You do learn a lot the first time around. I offer a discount to anyone who pays immediately (as in, when I hand the boss an invoice). In my case, I am handing it to the owner, and he wants to save the money, so he has the accounting girls write me a check immediately. I find that works. I also give a recurring work discount because it helps promote work for clients that are already existing, and on code that I already know (since I wrote it the first time around).

I haven’t had any collection problems as of yet. I work a lot through web sites that have escrow services, which might be contributing to my high collection rate. Then, the discount gets everybody else to pay quickly.

I’m doing double-entry style accounting, and even after taking a class I still get confused.. a lot. I have a business partner, however, so it’s useful to break things down into separate buckets.

Is this programmer you know lazy in a code generation kind of way, or in a sit on the couch eating taquitos kind of way?

I and my business partner has been in business for over two years now. Since that time, I’ve learned a lot of things. I’ve found in my experience, accounting is much easier to handle if you think of it as documentation. You might know (more or less) where the money is going or where the execution flow is going, but that may not necessarily be true six months down the road, or when you want to get someone else to understand it. The categories and how you keep track of where the money is coming in or going out is all entirely arbitrary: it’s mostly to keep you on top of things. Just like software documentation. Double-entry is merely something you had to use back when a clerk had to document all of this on paper without a computer to do cross-checks and make sure it is correct. If the books are ever audited, these documentation prove to you and the auditor that fruad and embezzlement is not taking place, just like looking at a debugging output.

*How* you prove it falls under what is commonly acceptable, but like any documentation, its more an art than a science. There’s computation but very little math. Don’t let the fact you are documenting numbers or money confuse the essential issue.

Ho-Sheng Hsiao

When are you going to get your own minions? I know a guy who is pretty good with finances, but he’s a PITA to work with and is a lazy programmer.

Congrats on 6 months!!