It's Christmas

The big November sales lift has started in earnest - those figures are eBay sales only and don't include the website. I'm making progress through the list; it's amazing how much more I get done when I don't fire up TweetDeck first thing in the morning - in fact, I haven't been on Twitter for 24 hours now.

Touch wood, orders are still getting delivered despite the postal strikes, but I really hope the CWU and Royal Mail sort things out soon or the backlogs are going to be horrendous.

Oh, and I'm going to run out of charm bracelets again fairly soon. Of the 6000 delivered in October, I've sold over 3000 already.

Sorry...

...for not being around much, but if I show you my current 'to do' list, you'd understand. In fact, here it is:

- Bag jump rings
- Photograph jump rings
- List jump rings with new listing as 'high quality jump rings'
- Photograph medium head & eye pins
- Bag 2000 of each type (8 altogether) and list
- Photograph new jump rings
- Bag 2000 of each type of new jump ring (6 altogether) and list
- Work through the 'needs bagging' list (currently 10 items)
- Bag coil ends from under living room table and list
- Photograph last millefiori beads
- List millefiori beads
- Photograph wood beads & plastic pearls
- List wood beads & plastic pearls
- Bag split rings
- List split rings
- Bag calottes
- Photograph & list calottes
- Photograph & list ball & spring earwires
- List GP metal beads
- Finish bagging 1 roll of each colour 1mm cord
- Photograph & list 1mm cord
- Bag, photograph & list 2mm cord
- Bag, photograph & list 0.5mm cord
- Finish templates
- Lost in post claims
- Photograph & list chip strings
- Tackle the stock box in the study
- Bag, photograph & list 1" thin eyepins
- Pay in cheque
- Rephotograph puffed black agate beads

When does all this have to be done by? Yesterday would be good...

Matters weren't helped by me deciding to switch off my Frooition template in a fit of pique about how slow the thing was to load and only afterwards realising that although the plain text was still there, it had defaulted to black text but left the background black, so my 500+ listings were to all intents and purposes invisible. I got about 250 sorted out by staying up until 1am and just have 4 of the cabochon categories to finish off.

Other than that, business is going well, takings are massively up, VAT registration has gone smoothly (touch wood) and I'm looking forward to December 17th, which is when I shut down for Christmas (a bit earlier than usual, but I've got cheap flights to Bristol so I can go and see my Mum for a long weekend).

Back to bagging head and eyepins...

Busy

Sorry for the lack of posts, it's been hectic. Have to start charging VAT on Thursday. Still got loads of stock to work through. My ship has docked at Southampton, so there's 200kg of findings on their way up the country and my gemstone bead order is being UPS'd from China today and should be here some time next week.

Incoming!

I have a new Chinese supplier and my first order from them should be delivered tomorrow. It was supposed to be today, but UPS in Edinburgh took one look at the postcode and rescheduled it. Since I suspect AJG will be doing the final leg for them, it might well end up being today, depending on what time it got to Inverness. That's two boxes of bead strings. Then my big Christmas stock order from Hong Kong will be docking in the UK on 23rd September and 9 boxes of charm bracelets and other findings will be arriving with me a week later.

So I'm trying to clear the decks by getting beads listed. I've decided to move away from the Frooition template and have my own sorted out. It's not quite as posh with fancy Flash bits, but it loads a lot faster! My Frooition account is due for renewal in March, so I've got a few months to slowly switch everything over.

My second eBay Seller Report turned up in yesterday's post. According to their metrics, from March to June 2009 I was the 76th biggest seller in the Crafts category ranked in terms of sales and the 627th in terms of listings. Just goes to show that lots of listings doesn't always equal lots of sales. On the whole of eBay, those figures are 12,300th and 12,970th respectively, which is still pretty respectable I think. The stand-out figure for me though was that they identified 67,602 visitors to my shop listings, which is absolutely superb :o) I shall be interested to see how that compares to 4th quarter figures covering Oct, Nov, Dec, but I won't find out until the end of February.

I've also taken the plunge and bought Microsoft Office Professional. Not the latest version, this is the 2000 version, but it's a legal set of discs and licence key and it was £40 as opposed to however many hundreds the current version is. After suffering with Microsoft Works and Open Office for a couple of weeks, I'm SO relieved to have Excel back - neither of the other two could handle importing a .csv file which used " for inches in the descriptions and having that facility available cuts about half an hour off my workflow.

Moving on

I have an accountant - how grown up is that?? Given that in the first 12 days of August I've taken only £300 less than the whole of August last year, I decided it was probably time to get an expert on board and yesterday I spent an hour with Helen Long from The Long Partnership who is now my accountant :o) She's happy with the way I'm recording information, so we've agreed she'll be there to advise me when I need help with something and to cast a professional eye over my tax return because it gets a bit more complicated when you go over the VAT threshold.

Talking of which...I will be VAT registered from 1st October. Not ideal, but she agreed with me that if sales continue the way they are, I don't stand a hope of holding off until after Christmas and if I take 1st October as my voluntary registration date, then the VAT returns will fall in nicely with my accounting year - they'll be due on 1st Jan, 1st Apr, 1st Jul and 1st Oct and my year end is 31st March.

I'm still looking for software that'll do decent stock control in more than one currency. My spreadsheet system has got a bit out of whack through user error and since I need to do a full stockcount before October 1st (I can claim back VAT paid on all on-hand stock on that date, which means my first return might well be a refund) it's a good time to get it sorted. Ideally I want something with a one-off fee rather than a monthly/annual license, so I'm currently looking at Microsoft Office Accounting - there's a free version which doesn't have stock control, but if you pay £149.95 to upgrade to the professional version, it does. If I get on with the free version, I may take the plunge.

Unbelieveable

We have a new daily record, folks :o) Tuesday 4th August - £611.01!!

If I keep up the pace of the first five days of August, I'll take over £10k this month and this is supposed to be my quiet period. I'm now on VAT-watch and as far as I can figure out, I'm going to be forced to register round about the end of November unless I take the next 8 weeks off.

Since that isn't an option, I'm going to find myself an accountant and discuss the merits of registering voluntarily so I can get it out of the way before silly season starts.

I've been looking at the possibility of getting some baby pink and baby blue suede thong made - I used to be able to get baby pink and it sold really well - but the manufacturer says that the minimum order, per colour, for custom colours is 25,000m, so that's going to have to wait for a year or two, because I don't have the space to store 5,000 reels at the moment.

Remember last year I did a Christmas fair at one of the local village halls and sold a bit of jewellery? This year I'm taking the bead shop :o) Only in a small way - it'll be things like charm bracelets and charms, boxes of beads and so on, but it'll be a bit different and it'll give me a chance to see how things sell because I'm considering taking the bead shop on the road next year. I've been getting requests to come and visit from people all over the county and I just can't do it - I'm not insured for customers on the premises (and given how often I brain myself on the bead room ceiling, I daren't have a member of the public up there!) and the wholesale prices are still on everything. So the other half and I came up with the idea of booking village halls for three hours on a Sunday afternoon and taking the beads round Caithness and Sutherland that way. Local customers get to browse, I don't have the fixed overheads of permanent premises - village hall hire is about a tenner an hour.

Watch this space...

Woohoo!

FANTASTIC month for sales! £6,700-ish (the exact figure is on the upstairs computer and I'm too comfortable on the sofa - OK, too hemmed in by the dogs! - to go up and switch it on again), which considering July and August are usually really quiet for me is incredible.

I've spent last month's stock underspend though. Just over £3,000 on another order from Hong Kong. 6000 silver charm bracelets coming in along with some specially commissioned matching necklaces. It'll be interesting to see how those sell. The leather cord and suede is starting to pick up now it's getting established in Best Match and I suspect I'll be placing another order with that company before Christmas as well.

I really am going to have to give up the transcription, I think. I've got so much stuff that needs to be done for the beads, but have a tight deadline which means it's getting delayed for another week.