Caz counts it down

Mara_uk7

Can I come and be your box unpacker please ? Feel like I could use a few wow moments !

cazmanian_minx

You'd be more than welcome, I've got 1 arriving next week and 24 the week after!

cazmanian_minx

It's been a busy, busy day. I had the shock of my life when I sat down to work this morning and found a load of orders had come in on eBay overnight, but it turned out that one customer had bought 15 items and paid for them all separately, so that was £9 of postage refunds to put through first thing.

It took the best part of five hours to pack the weekend's orders and then I started the long job of re-doing the work I lost on the memory stick. Out of the 32 photos needed, 16 have been taken and 4 have been edited and uploaded to my webspace (not taking any chances this time!).

I also found a moment to work my way through getting quotes for the building insurance. The renewal quote through the broker was £20 cheaper than the cheapest one, so we'll stick with it.

We have another household expense coming up though - we've finally found out how long the septic tank needs between desludges (3 years). Now that we know what the interval is, we can set up a contract with Scottish Water and pay the scheduled rate of £162 rather than the unscheduled rate of £238.30. They're sending me the paperwork and then a man with a tank will come out and sort us out. It's not too urgent at the moment, we have a bit of water seeping out into the field if you have a long shower and then flush the loo (or the other way around!). The grass around it is looking fantastic :rotfl:

cazmanian_minx

I don't know why, but I'm just so obsessed with my business at the moment that there's no room in my head for anything else. My to-do list is getting longer and longer and I'm loving every minute of work at the moment!

My new hard drive arrived today and I've unpacked it but not plugged it in yet. Very impressed at how fast it got here. My bargain Oasis jeans turned up as well, I'll try them on in the morning.

cazmanian_minx

knackered.com but progress is being made The new external hard drive is set up, the old external drive has been copied onto it and the whole thing is now backing up to a server in America while Carbonite puts a mirror image of my C: drive on the old drive.

The box of stock that arrived last night has all been processed and booked on, including the three new items that were a special order for someone. I've re-photographed the rest of the glass beads and only have 12 pictures left to edit before I can do the listings for them. I've ordered some more cabochons I'm low on and arranged for three custom sizes of one cabochon to be made for a customer. £350-worth of stuff got packed and posted and I worked through a 64-page PDF from a new supplier and whittled it down to 2 and a bit sides of A4 of stuff I want.

I'm watching my two big orders head towards the UK on https://www.marinetraffic.com - it's addictive The Xin Mei Zhou has just done a 3-point turn and is backing into Felixstowe and the Hatsu Crystal is just coming around the north west corner of Spain. The first load of boxes will wait at Felixstowe for the Hatsu Crystal to dock on the 28th and then they'll come up together.

I'm slowly ticking up towards my turnover target - I went past £10k yesterday, so as long as this financial year has 22 months in it, I'll make it :rotfl:

Finance-wise I've finally got round to doing my 'all DDs have been paid' transfer from First Direct to NatWest and paid Mr Minx my half of the weekend's shopping.

cazmanian_minx

How did it get to be Friday again?

(last week/this week/ + or - amount)
Business
Overdraft: -£-6983.54 / -£6649.52 +£334.02

Business total: -£-6983.54 / -£6649.52 +£334.02

Personal
Overdraft: -£83.37 / £-79.61 +£3.76
Egg card: -£3420.36 / -£3420.36 no change
Barclaycard: -£2615.00 / -£2615.00 no change
Nationwide card: £2741.85 / £2714.44 +£27.41

Personal total: -£8860.58 / -£8829.41 +£31.17

Grand total: -£15,844.12 / -£15,478.93 +£365.19

Not quite as good as last week, but nice to have everything green

One of my UK suppliers updated their Facebook page yesterday to say that they had a 7.5 tonne shipment arriving which was 30,000 strings of gemstone beads - I have shipment envy :rotfl:

gallygirl

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

One of my UK suppliers updated their Facebook page yesterday to say that they had a 7.5 tonne shipment arriving which was 30,000 strings of gemstone beads - I have shipment envy :rotfl:

Still only one little ship to track though .

Well done on a great week :j

cazmanian_minx

Nearly £20 off the Tesco shop today with coupons.

You can tell it's a bank holiday weekend with good weather, I haven't had a single sale on eBay for nearly 24 hours. But all the glass beads are listed and some have watchers already, which is a really good sign. I'm getting impatient to be buying again, especially since the resin flatbacks have done so well, but I need to wait for this next big delivery of boxes - until I start getting some cash in from that, buying more from overseas would seriously hamper my cash flow.

My NatWest bank statement arrived yesterday. This month's interest is £2.52 - that's better

dawnybabes

Wow I've just read your diary ! Well done you.

Might be teaching u to suck eggs here but have u ever looked at small business vat ? Not a lot of people seem to know about it and saves us a fortune.

cazmanian_minx

Hi Dawnybabes :wave: Do you mean the flat rate VAT scheme? My accountant crunched through the numbers for me and worked out that I was better off doing it the normal way. If all goes to plan, I'll be out of the turnover bracket in the next 18 months anyway

It's been a quiet day of doing not very much, though I did get up to date with the business accounts. Still not many orders to go, but I'd better do some packing up and get them dispatched off the system tomorrow as a couple of them are for Australia and the USA, who won't know it's a bank holiday.

I think I'm going to start putting away 5% of incoming business cash again. I used to do this when I first started out, but got out of the habit. It'll be a savings stash for tax, VAT balancing payments and unexpected stock opportunities. I know I shouldn't in theory have savings while I have debt, but it would be useful mentally to have that money put to one side.