News from Huckleberry Resources

July 2010

Welcome to Huckleberry Resources

Greetings!

Now that the summer is finally here, I can get back on my bike! Some friends, my hubby and I took a ride to Bike Fest in Seaside over the weekend and because Josh and I don't ride cruisers, we looked funny contrasted with the Harley-types. We had a blast and I look forward to my upcoming trip to Ashland, going the long way down, in August!

There are some new items on the Huckleberry website: a handy business plan outline and a sample bio. If you are in business planning mode, check them out.

As always, I hope you find this issue entertaining and informational. Your comments and questions are always appreciated and please pass it along to family and friends.

Best wishes!

What the heck is Twitter and why do I care?

Although I am sure you have heard about Twitter, you may not know exactly what it is and how it might be useful to your business.

In a nut-shell, Twitter is an information feed. Users post in 140 characters or less their status, thoughts, comments, links, pictures, etc. Anyone can be a user, you just have to sign up for a free account and start posting. Just remember, what you post stays out there in the interwebs - its public!

Who to follow? You can follow friends, celebrities, companies or random people. For example, a short list of who I follow are local news organizations, Bill Cosby and a handful of friends.

So what is with the @ or #? @ is addressing your Tweet or referencing a user. And a # signifies a hashtag for tagging your post with keywords. If I were to hashtag this article I might use #whatistwitter. This allows people to search Twitter for all posts with that keyword.

Why would I want to use Twitter? I don't care about Paris Hilton's latest meal. Many people use Twitter to get their message out to their followers quickly and easily - you could be talking to your customers at any time. Its not about what mundane thing someone is doing that second but it could be very useful like getting quick tips from a computer guru or specials from a favorite coffee shop.

The first step is signing up and you can follow me @anishbee.

Ugghh, Job Costing

Do you know if every project you do (assuming you do projects) made money? How do you know if you have estimated the correct labor?

Job costing is where you take a completed project and accumulate all the costs associated with the project and subtract those from the invoiced price to the customer. This is also called gross profit.

Yeah, if you are not a numbers person then job costing can be torture but how else are you going to know these critical things?

Take a look at your accounting system. Can you make it easy by entering in labor in the form of timesheets? What about purchasing - do you use your accounting software to cut purchase orders? This will put you on the right track pretty easily if you have just these two things already in place.

Realistically, you might not use your accounting system for every little tiny piece of who-knows-what on your project so developing your process can help you with the incidentals. Can you create a quick form for those that gets turned in daily? Weekly? At the end of the project?

The rest is just running a couple of reports (or if you are lucky, a single report) and doing some simple math.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Issue: 7

In This Issue

What is Twitter?

Ugghh, Job Costing

What's New?

What's New?

Writing Your Business Plan
a new series on my blog!

Feeling overwhelmed by the thought of writing a business plan? And for gosh sakes, why would you want to write one?

I am writing a business plan series on my blog, your comments, thoughts and even critiques are welcome.

Subscribe and stay tuned!

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Anish vonAhlefeld
Huckleberry Resources
503-206-7209
www.huckleberryresources.com

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