Saturday, January 2, 2010

No I'm not online, I'm doing paperwork for taxes ...

Between the holidays and family visits and weather and other distractions the farm has kind of been on hold the last week or so.  Come Monday we'll hit the ground running and start acting like a business again.  But it's been nice after this long dragged out fall to just kind of take a break and adopt a "don't worry, be happy" attitude.

We had a major systems failure here in the farm office.  The KVM switch died.  I have 2 desktop computers.  One is business and the other is everything else.  But with the KVM switch both ran off one keyboard, monitor, and mouse.  So I'm back to this computer over here and that computer over there.  It shouldn't be that big of a deal, but once you get a system in place changing it is a pain.

That kind of describes a record keeping change I've been contemplating.  I've been trying to convince myself to break down and make Farmworks FarmFunds software package work for me (see http://www.farmworks.com/products/funds).  It's a great system, but to make it work I'm going to have to change how I do some record keeping.  It's about as big a change from what I have now as what I have now was from Dad's ledger book.  It's kind of the GIGO problem (Garbage In Garbage Out).  To make it do what it is capable of you have to put the right data into it ... and I'm not sure I'm disciplined enough to make it work.

I used FarmTrac for several years and decided to go to Funds.  It integrated with all my Trac records flawlessly.  But when I tried to implement Funds I realized it just would not work with the way we were set up (this was a few years ago when Dad was still going strong).  But it integrated my Trac records so completely I was unable to go back to what I had.

Well anyway, I better finish printing out the report I started on 12 hours ago.  I just love taxes.  I'm constantly reminded of something Gramps said. "Paying taxes is bad, but not having to pay them is worse."

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