I mean that I have been taking care of "the business" a.k.a The Adventurous Silversmith.

Two weeks ago I noticed that my iMac was starting to act up; it is 10+ years old and not much has gone wrong with it.  There was that time the power supply blew and I had that repaired and the memory upgraded from 2 MB to 4 MB.  So what was happening? Occasionally it would not read a DVD or music CD or it would lock up but that might be due to me running Photoshop, Illustrator and my CAD program all at the same time.  Add to that I could not upgrade the OS because the versions of Photoshop and Illustrator I use would no longer work.   It was time for a new machine.

Strangely just a few days before, another metal friend (Thanks Diane!) told me she bought a Mac Book Air from a re-seller in San Diego (DC Computer Warehouse). I have no issues with buying a slightly used Mac since it saves me money.   I exchanged a few emails with them and then on Saturday (last week) I packed up my iMac and went to their store to select a machine.  

I settled on a 27" with a 1TB fusion drive,  Quad Core i7 processor and 32 GB of memory and a high end NVidia graphics card with a 90 day warranty.  Plus they transferred almost all of my applications and data from the old machine to this new one. It cost me $2000 including sales tax plus they threw in an external DVD burner since the newer Macs do not have an internal one though it took most of the afternoon to select, purchase and transfer the data. 

But when I got home in the evening,  I had another issue to deal with - my external hard drive had also failed, several days earlier. It was (note the tense!) an Western Digital My Book that was 1TBB. It held not only my iMac backups, 3,000+ fonts I have, and also ALL my process pictures from ALL of my metal work.  I contacted several data recovery places and finally settled on Kroll OnTrack  as their communications was the best and they have a facility in Orange County. I sent them the hard drive plus an external 1TB drive I have so IF they could recover the data, that was where they could put it and send back to me.  The send me a pre-paid priority mail label and my drive arrived at their facility on Tuesday.  I was then sent a link to check on the status and see what was happening. Wednesday, I found out the controller died so it was going into a clean room to be worked with. Then on Thursday, I found out that the HD platters were good and that they would be hooked up to another controller so they could see what the data looked at. Friday morning I was notified that there was NO bad data and all files could be recovered. How many files - how about 4,393,780 files which is a total of 704.83 GB.  The evaluation and data recovery cost me just over $500 but it is worth it. My data was shipped back to me on Friday afternoon.  WHEW!

Here is the new Mac, it is a screamer. 

An unexpected surpirse appeared in my inbox the other day.
It was an invite to participate in the Holiday Small Art Market at the Studio Door down in San Diego. I was invited because I had a piece (The Tenacious Tentacle Cuff) in one of their shows earlier in the year. 

I have not participated in many craft shows or markets for several reasons - Having to make a lot of inventory, Owning the tables, drapes, display cases and stands, even the shelter can add a lot of cost let alone the time and entry fee expenses. 

I first thought I would not participate even though this was in their gallery, as I really didn't have time to make a lot of things to sell but upon further reading, the participants are limited to 3 items and they must be priced at under $500.

I can do that.

​As a matter of fact, I had just finished those Red Oxide Dishes and I have one that is unclaimed (2 were presents) and then last weekend I made another dish. Yeah, I could just have 2 pieces in the show, but I am free this weekend, so I am going to make something else tomorrow.

Here are the details so you can go and possibly buy something - it does not have to one (or all) of my items. 

Where:    The Studio Door
Address:  3750 30th Street, San Diego, CA 92104-3632 
When:     November 3 through December 11, 2016
Hours:     Tues - Sat    Noon - 7 PM
               Sun    Noon - 4 PM
              Closed on Mondays
             The Studio Door will open at 10 AM on SHOP SMALL Saturday.

Many people have told me that they like reading this blog because I show lots of process pictures thus allowing them to see what ever it is, being made. 

But what about actually documenting the work??

DaVinci kept a note book but that was more of an idea book and many of us have those. 
The documentation of antiques that were originally bought, repaired, sold again and again is called provenance.
And art historians will try to document a piece of art - a painting perhaps, by building a file on who the artist is, where the painting was done, the subject matter, and the materials: canvas, paints, frame, etc. 

BUT DO YOU:

• Take not only process pictures but a final picture; 
  
• Write down the materials used; 
  
• Keep design drawings; 
  
• Track how much time it took to create and to finish the piece; 
  
• And what all of that cost?; 
  
• What it was sold for; 
  
• And most importantly who you sold it too? 
  

I know many of us will never have our work in museums or have it appear on the Antiques Road Show as a great piece of art; but what if it did... possibly some time later a descendant might appear with your documentation and then finally all your work would be revealed and unknown items identified around the world as lost works of art!

Here is what I do.
I have a project sheet that I can print out and fill in with: 

• Start and End Date; 
  
• Title of Piece; 
  
• Materials Used; 
  
• Task List with task name, start/stop times; 
  
• A place for notes. 
  
• I then have places to add up costs - material and labor (which is time multiplied by the hourly rate) plus overhead
  
• Places to calculate the wholesale and retail prices base upon the total cost.  
  

I then staple a few pictures to the project sheet which I then slip into a glassine sleeve which is put into a notebook and when it sells I add a copy of the invoice to the sleeve.  

I also keep all of my process pictures on an external HD with each project having a folder named Year-Month-Title. This is so IF I need to refer back to any pictures i can easily find them. 

I now have a complete set of documentation.

I shall confess that in the beginning I only took pictures, then I started the project sheet, I then added the pictures and recently I have added the costing bit and attaching the invoice. Some pieces I have made and sold I have no record of at all but hopefully in the future, since my makers mark is on it, it will appear on ARS and be noticed as a lost piece of art that has been found. 

I am back from my Thanksgiving break and a road trip to Texas. 

I am now going to start some new projects and even (finally) make a few items for sale in the store.  

First up, I am starting to raise (another) tumbler because I have been taught how to do it, I have done my technical drawings, have one wood stake with two different shaped ends, and a planishing hammer that I made.

While doing the raising on weekends, I am also starting a large copper logo panel for Wes over at The Firehouse Collective, who did my new logo design.

Here is an image of the logo. I see it all copper - 
There would be holes drilled in the corners so the final piece can be bolted to some wood (I see it sitting above the wood) and the corners cut in an inward semi-circle.  The background would be an arts & craft hammer (dimpled) finish so the words and flames pop out. The letters would be bright, smooth copper, and lastly I see the flames with a green patina (like you see on the statue of liberty) The flames and lettering would be raised by repousse.
 
But that has to be approved by Wes.

So? ................

What do you think of my new log and redesigned website??

Why the change?

Well, I have always wanted a nice logo and since I was paid for an upcoming article in Art Jewelry Magazine, I thought I could take that money and fund the logo design.  

I found a design firm (The Firehouse Collective)  in the area and we discussed my requirements: logo, colors for website and business card and that I could do the website redesign myself. We came to an agreement on price that was within my budget and voila about 3 weeks later I had everything in my inbox. Yes, we only met once to do the final selection of colors. 

And today less than one week later after staying up late and working on this through lunch I we also have a new website.

I still have a few things left to do

• Get the business cards made
• Get a touchmark/stamp made for putting on metal
• Fixing some images here on the website and a few other geeky items

I hope you like it as much as I do

I am putting off "real" metal work today in an effort to finish my year end accounting. I only have to do the final counting - or weighing of my metal inventory so I can figure out what I used through the year.  Yes, I was lax in recording what I used but not in what I bought, this year. By doing a final weighing of the silver and counting of various other metal components, I can then subtract what I have, from what started the year with and what I bought to know "what I used".  I can then give this to the accountant  for tax purposes. 

Yesterday though I did start to planish the copper dish I made two weeks ago.  I am using two of the new stake heads I bought last week along with the arm and  the vise holder 

In my last post, I chronicled The Saga of the Inventory Software.  
In this post I will explain how I resolved it.

To refresh your memories, finding BUSINESS accounting software that runs on a MAC that does not cost a hefty penny; does inventory; and works well is a very rare thing BUT after much Googling I located Express Accounts and Inventoria which are both my NCH Software. 

I won't go into the evaluation process but let me just say that after working with each for a week I was convinced that they would meet my needs. I was fortunate enough to hit this right as they were having a software sale so I bought both.   

IF you want to do just inventory management then Inventoria alone will suit your needs. You can set up suppliers, customers, inventory categories and sub-categores, unit of measure. Create orders and receive parts as well as Invoices for items you sell, as well as reports for costing. If you want to track COSTS and what your business is doing money wise, then Express Accounts is for you. AND in Express Accounts you can do some basic Inventory Management too.  So it comes down to basic double entry accounting;  purchasing, selling and reporting.  A basic knowledge of accounting is required.  For either package I will not teach you how to do all of this but their website will help you if you have further questions on it.   

Once I had bought the software, I now had to move everything I had done in Bead Manager Pro (BMP) and export it so I could import it onto the new system. Yes this would take time but starting over from scratch would be even longer. The ace in my pocket to do this was my many years of experience working with and installing this type of software. FYI in big business the entire suite is called Enterprise Resource Planning "ERP" and this covers Sales driving Manufacturing which drives Purchasing and Recieving and the Accounting that ties it all together.  I was in my element even though I would have preferred not be there. 

From BMP, I exported my suppliers and I also did separate exports of each category of parts; these I set aside.  In Express Accounts I set up the chart of accounts and imported my suppliers. Next I massaged the parts exports to give me lists of parts and categories which I could then import in the software world this process is called a data conversion. It took a few tries to get the files setup so I could import each portion of the data but working with just one or two lines of data allowed me to eventually import over 166 different items in inventory along with their costs and quantities (wire, sheets of metal, disks, jewelry components, stones, etc.) an for those items that did not export from BMP (about 20 items) those I hand entered.  This was all done in Inventoria.

Then I had to do journal entries to take care of the dollar amounts in Express Accounts. For items like hammers and other equipment that is not tracked in a normal inventory, I had put them into BMP so I could track the costs.  I just had to find the totals, in BMP for these categories and make the appropriate journal entries. I then did journal entries for the inventory categories.   

Afterwards, I did a quick reconciliation which is just bean counter speak for make sure it all totals and I was done.   

In 3 days I had moved out of BMP and into my new system.  
I would not recommend this for the faint of heart or if you don't know how to do it; but I did and I could so it is now done. 

What can you learn from all of this. 
Don't do a quick evaluation
Test everything! In the past I would have, doing this on a paid job but I admit I was lazy this time around
Don't be afraid to say "This won't work" and ...
Quit while you are a head, not when you have a head ache. 

I hope I have helped you.

Last year I wrote this blog post about choosing a program that did inventory and some basic accounting. At that time I was focusing on jewelry software so I could avoid a lot of extra work with a chart of accounts [very bean counter term for categories to track money] and double entry accounting [you spend money here and thus the same amount of money goes into another bucket like inventory, supplies, etc]. But it also HAD TO work on a Mac computer as a native program; no running Windows on a Mac. 

I started with Beadia since it was for the Mac and very simple. I found many bugs and eventually I gave it up because the developer was not fixing the issues I found.  

I should note that I have this uncanny ability to find bugs in software. I found some very deep (this is a term which means the average person would never, ever come across them) bugs in a software tool/package back in 1995 such that the company paid for me to come to their facility to discuss, with their developers, how I came across them. While there they fixed and I tested.  Over the years I have had friends tell me they DO NOT want me to test their software.  But I am getting off track.

Earlier this year I moved onto Bead Manager Pro.  I worked with it for about 3 weeks and then spent the money and purchased a license.  I spend several weekends slogging through all the receipts I had kept since late 2008 entering EVERYTHING - hammers, files, rolling mills, wire, sheet, stones, solder and even workshops and books. You name it I had a receipt for it. BMP's inventory valuation methodology was not exactly what I wanted which was FIFO (First in First Out) but did a weighted average which was my second best choice, and along the way of entering items I did a physical inventory (what I really had vs. what I have purchased over the years).   

And of course I found a bug. The program has the ability to "make" a product using items in (raw) inventory and then will add up the costs. You can then add the labor and mark-up, and then you know what FINISHED items you have so you can sell them.  I was trying to assemble/make a bracelet and the program would not let me use less than one ounce - I had .75 troy ounce of silver wire in inventory and i wanted to use .25 troy ounce and it kept telling me that I had ZERO in inventory.  I wrote to BMP about this and let me say that the tech support in the beginning was rather poor. I was first directed back to their help page, which I had said in the email I sent that the answer was not there. This first response took several days for me to get. So, I responded as such and it almost 3 weeks to get it sorted, a new version was sent to me to test/verify, and then I could move forward [A new version was then sent to the user base soon afterwards]. 

When I finished EVERYTHING last month I went to print out some of the reports so I had a year end inventory valuation from last year. This would help my accountant with this years income, purchases, and cost of items sold.  

Hold on to your web browsers people cause can you guess what happened next??  

Yup, I found TWO more problems; I would call them bugs but once is a limitation of the BMP system.  So let's go through them in order. 

FIRST ISSUE: 
When printing, the report does not scale to fit on the paper which is in landscape mode. I know many of you have used PDF's, Word, even Excel and you can tell the printer dialog box to scale the page to FIT on one page (horizontally) so it does not have some text hanging as an orphan on another page even though vertically the total contents will be on  many pages.   I selected the columns I wanted to print; I then set the width (a description field) such that some text even wrapped and then hit the print preview button. That is when on the screen the text was CUT OFF - yup, it did not even push onto another page IT WAS CUT OFF.  Even when the actual print dialog box came up and I checked the scale to fit page check box - IT WOULD NOT SCALE.   

I was not a happy camper to say the least. 

Once again I filled out a support ticket on the BMP website. Several days later I got an email back telling me to refer back to specific page. Well I had been there and I had removed the columns I did not need; I NEEDED ALL THESE COLUMNS. So, again I replied and after a few other emails it came down to: 1) that was the way the software was. 2) maybe I print the information twice each with a sub-set of the columns and just match them up.   

SECOND ISSUE: 
I then decided that I would just export the data to a spread sheet and do the report from there. The ability to select columns to get the data you want is fairly reasonable if you have worked with report writers before, if not good luck. I found the columns I needed and did the export. That is when I found several items missing from the export.  Into investigation mode I went. The system does have an inventory number and one would assume that this was the key (a primary key in database terms) used to distinguish between items even if the description was the same. OH NO MY FRIENDS it turns out that item 057 which was Wire, Silver Sterling 18 G (and in the size field marked Round) did not export because 056 Wire, Silver Sterling 18 G (and in the size field marked Square) some how caused a conflict.  This happened for the majority of the wire, sheet, and my jump rings. 

At this point I was done. DONE, DONE, DONE I say!!!!

I have just finished spending another 3 weeks of evenings finding another business accounting program that allows me to also do inventory PLUS migrating all my data from the BMP system to this new program. 

When I am done here, I will delete all evidence of BMP from my Mac and say GOOD RIDDANCE.  I write software for my day job and this was just too much.

Next week I will tell you about the software I did find and how I migrated my data and how it meets my needs. 

After the high of winning THREE awards at the San Diego Fair - my husband, myself and Bunny Bravehart left for vacation in Texas which you can read about here. 

And since I have been back I have been working on my accounting for The Adventurous Silversmith per the family accountant. Earlier this year I evaluated several programs for tracking cash out and cash in as there are not many low cost or free programs that will run on an Apple Mac and just using a spread sheet was not going to give ME the detail I wanted.  

I finally settled on a software package (back in March) that was close to what I wanted and had a good price - being a software engineer (these days) means that evaluating software for personal use can be frustrating as you know what should work and hate it when it does not meet your expectations.   

Once I had the software, I started to enter the invoices I have saved since I started metal smithing back in 2009. I don't have ALL of them, but probably 90% of them with most being the big ticket items like hammers, stakes and rolling mill and the miscellaneous things like silver, copper, bronze, ear wires, solder and the other tiny things needed.  I have been working on entering everything on and off since April and I did a two day push and I have finished all the initial entry yesterday. Today I have to do a current inventory level so I can determine a true 2012 year end inventory valuation (we only did an estimate).  

I am rather amazed at how much I have spent on this hobby "third career"; here are some rough numbers:

• Classes, Workshops, Books, Video's and other learning.... $9,000 +
  
• Stakes, Hammers, Rolling Mills, Chasing Tools, Drill Press.... $9,500+
• Metals (all purchases but excludes what has been used) ...$4,500+

And going forward, I will [try, ha!] to stay on top of the entries and won't have to go through this again. 

Hopefully, next weekend I can get back to the repousse \0/

Yes, I am being geeky in this post, but it is in my nature I am an engineer after all. 

Why? 

Well, currently I am evaluating the various jewelry software programs for me to use.

Why? 

Because I want some way to not only track my finished pieces so I can sell them but a good program will also allow you to track the value of my finished pieces, what components, and their value, that went into making it, how much labor/time went into the piece, who bought my work, who do I buy my components, and the like. 

I know, some of you just use a spread sheet but not me, if I am going to do this, I am in all the way.

Why?

During my life as a manufacturing engineer I had to use an ENTERPRISE level program that did this. This is called an ERP package which is short or Enterprise Resource Planning. This allows you to record a sales order which drives purchasing the parts for the item being bought if the parts for making it are not in stock/inventory; which then causes production to make the piece; and the shipping department to send it out the person who placed the order. WHEW


After I left manufacturing engineer in went out into the world as I consultant, guess what I did for several years... I helped companies install and set up their new ERP packages and change their business processes to work with the new and improved software. 

Now, as a Software Engineer, I could actually write such a program but then I would never have time to play in my studio, which is why I am trying them all out.

And now you are going to ask, what programs are you looking at? Let me tell you what I am NOT looking at: Quickbooks, Sage, PeachTree accounting or any of the other general small business packages because I know how to set up and use these packages and some just have more than I need: Payroll and a full chart of accounts for example. I am not saying that I might not end up with one of these general accounting packages but for now they are on the bottom of my list.

I am looking at the software that appeals to the small jewelry maker since many offer the ability to add pictures and print out price lists and such. So here is what I am looking at: 

• Bejeweled Software : http://jewelrydesignermanager.com/products/
  
• Beading Software: http://www.beading-software.com
• Beadia Jewelry Business Manager: http://beadia.net

There may be others but I have not found them. I have found many programs for actual Jewelry stores but I am not to that point, yet.

My other requirement is that it runs on my Macintosh as a native application.  I know, you are scratching your head again thinking why do you need that?

This is software that is written for the Mac OS (operating system, see I told you this would get a bit geeky) and not in a PC Virtual Machine (VM) or PC partition.  In case you did not know, the Macintosh computer now uses an Intel chip which is one of the chips that the Microsoft OS (you know what that is, I gave you this earlier) works on. Thus on a Mac, it is possible to divide (known as partitioning) the hard drive and install Windows OR we can use a Virtual Machine which is a program that allows you to set up the Microsoft OS and it is all contained within the VM program.  The problem with doing either of these is the following:

1. It takes up more hard drive space than just the accounting software
2. You have to buy a copy of Microsoft windows
3. There is an entire second OS that is on your computer that must be maintained. Think of all the updates and virus protection that you have to deal with when using a PC, which is why I have a mac.
4. You have to switch back and forth between the PC and the Mac

With this requirement, I am removing the various version of Bejeweled Software from my list because this software only runs on a Windows OS and I would have to set up a partition or VM to use it. That leaves me with the other two on the list above.

I spent part of last weekend working with Beadia which is a newer program. You can download and work with a free evaluation version.  I did find some bugs (that's geek talk for things that don't work) and have been in communication (email) with the developer about them; he told me that an update is due sometime in December and he sent me the list of changes. The program looks promising but until I try the next version I am not wiling to purchase it. It will cost around 50 USD.

Over the next week I will be testing the Beading Software. This is a 10 evaluation package and there are many videos on their website that show how to do various things in the software and from what I have seen this program looks pretty robust my only concern is that I have read that when you use the mark-up module, it only does so for the material portion, and if that is true, I will have to try a work around of setting up a part item named "LABOR" and then add it to the parts list for a completed piece.  This software cost about 150 USD. 

As you can see the price difference is big but it all comes down to does it fit my needs.