Posts Tagged Business Advice
iPhone App Review: Money Book
Posted by Josh in Business Advice, General, Reviews on February 4, 2010
In an effort to be a better blogger, I have decided that I will be publishing stories, reviews, and other things I find interesting on this blog. As it transitions this coming year I hope that you will continue to read and offer constructive criticism. So with that written, on with the review.
Last week, I was informed of an app called Money Book: Finance with Flair. I was intrigued by the article on the app, and I decided I needed to investigate this further. As someone who believes a $0.99 app is always worth a try, I decided to pull the trigger.
*(Note to all those reading this, the app was on sale at the time, I think it is now back up to $2.99, but it could change.)
After downloading this app my first impressions were that the UI (User Interface), was incredibly well designed. I thought while using it that getting from screen to screen was seamless and exactly how Apple had envisioned an iPhone app to behave. Clearly, the user experience was well conceived while developing this application.
The application comes with standard budget elements. They allow you the ability to set up your gross monthly income, enter your recurring bills, track daily expenses, and see some well designed graphs of your expenses.
Here are some photos of the app so you can see exactly how the interface looks and works.
From this screen you are able to see your highest expenses and a fuel meter of where you are in your budget. It is easy to add a new expense from this screen.
This is a graphical view of where your money is going.
This is where you can see all of your recurring transactions. You can add a note on each one that will appear in your summary.
A nice feature is the ability to export your log. You can track and store multiple months on this view, but by having this log, you can send it as a CSV File.
This is the page where you enter an expense. I think it is well designed and allows you to select from about 20 icons, and it has the iPhone calculator feel.
My only complaints about this app would be the following.
1) They need to develop a way for you to update your recurring expenses so that you can set dates for those transactions. This would help for those that want to have a true date tracking budget. Currently your recurring payments are taken out on the first of each month, so that is a bit frustrating.
2) I would like to see some more default items add to new transactions page. They have about 20 right now, but they would be better served if you could choose from a few more.
3) They should develop a quick way to pull up a previous transaction again. I am a person that eats at Chipotle (A LOT). Each time I go my bill is $9.91 (I will let you guess what I get for that price), and it would be great if I could just have a quick add button. Instead I have to enter it as a new transaction and type a new note.
Overall, I would recommend this app. I am not sure what type of ratings scale I am going to use (most likely something with beards) but when I do come up with one, I will come back and rate this app more appropriately. For now, I feel this app is an 8 out of 10. I think it has room for improvement, but it is a very good iPhone budgeting app. My suggestion is, if you need a quick way to track your expenses each day and do not have a current solution, this would be a great choice. I started using it each day and now I can export the data to my excel budgets.
New Highrise V-Card Work Around for users of 37 Signals Product
Posted by Josh in ADE, Business Advice on January 25, 2010
Below is a post I had on the 37 Signals Answer Board. I wanted to just post it as I thought it might be interesting.
Greetings everyone, I wanted to provide an update for this issue and hopefully you find it helpful, if you have not yet figured out a good work around for the following issue. The 37Signals product Highrise recently added a way for a user to download all of their V-Cards for cases and deals. This was a very exciting new feature as our company has well over 150 Cases and Deals that we are working within. I was using this feature on Mac with no issues, but our PC users were not able to download and install the V-Cards correctly. I posted the following question to the answers.37signals.com to see if they would be able to help.
“I am able to generate v-cards on my mac that add all of the necessary contacts into my address book. When I try to do this same task on a PC (Windows Machine) I get an error and it only imports 1 v-card which is the user’s personal dropbox. I was wondering if anyone else has this issue.”
After posting my question above on the answers.37signals.com form I did not receive a response from either a fellow user or their support staff. I waited about 4 days and then I decided to email 37signals support with my question regarding the issue the new V-Card download feature. Here is the response I received from Jamis, a 37Signal support staffer:
“I’m really not sure what that could be, but it does sound like a limitation of Outlook 2007. If you have one of your team members download the file to their computer, and open it in a text editor (like notepad, etc.), does it contain multiple BEGIN:VCARD lines? (It should contain a lot more beside, but each BEGIN:VCARD indicates a separate vcard embedded in the file.) If it does contain multiple BEGIN:VCARD lines, and Outlook 2007 is only grabbing one of them, then it probably is a failing of Outlook.
- Jamis”
This was one of the most helpful reply’s I have ever gotten from 37 Signals Support. Jamis was super clear and gave me all of the information I needed to trouble shoot this issue. I downloaded a set of V-Cards on a Windows machine and opened up via notepad. He was correct, as all of the code was there, and this now became an outlook 2007 issue. Knowing this information, I had already begun to formulate a work around for the windows users.
Here are the steps I took for my work around: Please Note: this is the work flow for each user that you have as I found out the case/deal email addresses are user specific.
1) I logged on / had the user logon to High Rise and download their set of V-Cards. (Watch out for the link that resets your dropbox number, I hit the wrong one a couple of times because I was careless in trying to move too quick.)
2) I had those V-Cards emailed to me and then I opened them up with the Address Book mac application. When I opened them up in Address Book, I created a new group for them so I could delete them easily after I was done.
3) I then reviewed to make sure we had all of the address that we were exporting for each user and then dragged those v-cards to my desktop.
4) I then moved those V-Cards into Entourage (Yes I hate this application but it has public folder support which is required for our company) to add them to our company’s Contacts public folders.
5) After they were uploaded into our public folders, I went to the user’s machine and dragged them from the public folder contact file to their own personal contact group.
6) Finally, I verified that each user could send an email to a deal with the new contact files that were just imported.
These are the steps I took to help with this issue. Our company has about 70 active deals, so exporting these was well worth the effort. We are emailing and tracking within most of these deals each day these automated address have already proved to be a huge time saver.
Hopefully someone else can find this helpful.
Thanks.
Don’t sweat the small stuff- Work out the big issues.
Posted by Josh in Business Advice on February 6, 2008
In the time I’ve spent here at AKT, I am privileged to be part of the executive team. My position as a co-owner has allowed me to experience pleasant meetings, painful ones, and ones I didn’t even need to be in. In the last few weeks, there have been many changes that have directly impacted my day to day operations. I have had to learn not to focus on the small issues but find a solution for the big problems, for the betterment of the company.
While we are growing at an amazing pace, we must be careful or we may find ourselves in a world of trouble. I find myself each day asking “should I care about this?” and “is this the best solution for now, or the best solution for the company?” These are two questions that help the overall growth of a business, not just one facet.
As we continue to bring in more and more clients and business, we must not lose focus of our goal: to do what is the best for the company.
Sometimes, it’s hard to work the few extra hours to make sure something is done right; however, those extra hours are usually what’s best for the company. As you grow, you must ask yourself whether your goal is to win a few small battles or to win the war.
About
Posted by Josh in Uncategorized on February 4, 2008
Bio courtesy of Aquatic Design & Engineering’s Web Site:
Josh Martin is ADE’s Chief Operating Officer. His duties include oversight and implementation of ADE’s Mission, Vision, and Values. He is responsible for optimizing the operations of ADE; including managing the technological developments, creating and implementing company systems and policies, and maintaining the corporate relationships of ADE.
Before Josh came to ADE, he worked in the fashion & music industry for the previous 7 years. He founded his first company at age 18, and over the next few years Josh helped to launch other music & fashion related companies whose sales rapidly grew to over seven figures annually.
In the fall of 2008, Josh joined the family business to contribute his desire for best practices, ethics, and integrity to an already prospering company. Josh is learning from ADE’s Founder and President, Ken Martin, (who is also Josh’s father) the business of Engineering. Josh brings with him his entrepreneurial spirit to ADE, and will lead the effort to optimize and refine ADE’s systems and operations to allow ADE to expand its world-class service. Josh now oversees the design and marketing strategies, he is expanding the technological knowledge of the company, and helping the company have a larger international reach while staying true to ADE’s Mission, Vision, and Values.