Help Me With My New Business!

I have decieded to take the big plunge and open my own business.  First of
all, I thought of coming to all my friends on grex and ask for any advice and
help they may have.

In my business, I will offer bookkeeping and accounting services to small
businesses on an as needed basis.  Many small businesses have neither the need
or finances to employ a full-time bookkeeper and that is where my business
will come in.  I will be available once just to help an owner balance their
checkbook or several times a week to enter sales, process accounts payable
and recievable and generally do the book work.  Whatever the customer needs!
I also plan on helping the customers with business planning, budgeing and cost
saving ideas as hired or needed.

I have a degree in Banking and Finance and am working on a second degree in
Business Studies.  I also have 3 years banking experience and 3 years
experience working as a staff accountant.  I am also currently doing the same
type of work for a small business owner (that's how I came up with the idea)
and by next month will have completed my certification as a Certified
Bookkeeper.

Here's where I am asking for your help.  Remember, I am in the very early
planning stages of my venture so any and all help and ideas will be
appreciated.  I'd like to learn from other's mistakes.

First, has anyone else started up a business?  Do you have any tips?  Any
books and/or other publications I should check out.  I currently subscribe
to the following: Business Start-Ups, Small Business Start-Ups, Entreprenuer,
Inc. and Bloomberg Financial.

Second, I'd really like to decided on a name.  Does anyone have any
suggestions?  I will tell you that I live in Gaylord, MI which has an
alpine/swiss theme.  Some of the suggestions I have gotten have been: AAA
Accounting, Alpine Accounting, Beancounter Bookeeping and Budget Bookkeeping.
None of these really seem to grab me.  I welcome all ideas and/or comments.

Thank you, thank you, thank you in advance in any and all help you can be!

101 responses total.

"Green Visor Accounting"
"On Demand Accounting"
"Magic Ledger Bookkeeping"
"Cratchett's Clerical"

One last thing I need help on that I forgot.  I will need to buy a laptop and
am slightly ignorant in knowing if I am getting a good deal.  So far I have
found the following two systems, both of which are available for lease.  I
don't want to spend over $2000 and would prefer something I could lease.

An Acer 500 with Win 98, 266MMX processor, 3.2 GB HD, 20X CD ROM, 32 MB RAM
expandable to 128 MB and a 56K fax/modem.

A Satellite with Win 98, 253 MMX processor, 4.1 GB HD, 24X CD ROM, 32 MB Ram
and a 56K fax/modem.

The Acer's retail price is $1269 and the Satellite is $1539.  Are either of
these any good?  I am looking at Midwest Micro.  Does anyone have a good
source?  Any advice on what I should be looking for?  Thanks.

It's a laptop?  Sit down, use the keyboard, mouse, & poke around at the
display.  Those are all human factors issues where your subjective
impression counts for much more than anything else.  For the rest, a lot
depends on what you are doing -- what applications you're going to use,
etc.  In general, a difference of performance that is less than a factor
of two is almost invisible to the naked eye, so the difference between
253 Mhz and 266, or between 20x and 24x, is insignificant.  These
differences may also be wiped out by other less obvious structural
differences such as cache architecture, memory speed, or I/O contention.
If performance is important to you, look at benchmark results obtained
by independent agencies, or construct your own benchmark and run that.
You mention 32Mb ram.  A lot depends on your performance needs and usage
habits, but in general, more ram doesn't hurt.  On the other hand, it
will get cheaper.  How do you plan to back up your hard disk?

Alpine Financial Services
Swiss Watchdog Accounting
Helvetica Bookkeeping
Geneva Accounting Services

   A laptop is going to be of vital importance to your business, so
this is something you can't afford to skimp on.  Forunately, prices
have never been better.  Unforunately, many laptops have minor to
severe physical/mechanical problems.   There are two companies that
make what I consider decent laptops: IBM and Toshiba.  The IBM ThinkPad
series is expensive (though cheaper than they used to be).  The Toshiba's
are perhaps a little less advanced, but definitely cheaper, and have a
good reliability record overall.  If you look in the magazine "Computer
Shopper" you'll find dozens (and I do mean plural) of places that sell
both kinds.  A service contract will cost more but you want it.

I'm assuming the Satellite you're talking about is a Toshiba Satellite?  The
Toshibas I've used have been really nice.

Agree with Marcus: you want to evaluate the keyboard and the screen
on any laptop you are considering.  I like the Toshibas but your milage
may vary.
 
To expand upon marcus' comment about backing up your hard disk:
You need to answer the question, "What happens if someone steals the 
laptop out of my car?"

  For a business computer don't waste big bucks on today's fastest
  processors, you're not going to need them to do word-processing or
  spreadsheets.  Instead, concentrate on the quality of the display,
  keyboard, and pointing devices and try and get a machine with lots
  of RAM.  I definitely second the recommendation for the IBM Thinkpad
  series laptops and you might be able to find last year's model at
  a decent price..

  Absolutely, positively have a backup plan of some sort.  Stick to it,
  too, don't get lazy..

I can't really add to any of the laptop advice.  There are plenty of 
other things to think about, though.  Establish a plan for how your 
business operates.  How it handles customers, when you schedule things, 
what processes you use, etc.  Customize things so they work best for 
you.  Decide on a "pitch," a set strategy of selling your company to 
customers.  Make sure it looks and sounds refined and composed.  This is 
how you will make money.  

Talk to other people who do this and get advice from them, see what 
they've learned.  It also helps to get contacts and referrals from them 
if they operate in a similar area.  Get a slick looking business card to 
get some brand equity out there so small businesses know you're 
available.  

You'll notice that everything seems to tie into publicity.  There's a 
reason for that.  When people know you're there, they'll hire you.  
That makes money.  That's what keeps you going.  If you know what 
you're doing and people know that you know what you're doing, you'll 
do well.  I'm probably telling you stuff you already know, but if I went 
into actual operational procedures I'd just be looking even dumber, 
since I have all of one semester of college experience and you have one 
degree with another on the way and six years of related experience.  But 
that's how it goes.  Good luck.

Here's an easy thing to remember:

"For almost any computer that you will be able to afford, your data will be
worth much more".

Why use a cutesy name at all?  Unless you're planning to hire a bunch of people
just use your own name.  You might also want to think about getting your CPA.

senna's right on the money with his advice on getting the word out about your
business. Doing a good job for clients should be your first priority, the
second is having contacts.

I tend to be rather skeptical that the latest technology is necessarily
worth buying.  For most purposes, the 486 I have at home is perfectly
adaquate.  It does have more RAM than the average 486, I think (20 MB),
and it certainly has a much bigger hard drive (11 GB) which I bought new
about six months ago.

The annoyance that I run into is that the screen updates slowly in X11.
It can take a second or two.  This isn't a fatal problem, but it's
annoying.  I'm also running at 1024x768 on a 20" monitor, which is annoying;
I wish I had a better video card.  If my 486 had a PCI bus (it doesn't, but
the high end 486s do), I could probably buy a fairly nice video board for
it for less than $50, and then I'd probably be completely happy with this
machine.  (Other than the hard disk subsystem being lame, but that's a whole
'nother story.)

Before you buy a new computer, I'd recommend you take a look at a computer
that's a few years old.  See how well the old computer can meet your needs.
Compare it to a new computer.  If you can make a list of reasons why the
new computer will work better for you than the old computer, then it's fine
to go ahead and get the new computer.  But if you can't figure out what
the new one will do for you that the old one won't, then you probably should
get the old one and save your money.  The big computer companies would
like to sell you the latest and the greatest, but that doesn't necessarily
imply that you need the latest and the greatest.

This response has been erased.

This item is now linked between "agora" and "small business".  "j small
business" to see other topics of interest to small business owners.  "j agora"
to see a market place of ideas.  

Lori's Bookkeeping Service.
Do you have a homepage with the word Gaylord on it somewhere?
Have you offered your services free to a few nonprofits?  They will have
contacts.
Local newspaper advertising?
Have some other way to support yourself for a few years, such as a regular
job.  I did housepainting until my translation business got going.

Ingersoll Associates.  Even if there are no actual associates at
the moment, you'll be ready for them some day, and it's a great
name.

Just for the record, I have dealt with Midwest Micro in
the past, and they did a good job of customer service.
I haven't dealt with them lately, however.

Re #0:  Lori's Ledgers
        Ledgers by Lori (give it an up-scale feeling).
 
If you have a laptop, make certain that your hard drive is
removable.  If you can plug it into a desktop machine, so
much the better.  What you need are two capabilities:
 
1.)     The ability to back up your data elsewhere.
2.)     The ability to run your business even if the
        laptop machine, or its hard drive, fails.
 
Ideally you'd be able to walk into the nearest office-supply
place, buy a new machine, and be back in operation within a
few hours of a complete failure of your portable.

Ledgers by Lori sounds like a company selling artsy bookkeeping supplies with
floral patterns and poetic slogans.

I'm voting for "Ingersoll Associates" or "Green Visor Accounting"

Here's a vote for Ingersoll Associates

Re #17: Yes, it's nice if you can buy a new machine and have it working
correctly within a few hours.  I haven't seen it happen in practice.
I tend to find it useful to have lots of machines configured in a useful
state, so that when things start failing I can work on something else.
(In practice, these days that seems to mean that of the four machines I have
at home, one is actually useful.)

I don't see where an easily removable hard drive necessarily helps.  And
if you want to be able to get to the laptop's hard disk from your desktop,
you ought to consider investing in ethernet.

Here's how one small business came up with its name (quoted from its web
site):

                            Where did it come from?
   
   It's Welsh. I was looking for a business name. I tried three different
   names, and New York State told me (one by one) that they were all
   used. Three months, $15 and much aggravation later I decided to pick a
   name that *no one* would have thought of before. A friend of mine
   knows Welsh, and named his lab computers after the days of the week,
   the months of the year, etc. Well, rather than pick a euphonious but
   meaningless Welsh name, I looked up Quaker in Welsh and liked it.
   Hence Crynwr Software.
     
                              What does it mean?
     
   Crynwr in Welsh literally means "cringer". Capitalized, it becomes a
   proper noun meaning "Religious Society of Friends".

  I'd also vote for "Ingersoll Associates" but fear that you might have a
  conflict with an existing firm..

Or you could go totally abstract. Lately at work we've been dealing a lot with
a company called "Promax". 
 
I know what kind of firm Promax is, but the name doesn't help you out any.
Any number of types of businesses could be called Promax, as fittingly as
these guys are. (Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of custom paint
matching, prescription drugs, auto body shops, "novelty lubricants", or
management advisors.)
 
I vote abstract.

From a web search I just did, Ingersoll & Associates is dealer of automatic
bag closing equipment, in St. Charles, Illinois.  I think a corporation name
or DBA only has to be unique within a state.  Trademark law, if I understand
it correctly, only gets concerned in cases of "famous companies" or in cases
where the companies are similar enough in service area, type of business, etc.
that there would be confusion between the two companies.  Given that I don't
think anbody would suspect that the Ingersoll Associates bookkeeping firm in
Gaylord was also an automatic bag closing equipment dealer in St. Charles,
Illinois, I doubt that would be an issue either.

You could also go for something with a neat TLA (three letter abbreviation).
I suppose Gaylord Accounting Services wouldn't come out quite right in that
sense.

One silicon valley startup last year paid a consultant some big bucks to
come up with a snappy name for the company.  The founder of the company
was a man who had made a name for himself, and was now jumping ship to
start his own company, yet he gave the consultant explicit instructions
to come up with 'something unrelated to my name'.  That's what he got:
Sutmyn corporation.  

Re #24: Yes, that sounds about right.  It happens that `emacs' is a trademark;
there is a company that makes emacs power supplies.  The emacs power supplies
have nothing to do with the emacs text editor, and it has been concluded that
since power supplies are very different from text editors, we don't have to
worry about the text editor being trademark infringement.

I vote for Gaylord Accounting Services :S

As to the equipment, you definitely want redundancy and backups. My personal
preference for backup is currently a CD-ROM burner, with mag-op taking second
place. However, CDR generally produces coasters more often than not if you
don't know what you're doing; and mag-op is fast becoming unsupported.
Therefore my recommendations:

* Both a laptop (see above for brand recommendations) *and* a desktop are in
  order. Get ethernet cards for both machines, that they may easily talk to
  one another. Needless to say, modems are strongly recommended as well. If
  you *must* run a microsoft product, have a DOS 6.22 installation *and* a
  Windoze NT partition on each machine.

* For backup, each machine should have *three* identical hard drives of a
  size commensurate with the task. I recommend around 8 GB. Get Western
  Digital for the desktop at least; and for the laptop if you can. Each
  hard drive should have contents identical to the others. One will reside
  its machine; a second should be outside the machine but nearby; and the
  third should be stored in as far removed a location as practical from the
  rest of the equipment - at least inside a different building. Rotate
  the hard drives so that each one spends some time being the offsite backup.

  Backing up consists of shutting the machine off, opening it up and plugging
  the backup drive in, and doing an XCOPY for each partition. Again, be sure
  that the offsite backup gets updated as well as the nearby backup. To a
  very large extent, the hard drive *is* the computer. For this reason, if
  you have a problem with a computer, this backup plan will let you buy a
  new machine, plug in one of the backup drives, and be back in business
  instantly.

Re #27: First of all, you cannot count on being able to transplant a hard
disk and have the operating system immediately start working in a new machine
with different hardware.  If you're running a microsoft product, you probably
will have to reinstall the software from scratch.  With unix, you may have
to rebuild the kernel or otherwise change the configuration.

Second, it may be wise to get hard disks from different manufacturers that
have about the same specs.

Third, I personally would recommend doing RAID mirroring rather than
explicit backups.  If you do this, make sure the drives are not identical;
there are some failure modes which are likely to toast all of the drives
that are very similar, but won't immediately toast a drive with different
charictaristics.

Also, it should be pointed out that doing RAID mirroring is *not* an adaquate
substitute for regular backups.

One advantage of tape is that you can save the tapes, and if you notice
now that you deleted deleted a file six months ago, you may still be able
to find it on the tape.  However, my experience is that restoring from
tape is somewhat non-trivial.

Whenever I get a laptop, I don't think I intend to back it up.  I'll make
an effort to make sure that data gets copied onto other machines every
few days; the fact that I use cvs for a lot of the code I hack on helps
with this.

I once considered tape to be adequate, until I needed to restore off of one
and found the data to be all screwed up. I will no longer trust tape, or
recommend it for something that's somebody's bread and butter. For that
matter, I don't particularly like any storage based solely on magnetism.
However, while every other hard drive I've had has eventually developed bad
sectors (often out of the box) and become useless, I've yet to see a single
bad sector on my Western Digital 4 gig which I've had almost 2 years. This
is why I consider it okay for when optical media is not practical.

As to transplanting, I've had no problem booting up, even after switching from
a 486 to a K5 and then a Pentium. 'Course, I use DOS, but even the NT system
has been able to handle the change. A Linux kernal might need rebuilding, but
that's not that difficult. Just replace with identical hardware where
possible; even non-identical hardware compatible with standard protocols. IDE
is IDE and NE2000 is NE2000.

As to RAID, it might protect against hardware glitches of various sorts -
maybe - but it does nothing about buggy software trashing important files,
and it doesn't address the need for offsite backups. IMO, the backup data
should not reside in the machine except when being updated.

The idea of backing the laptop up to another machine is good - it saves the
expense of a specialized hard drive. Just remember to do it early and often.
The machines can be offsite backups of each other this way, though I still
think there should be at least one more copy somewhere. You can never have
too many backups.

Back to CDR: It's a pain in the ass if you don't know how to set it up and
use it properly, or if you get the wrong media and|or machine. But if you can
make it work, it's a splendid backup method. CDR is write once, but it's
disgustingly cheap these days if you buy the media in bulk. Even CDRW disks
can had for about half a cent a megabyte, compared to hard drive space at 2.5
to 3 cents/MB.

I don't think it's at all practical to have a RAID array in a notebook.  It's
also not necessary for what Lori is trying to do.

Ok, most of us are geeks here, and it's easy to try to impose our dream
computer situation on somebody else.  Yes, it's nice having several computers,
including a notebook I use while I'm on site somewhere and desktop computers
at all the places where I do lots of work.  However, for somebody who is just
trying to use their computer as a tool to get work done, that's really not
ncessary.  I've known plenty of professionals who used their computers a lot,
in a lot of different locations, who got along just fine with a notebook as
their primary and often only computer.

Good backups are important, since losing all your files is not something you
will be able to recover from easily.  That means that it's important to back
up any data files that have changed every couple of days at least, or even
more often.  Depending on the volume of those files, you could do that onto
floppy disks, or zip disks (which hold around 100MB), or tape.  Backing up
to CD or over an ethernet to a PC are also options, but are significantly more
expensive.  A complete backup of everything on the hard drive is a good thing
to do occasionally.  However, assuming you're using a Microsoft operating
system, that will only be useful if your hard drive dies and not if the whole
computer dies, since there's enough hardware specific stuff in the Windows
registry that you're likely to have to reinstall all your software if you
switch computers anyway.

A big question with the computer stuff is how much your time is worth, and
how much time you can afford to lose on an unexpected problem.  Computer
failures happen.  However, they're relatively rare, and pretty unpredictable,
so there's no one thing you can do to protect yourself.  Assuming you're like
most people starting small one person businesses, you probably don't have
enough money to buy a spare of everything that could possibly break, nor would
it make sense for you to do so, probably, even if you did have enough extra
money to do that.  If your notebook computer gets destroyed or stolen, you
can probbaly figure on spending a day or two dealing with that, and possibly
spending a few thousand dollars, before you can get back to doing work that
depends on it, but as long as you have good backups of your data it shouldn't
be more than that.

Re #29: My slightly more than 3 year old, 1.2 GB Western Digital hard drive
is dead.  Sadly, it seems to have died right before I got around to backing
it up.  (I got a tape drive a few months ago.)

I don't think *any* medium is completely flawless.

So it's decided, she'll need triply redundant dual/Pentium servers.  ;)

Seriously, a notebook is a handy thing if you want to have everything at your
fingertips when visitng a client.  On the down side, notebooks are harder to
fix and tend to break more often.  If mobility is not needed, a desktop PC
could have 2 hard disks (say another $200 for the 2nd disk), and do daily or
more often backups to the 2nd disk.  Software exists too that lets you do
compressed drive images to another disk, such that if the primary disk fails
you just put in a new disk and restore the most recent image from the
secondary (if the secndary dies you just put in a replacement!).

Offline backups like tape or Zip disks are good too, since you can take
backups and put them in a deposit box or someone else's house in case your
house burns down.  Solutions here vary in price depending on a number of
factors, but usually you either have a cheap drive and expensive media (Zip
disks, linear tapes, tec) or an expensive drive and cheap media (DAT, CD-R).

For bookkeeping you need to consider how long records must be archived.  Print
copies may be OK, or perhaps you'd want online archiving.  CD-R would be
pretty good for that, with meda costing about $1.50 for 650 MB and a long
shelf life (CD-R is *slow* to write, though).

A big concern might be what software is to be run.  For just word processing
and email almost anything will work, but special accounting packages, ability
to directly read data files from clients, etc. will weigh heavily on choice
of computer.

I'd stay away from Zip disks and any other Iomega product. Yes, they're all
the rage in the consumer PC market, and everyone has one, and you can swap
data easily and all. But there have been numerous complaints about these
things dying from several newsgroups, particularly comp.sys.scsi. Maybe your
zip drive will work okay - many people report no problem. But why take that
chance? Iomega is a flakey company through and through, judging by their
rebate performance and customer service.

Any company that makes you pay just to get 'customer service' 
is a loser in my book...  (Does Iomega still do that?)

(I wouldn't buy a Zip drive again...no problems with mine, but there are more
cost-effective drives out new like the SparQ)

The only problem with the SparQ is that Syquest, who I believe makes it, is out
of business.  I'm a very happy Zip user, and heartily recommend them,
especially if you'll be swapping media with other people.  Their popularity has
made them an ad-hoc standard.

Last i heard, Iomega bought Syquest's technology and a few other choice 
items at the liquidation sale.  (It's called making *SURE* that your
competition is *DEAD*.)  Iomega's new ZIP 250 drives are now available
in external versions.  Figuring the popularity of the format, how high
the effective capacity is with (usually VERY compressable) accounting 
files, and the ease of swapping an external drive (if yours dies or a
client has no other way to get something on or off his computer), you
probably can't do much better on a budget. 

Re #32: Having a second nonremovable hard drive is not something I consider
adaquate for a complete backup solution.  There are possible failure modes
in which the machine gets compelety clobbered (such as power supply failure,
or fire, or something maliciously deleting all files).  A backup *must* be
kept away from the computer if you really want to make sure the data will
be preserved.

        How about an external Jaz drive? Certainly big enough, at least.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss