The final (for now) entry on switching my business to the mac
So, I’m almost there. I’ve got my records and accounting in FileMaker Pro, I can create and manage invoices and expenses there. The most interesting thing about the process was figuring out how to translate how my business works into FileMaker. I never realized how complicated my business was. I have direct sales, consignment sales, digital sales, and then consignee sales (I sell CDs from some local artists on my site). Additionally, I have to pay royalties from all these sale types and publishing as well. Then I have expenses related to releases and general expenses. It was some hard work to capture all this, and it gave me some real respect for the consultants who do this for a living. It took about 40 hours of work to get it all done and I still need to figure out how to make the reporting work so that next year at tax time it will be easy. The best part of it is that I pretty much don’t need Word or Excel at all any more.
The one thing I haven’t dealt with yet is how to get my database up on my website. It is an NT server and I figure I can do it using ODBC and something exported from FileMaker, but it will take some work. I’m going to wait on that until I have to.
Aside from that, I can definitely recommend the switch. It has been all systems go.
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