that lot is not bad.

The Czech bead manufacturer has come back to me and said there's no minimum total order. They also sent pictures of the bead mixes made up as strings and I think I might buy them that way - I can do a 7" string for £1.20 which, compared with Hobbycraft selling 8" Jesse James Inspiration strings for £4.99, looks like good value! I think I'll order a selection of the pressed glass and pearl mix strings (minimum order 50 strings per colour) and then use the profits from those to buy the neons.

I told the bank that my aim this year was to get my turnover back to its pre-cash-crunch levels of £100,000. That means that I need to bank £120,000 to account for the VAT (or a little bit less, as the cash comes in minus PayPal and Amazon fees, but it's a good enough target). So I've got a spreadsheet set up, I put my daily takings into it and it tells me how much I've banked since 1st April and what percentage that is of £120,000. I'm currently at £1253.16 and 1.04%, which sounds like a slow start, but we're in the quiet period of the year and I'm low on stock, so I'm actually pretty pleased with it.

Hiddenidenity

Wow I had some catching up to do lol!

Looking good xx

cazmanian_minx

It seems to be a busy day that we haven't done much in, if that makes sense. We had a bit of time to kill in town before we were due at mother-in-law's house to see her and Mr Minx's eldest brother who was arriving for a visit, so we went and had a mooch around CLB for me to price up some new waterproof trousers as after four years mine are starting to give down the seams and I got soggy jeans a couple of times this winter. They've started stocking a new brand which are only £12 and there's space in the horse budget this month, so I bought them and a lunge cavasson (also £12) which will help me with long-reining Merlin.

Funny how I can spend £24 on the boys quite happily but baulk at spending £5 on a pair of jeans off eBay for me - though that may be because they really need to be size 12 jeans at the moment and I'd rather wait until I need to buy size 10 again :rotfl: The problem is that I've only got 3 pairs of trousers I can wear at the moment and one of them is on the verge of wearing through. Time to get back on the diet....

Talking of which, the Tesco shop was a very reasonable £50 today thanks to £11 of coupons and whole chickens on offer at 3 for £10

Yesterday I asked Mr Minx if he would mind me transferring £3k of the croft savings to my current account to temporarily pay off the NW overdraft. Because he's lovely, he didn't mind at all, so I'm now only £81 overdrawn, though I'll continue to show the full amount in the scores on the doors. It'll save me about £100 in interest between now and the money being needed for the croft. Of course, there's always the slight danger that NW will withdraw the overdraft facility, but it's been at the same level for over 10 years, so I hope they'll be happy for it to continue. Let's face it, they've made about £450 off me in interest over the past 12 months and I've never breached a lending limit in over 20 years of banking with them, so I think I'm probably a pretty safe bet

cazmanian_minx

We've been out to lunch with MIL and BIL, which went well (not always a given with MIL!) and got back in time for me to take Finn out for a hack - we had a really nice potter up the hill, over the common grazings, down to the surgery at the end of the road and home again.

Other than that, nothing to report!

cazmanian_minx

1450 7" strings of glass beads are now on order *gulp*

That's not as bad as it sounds, I've 'only' spent €829 and their courier has quoted €68 for delivery. I'll get a quote from mine when I've got dimensions and weights, but if theirs includes the Highlands and Islands surcharge instead of just being for the UK, it's extremely competitive.

I tried the £12 lunge cavasson on Merlin this evening. He's 15.3hh and the 'cob sized' cavasson just about fitted when done up on the tightest settings. I think it's going to fall off Finn, goodness knows how big their Horse size must be! Anyway, M did a grudging couple of circles in walk on both reins to test it out. I'm not sure whether he was more annoyed at being asked to do some work or at having the word COB in large letters on his face, but since it was coming up to tea time he thought he'd better co-operate :rotfl:

The library van is coming tomorrow and they've got 17 books for me :eek: I'd better not order any more for a while, it'll take me at least one renewal to finish all of these! I've got 8 screens of unread books on my Kindle as well (all freebies).

cazmanian_minx

That's it, the accounts are wrapped up for another year - all I have to do now is take a back-up of my Sage file and email it to my accountant

Scores on the doors for the business this year:

Sales: £76,081.06

Stock purchases: £31,544.93
Direct expenses: £13,990.95

Gross profit: £30,545.18

Overheads: £14,236.36

Net profit: £16,308.82

Not quite as much on the bottom line as I'd hoped, but I overhauled everything in January/February to raise the net profit and for the past 3 months I've been averaging around 27% - so even if sales don't rise (and I hope they will!), next year's profit will be around £20k.

cazmanian_minx

Boden very kindly sent me another £10 gift voucher with a code for 15% off and free delivery today. That got converted into an extra birthday gift for my niece (8 at the beginning of June) in the form of a £14 t-shirt for £1.70

I had to buy another 10 bales of hay last night, which was £30. The grass is so behind this year - the ground temperature needs to be at 6C for it to grow and we're still getting ice most mornings, so it's just not growing.

Business takings are now just over £2k banked. Only another £118k to go to target :rotfl:

cazmanian_minx

It seems that I need to make a weekly order to my main UK supplier now, rather than the fortnightly ones I was doing previously. £970 today, but quite a bit of that is either new lines or a special order for a customer. Sales have been ticking over steadily this week, but have dropped off today - I only have 4 to go tomorrow at the moment.

The Barclaycard-that-was-an-Egg statement generated earlier this week and was paid immediately, as usual. Very nice to see 'Estimated interest next month: £3.16' instead of the usual £40 Nationwide, having asked me if I wanted to register for internet banking during the application process and taken all my details, sent me a letter saying that they couldn't register me because the account wasn't fully opened(!) and asking me to try again, so I did that today and hopefully should get online access to that account next week.

cazmanian_minx

O hai Friday - must be time for scores on le doors....

(last week/this week/ + or - amount)
Business
Overdraft: -£-6291.45 / -£6407.36 -£115.91

Business total: -£-6291.45 / -£6407.36 -£115.91

Personal
Overdraft: -£3081.40 / -£3242.59 -£161.19
Egg card: -£415.00 / -£400.00 +£15.00
Barclaycard: -£2695.00 / -£2695.00 no change
Nationwide card: £2741.85 / £2741.85 no change

Personal total: -£8933.25 / -£9079.44 -£146.19

Grand total: -£15,224.70 / -£15,486.80 -£262.10

So I'm currently moving in the wrong direction again. The business account increase is due to a supplier payment of £870.01 and eBay fees of £429.34, it wasn't actually a bad week.

On the plus side, I've now reached 2.05% of my turnover target and I had a nice email from one of the overseas suppliers saying that my order is nearly ready to ship. They sent me some pictures of three items that have arrived from the factory slightly different to the way they were ordered and wanted to know if I'd still accept them, which I will.

I'm trying to figure out what my next step is, debt-wise. At the moment, the balance of the NatWest account is actually -£242.59 thanks to the loan of the £3k from the croft savings. I *think* my best option is going to be to pay that off first (19.9%), which should happen when Mr Minx's next monthly payment hits the account (or if I have a good month with the beads and pay myself a bit extra), then start attacking the remaining £400 on the Egg card (16.9%). Once the Egg card is finished and the £3k has gone back to the croft account, I'll slow-stooze the overdraft to the Egg card by using the card for shopping, fuel etc. and paying the minimum and by the time that's all transferred, it'll be a year since I last applied for an MBNA balance transfer offer and hopefully I'll be able to transfer the Egg balance to 0% and close that card.

cazmanian_minx

Nice weather here today and the boys took full advantage:



I was thinking last night that I could maybe write an e-book along the lines of 500 tips for keeping a horse on a budget - I'm certain I can come up with 500 pretty easily and at 100 words each, that's a 50k book. Put it on Amazon at 99p a download, might do OK....?