Home Office Site

I have been looking for a way to incorporate forms into my business management. My priorities include privacy, efficiency, ease of use. I want to be able to tell a worker that they can go to a defined page and enter information that I can accumulate and use elsewhere.

Well I’ve tried out more than I bargained for. I don’t have much of a budget, but I will be willing to pay a small amount eventually….at least if the forms create more business.

The two I have looked at the most are Zoho Creator and JotForm. Both are free until you want more…..I haven’t gotten to the point of choosing more.

ZoHo is going to deserve a long dedicated post of its own…..it is downright amazing all of the free services offered by this site. I have already used it for formatting and submitting an excel sheet into a blog, for instance. I have created a online job application form with this also.

Now I have finally started a Google Payment account and want a form program that will integrate with Google the best. I am leaning towards using Jotform, because it is so clear what I am will get for $9 a month. You wouldn’t believe how many companies I have eliminated from consideration because they bury their pricing information…….on the assumption that if they loop you in with a free trial you will jump on board. Me….I get pissed off that they will waste my time by surprising me with the cost after I’ve delved into the program for a day. I just don’t give those suckers a second look any more. If you can’t be upfront and easy about what you charge I don’t want to deal with you. I don’t have time, thank you very much!

So JotForm is the one I will try for payment…..to be continued. Gotta pick up my high school freshman. Be right back!
love and peace

Alright….I know they have a suggestion routine…I have been there and done that. So here is my public plea….

All I’m asking for is a very simple way to search my email with a date range in mind. That’s all. I can’t be the only person who has needed to find an email and our major clue for the search is the time frame we either received or sent it in. How hard could this feature addition be? If I look for something I sent to myself  in February of this year I have to dig through page after page after page of emails to get to that date. A simple calendar based search box would be wonderful. If not that why not set it so that you can set up a filter with a filter category being a date range?  I could delete the filter after it was of no use to me.

Please? Pretty please????????

I loved working at home. Really I did. I home-schooled, had kids interrupting my phone calls and didn’t care, had everything in one place…..if I needed to stop what I was doing, I stopped.

I realize that must sound chaotic to most of you, but it is exactly what I loved about working at home. I am sort of a schizoid type and distraction ready. Thrive on distraction was my motto at the time.

So why do I write about “home office site” stuff when I don’t work at home any longer? Well…..I sort of still do. Just that I feel like I am always working no matter where I go. And I’m not saying that in a negative way. My view is that our life’s work is our lives, and I try to make the most of it where ever I am. I would not be able to be sane in my outside paid job, otherwise. I once told the woman who hired me that I would be dedicated to the position as long as I could blend my “outside” life with it and it with my outside life. And I do.

I manage two kitchens, have two office locations, supervise a staff fluctuating between 12 and fifteen people at two locations, manage several contracts, manage more than one type of business, manage a family ……(my youngest started high school this week – sigh – the other three are in the beyond of college land), I’m on the steering committee of two separate organizations, I’m politically active and sing with the Raging Grannies, I try to keep up with the remains of my “working at home days” business of managing several websites, write for three blogs…..and it isn’t as much as it sounds simply because I meditate every morning, practice Reiki, and stick to the plan of blending it as one whole instead of all the separations implicated by the many uses of commas in this big long run on sentence I have just written. Take out the commas and it is still one who sentence. If I didn’t see it all as some whole shape that fit together I would not be able to pull it off, or be happy with the fact that this journey is what I enjoy and what I love waking up to.

Anyhow, I carry my home office site with me wherever I go. My car resembles my frizzy hair in style. I have at least three carry-all bags. One of them is I swear an old diaper bag from the Goodwill store. Nice weird tan/peach shade, well padded and compartmentalized. Perfect for my laptop. The other’s are soft $10 satchels from Staples. And I carry my office online at my server space. More on that later.

Right now I’m at one of my EcoCenter Office Space that the Center for Sustainable Living allows for me to use in exchange for Food Works supplementing some catering needs. I’m here because my fourteen year old daughter needs to be fourteen and hang out downtown with friends and recuperate from the first week of high school. Blending. That is what I do. Working at home because home is where my heart and mind are. Wherever that may be.

Peace be with you.

donna

It is very simple to set Gmail as your default email client in FireFox.

Open your Tools tab and click on Options.  Then open the applications tab and scroll down until you see the mailto:  in the content type list.  Set it to Gmail and now when you click on a mailto: link Gmail will open up a compose window for you.

Google Labs has come up with a new feature where you can attach a Google document to your event listing.  This is very handy if you want someone to be able to print out details.  Do you have a flyer for the event that you would like those who share the calendar to post? Well this is one heck of an easy way to do it.

Here is an image of a calendar event with a document attached.

One of the work hats I wear is that of Business Manager for Food Works for Middle Way House. Food Works is a catering business that is ran as a social enterprise (there will be another post about that later). One of our rented kitchens provides the meals for the local Head Start Program, the Villages Child Care Program and the Senior Nutrition Sites operated by Area 10 Agency on Aging.




It had always been a challenge to deal with changing meal and supply orders from the senior nutrition sites. There is a very low percentage of profit possible on each meal, and to find that you have fixed 80 meals for one site only to find out they only needed 75 was a frustrating and common situation. Keeping track of each week’s meal order was also cumbersome……this is only one of two kitchens being managed (the other is for special events) and each contract has its separate wiggly details that can drive a person mad on a daily basis. Trust me on that. Keeping up with requested menu changes, complaints, shortages, compliments….well you get the idea. Invoicing correctly was definitely becoming a nightmare.

I lucked out, and Area 10 hired a great manager for the nutrition program (Hi Cheri!) who was comfortable with using the computer as a go-between. She already used Gmail, so getting her onto a shared blog with Blogger.com was not a problem, Blogger was a more comfortable route to go than a blog I would set up on a separate server. Once I was able to assure her that the blog was open only to us, she was on-board. We have our own individual user names and passwords.

Once a week Cheri posts the food order for each week. She then makes changes during the week as needed. We write her back on the blog if there are questions. She lets us know which sites are out of trays, what meals are a hit and which one’s don’t fly with the seniors (no un-cooked carrots because of dentures, limit the spiciness please, too many seniors can’t have grapefruit,etc.). We agree on meetings, post menus, etc. I have set up the sidebar with links to our web pages, a list of our important contact phone numbers, and our current menu download. This all may seem rather unremarkable, except that it lightened our work load considerably. For instance, Cheri and I are both people who are constantly receiving phone calls and this cut that down dramatically. I am no longer required to fill out and change paperwork constantly because of meal order changes. I just do the invoice once a month and pull the numbers straight off of the blog….no writing and re-writing. Jo, the kitchen manager, checks the blog every morning before meal prep and our costs are controlled more tightly because of the resulting improved ordering from our suppliers.

A blog like this is quick and easy to set up. I tried to convince the Head Start People to use this process, but they were more computer-phobic and worried about confidentiality. These concerns are groundless to a person once they really look at the process. No one sees our posts but ourselves and there is never any client data shared, regardless. I think people who have Gmail are more open to the idea because they have often been exposed to shared documents. The advantages of using Blogger is that it is quick and easy to set up, and it doesn’t take hardly any time at all to train a contributor in how to navigate the blog. We did have to agree not to use comments as communication on posts – just actual posts – because they were too easy to miss. We are on the run and need the information right in our face, not on a “to-be-clicked button” .




While I was at it, I set up a quick private blog where I keep track of personnel issues. Like most businesses we have a warning system including verbal and written warnings for tardiness and other work issues. This blog is open only to me, but I can quickly record details about employee incidents so that when I do type the incident up later it is correct, fair and not subject to the whims of my memory. I had been using email for this, but this is all in one place and requires no search. The chronological nature of the blog system is a definite benefit for this use because one can easily see an employee pattern developing.

I have also set up a blank document blog. I have uploaded all of my business forms to my server and I link to them on this blog. It is pretty much one long post of these links and that’s it. So when I am at one kitchen or another, or one office or another (I have two in addition to my office at home) I can download a PTO (personal time off) form for an employee when they request it. I have the blank time sheets available there, the personnel policies, all of the interview and new hire forms, W-4 forms, safety manuals…..you name it I’ve got it there. When your car is your mobile office as often as mine is, this is a real survival measure. I run in circles enough as it is to have to track back to another location to hand someone a form. This works better for me than Google Documents, because I can upload original formats (pdf files, jpegs, etc.) and land on them all in one simple page. Perhaps if I had already been using WordPress at that time I may have set it up on that, but I don’t think so. If I ever have to transfer my knowledge and resources to a replacement person crazy enough to take my job, the Blogger format is more convenient and transferable.

Please feel free to comment!

I won’t hide the fact that I have been a big fan of Google products all along. I long ago converted to Gmail, and recruited whatever friends I could to use Gmail for their email application. I soon afterward switched to their calendar system…….(this will involve a separate post). And now I am a big fan of iGoogle.

At first I didn’t quite “get” iGoogle. It just sort of seemed like a playground area to decorate a favorite landing area when you first log online. However, while I was setting up this blog, editing a website, and keeping track of links for a program I’m setting up for my employees all in the same afternoon, iGoogle’s usefulness became apparent in almost a trite “Aha!” type moment. I was able to arrange my iGoogle page into several useful tabs.

I have iGoogle set up as my homepage, and once I log into my Google account, my landing page on iGoogle shows me my most recent emails, my current to-do list, my calendar entries, my google bookmarks (another favorite), and my favorite news sources.

I have two other tabs set up….I’ve been too lazy to name one of them, so it is still called Name this Tab. I go their infrequently to play a quick game of Sudoko, learn my Spanish word of the day. That kind of thing.

My third tab is called numbers. I keep domain IPs, login reminders (pre-treated with my own personal disguises that I understand), and a yellow pages gadget to look up phone numbers.

This is all done with the use gadgets that you can get by clicking the links at the top of your iGoogle page. This is all so easy. On the typical afternoon I was talking about I would go from one of my Mozilla tabs back to my iGoogle page to log important links and article ideas. I jotted down login info for my cPanels. Since I operate more than one Cpanel I also had FileZilla open on the desktop so that I could transport files to servers. I was taking phone calls and wrote down my notes to later enter into my calendar(s). If I needed to close down my desktop quickly (and I did) all those little jots of notes were still there when I came back without closing down notepad, word, etc. I’m probably not doing justice to how handy this iGoogle page is, so play around with it and see if it helps you keep your life sorted.

By the way, I just had a conversation with a friend who wasn’t using iGoogle because she thought that anyone could see her iGoogle page. This just isn’t so…..everyone sees the standardized iGoogle page until they log in and then they can see their private iGoogle page. The privacy level is the same as it is for your calendars and email.

I wrote a few days ago about QuickBooks.  Since then I was surprised to discover that they have a free  product available to small business owners called Online Invoices.

What’s included?

Unlimited Invoicing
Multiple Invoice Templates
Address Book Management
Accept Credit Cards & eChecks*

If you want recurrent invoicing, or you want to create and send estimates, the  cost is only $9.95  per month.

It  seems to me that using this product is a complete no-brainer.  I have many friends and acquaintances who operate small  businesses out of their  homes.    Cash flow  needs to  be a top priority for all of us, and  having  an organized system of invoicing customers (especially those late  in payment) is critical for your success.  I am not an affiliate with Intuit (maybe I should work on that) …….I  am giving this recommendation to  you to help you out!  If you don’t  have the money to invest in  QuickBooks…….start here.

I think I have given up on a normal lifestyle. Working late creating the budget for Food Works for next year.

Every time I use QuickBooks I think of all the things I wish it would do for me. I mean, it is all right there.

For instance, my customer list has gotten enormous. And often times I won’t know what the customer name was listed as before (please realize that I’m sharing Quickbooks with several other programs operated by MWH and I’m not who set up all the customers). I should be able to do a simple search based (sort of like google) so if I put in Women’s Affairs I go straight to that office. As it is now, I don’t know if it is listed as Women’s Affairs, IU office of Women’s Affairs, Indiana University Department of ……well you get my drift. Perhaps this isn’t a problem for others, but I bet it is. Other organizations are larger than ours. This one small improvement would save me a bunch of time.