Company Profile

You guessed it - this is about "Snakes on a Plane."

I went into this thinking it would be "campy" but entertaining. Even Travis told me "it was worth seeing." I guess that should have clued me in. But alas I did fork over my $7.00 for a chance to be part of the hype.

I thought I had seen the worst movie ever when I saw "Summer of Sam" by Spike Lee. I came close to walking out on that one. I didn't make it 30 minutes through "Snakes on a Plane" before I had to leave. I don't think it was 10 minutes before a woman's {insert body part} was attacked by a snake in the airplane's bathroom. After that it was all over for me. Within the next 20 minutes I saw a woman's toungue get chewed off, a woman's eyeball get maimed, a man's {insert man's body part} gets attacked, and several other people necks, heads, and other various body parts get bitten.

I decided to cut my losses early. I'm betting that after we left, there were many others following. We were the first ones brave enough to make a run for it.

I'm not a movie elitest. I love bad movies. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite movies was "Deep Blue Sea" - another Samuel L Jackson campy flick. This one was just over the top stupidity, bad acting, and complete lack of plot or suspense.

Yes, it's true - Our office has had a Mac attack. But let's be real - Quickbooks seems to be the software of choice for small business owners that need to manage their finances and payroll. Yes there is MYOB for the mac, but that thing is a bigger piece of junk than the PC itself. I have many business associates who have used the Mac with quickbooks and inevitably they have gotten screwed one way or another. Maybe the Quickbooks Pro 2006 version for the Mac is better than the last release. And for the life of me I just can't get past the fact that Mac doesn't embrace the right click! I'm sure someone out there will school me after reading this post, but Shawn was right - I am the last hold out in the office. I don't see that changing anytime in the future unless someone gives me a free Mac.

We've been in business for almost 10 years now. We have a full benefit plan in place that includes fully paid company health insurance, dental insurance, disability insurance and a matching retirement plan. Up until just recently we did not have what is referred to as a "Cafeteria Plan" or Section 125. I began researching this option and met up with Johnny McCutchen with Aflac Insurance. If three Aflac policies are purchased through your company, Aflac will administer your section 125 plan for free. That means that your health insurance, dental insurance and any of the policies you purchase through Aflac (except for Life) are now pre-tax (federal and FICA). In addition you can add a FSA for your employees. FSA's can be used for Dependant Day Care and medical bills. We opted to just do the day care portion.

But just to give you an idea of the savings, here are some figures.

For an employee making $50,000 a year with family health insurance (employee pays the difference between the single employee rate and the family rate since we cover the full amount for the employee), and $620 a month in day care costs there is a tax savings of $216.00 a month. That means this employee will take home $216.00 more a month! As the employer it saves me $55.00 a month.

So what does it cost the employer? The Section 125 which makes insurance premiums pre-tax is completely free. The FSA costs $199.00 to setup and $25.00 a month. The $25.00 a month is the fee you pay to Aflac to manage the paperwork for reimbursing the Dependant Day Care claims.

So what do the insurance policies cost that you have to buy to get setup with the Section 125 for free? The Cancer Care policy and Accident Policy (which are my favorites) end up costing about $90.00 a month for a whole family.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to contact me at ssharp@plexusweb.com for more information about how easy the process was to get the program setup or contact Johnny McCutchen at (706) 614-0242.

This morning emma woke up and exclaimed "Mommy I rode a pony last night!"

I began to engage her about the statement and realized she had a dream. She has never said anything about dreams before so I thought it was so cute. I asked her what color the pony was...then she repled "It wasn't a pony it was a horse! and it was black". Then I asked what she was doing on the pony. Then she said "uh, it was a dinasour. We were at the store. He needed a bandaid. He was so sweet."

It was the sweetest little story she has ever told!

About two months ago we started using an online project management software called Basecamp. I�d considered using it for about a year but I found it very difficult to commit to spending money on a monthly basis for online software, considering we have the capability to develop our own software internally. I've always preached to my clients - don't design your busines around software, design software around your business. I have ignored my own advice.

Nevertheless, I caved. I am pleasantly surprised mostly. The folks at 37signals have done a great job with Basecamp, for the most part. There are a few weaknesses, which I very quickly pointed out to them - but I have to remember I am breaking my own rule - i am learning to design my business around a software.

So if I decided to commit the very little free time we have to building our own "basecamp" what would i do differently. The folks at 37signals have already heard this from me..but nothing wrong with saying it again.

Optional Deadlines for To Do Items
To be a succussful business, you should have lots of residual work from your existing clients. That work usually involves regular functionality updates, content updates (for those clients who opt out of CMS functions), graphical changes, etc. Most of these small, but numerous changes are entered into Basecamp as �To Do� items as they are not large enough to warrant �milestones�. But if I have 15 or 20 tasks to complete for 4-5 different clients and assign to 3-4 employees I just have to enter them all and noone is ever reminded they are due or overdue for that matter. We are logged into basecamp at 4-5 times a day but a reminder of to do items would be nice. Being able to enter deadlines would create a trigger by which to send email reminders.

E-mail Notifications for Completed To do items
I have 50-60 to do items entered in our system at all times spread over multiple clients. I would like to report back to clients when items have been completed. However, because the work is spread over 8 employees, I have no idea what has been completed because i'm never notified. It would be nice to have some notification to the system administrator when tasks have been completed - this would make it possible for me to report back to clients in a timely manner instead of when I remember to check to see what is done.

Better reports and Exports
I love the reporting capability on Basecamp. it is very easy to use, does some cool ajax stuff, and is overall a great product. One of the major weaknesses is the omission of the "To Do List". The "To Do Item" is exported but not the name of the list it is from. Most people wonder why its important. In my case we use the "To Do List" to identify the billing group and the "To Do Item" as the actual task. For example we have templates for our to do list. An example would be "Content Implementation" Under that list we have three default items � Cut and Paste Content, Refine Presentation, Add Meta Tags, and Add Title Tags. For billing purposes in Quickbooks the "Item" on an invoice is directly relational to the "To Do List" in Basecamp. The Description field in quickbooks is directly relational to the "To Do Item". Displaying and exporting the "To Do List" would make it much easier to enter items into quickbooks quickly, and the next natural progression would be quickbooks exports. Perhaps that is already on the slate...

Tighter Integration of Milestones and To Do�s
You can associate To Do Lists with Milestones and in those cases, when all to do items are completed the Milestone should be marked as completed. We will often times have milestones that have been done for days that just stay on the main list because we forgot to check it off even though all items associated with it had been done.

Progress Billing Capability
We have up to 40 projects going on concurrently at any point in time. Some of these projects are fixed bid where the time is billed in set intervals, some are hourly work and the time is billed monthly, and some are fixed bid but they are large enough to warrant progress billing on a bi-weekly basis. I have found it difficult to keep up with what I have billed or not billed because there is no way to mark items as billed. It would be nice to easily mark items as billed so I can pull reports of just time that I have not billed for previously. This would save a good amount of time!

Having said all of this, I would not hesitate to recommend this software to pretty much any type of professional service company. It is an excellent employee motivator, time tracking, efficiency tracking, and profitability tracking tool.