A pair of business thoughts
On Saturday I received a letter about an incorrectly filed employer’s tax form for the year 2005. 2005 was the first year that I’ve run a payroll, so it seemed completely believable that I’d made a mistake. However it was daunting to contemplate the possibility that I may have carried that mistake through 11 months of 2006 as well. I set the letter aside resolving to research the problem first thing Monday morning. I didn’t pick the letter back up until about an hour ago. I waded through the two pages of small print to try to figure out exactly what the objection was. I discovered that I’d failed to file a state witholding form. It was in the booklet they’d thoughtfully provided, hidden behind some other pages. Filling out the form took all of 5 minutes. It is reassuring to me that I was able to resolve the issue so quickly because it means that I’m probably doing everything right. Yay!
I like having our storefront. I like the fact that we can manage credit card orders ourselves without having to go through a service such as Paypal. I like that we have a shopping cart so that customers can customize their orders. Unfortunately this shopping cart software is not really set up for a big mailing like our preorders for Blackness Between. It simply can’t do some of the sorting and managing necessary for processing a thousand orders all at once. 10 months out of the year this software will meet our needs, but on preorder months there will be gaps between what the software can supply and what we need it to do. This month I solved the problem of that gap by throwing myself in it. I am manually sorting over 1000 invoices according to shipping choices and contents. I’m also manually manipulating shipping information to create address labels. Then I am matching address labels to invoices. Then I have to print postage appropriate to the various stacks of invoices. Once books arrive we’ll take those stacks of invoices with matching labels and postage and assemble them all together for mailing.
Each of those steps introduces the possibility of human error. Thus far I have made myself comfortable that no errors have crept in because I’m doing it all myself. But I’m human too. And there are only so many hours in the day for me to accomplish things. So I have to ask myself if I am retaining jobs that I ought to be delegating? I suspect that I am. Perhaps I need to hire my own children to help me do some of the sorting and printing. We’ve already lined up volunteers to help with the assembly and mailing. Perhaps by the next time we have to manage a large preorder we’ll be financially solvent enough that I can hire other help. For now, I’m happy in the knowledge that I only have to cover the gap for nine more days.