Constant Contact FAIL

As you may have seen in my post from 2009, we have been users of Constant Contact for a long time. Since my previous post I have attended seminars they have put on with presenters such as Guy Steeves. We have tried to utilize the service offered by Constant Contact to reach our 4600+ members. For the most part I thought it has been a successful partnership even though Constant Contact does not support foreign language fonts.

Recently Constant Contact froze our account because they say they have received a single complaint about us. We immediately contacted them to discuss who to resolve the problem. They refuse to tell us who made the complaint & refuse to tell us about the nature of the complaint.

We explained to them the manner by which we obtain email addresses is by people signing up to our site. They asked us to provide more and more information about the people on our contact list to the point where I am uncomfortable sharing private information.

For over two years we have operated in an up front manner as a legitimate business. Using email marketing in the manner it was meant. Constant Contact's unwillingness to help us resolve the issue with party who has complained or offer us a solution is giving me no choice but to change providers. I guess Mail Chimp will be getting my business soon.

Facebook Page

So I broke down and finally decided to make Facebook worth $500 Billion dollars by creating a natvd.com company facebook page. http://on.fb.me/fYBY2M

Does your company have a facebook page?

Fraud

Here is a nice email that I got from Craig Newmark. Can you believe it? I just had to post this. I love the spelling mistakes too!

Dear Craigslist Poster,

This is Craig Newmark. I'm the founder of Craigslist. We have been working with Apple Inc on new promotional giveaways. Basically we are giving away free iPads and other Apple products to randomly picked Craigslist posters. You have been picked as our winner for today. Your Craigslist post id came up in our random pick. You have won a free iPad!!! Please visit our promotional page here and follow the directions to get your free iPad. This is not a scam. After following the directions on our promotional page we will ship you an iPad within 3-4 business days.

Congratulations on winning an Apple iPad (currently valued at $829). If you have any concerns or questions you can contact me by replying to this email. Before contacting me I recommend that you visit our promo page here and sign up for your free iPad so we can reserver one for you.

Thank you for posting on Craigslist,

Craig Newmark
Founder, Craigslist Inc.

I didn't click on the links but here is where they would have taken you.

http://linkaja.info/ <---- Follow at your own peril
http://www.getresponse.com/ <---- Follow at your own peril

T4 time

So it is time to prepare the T4's. For us we ask our accountant to help but I do believe it is a straight forward process.

Information needed for completion of T4 slips:

1. Photocopy of payroll remittance form showing total contributions for year (should be January statement).
2. List of all employees with full name, address, SIN, and # pay periods.
3. Payroll Activity (Detail) or Payroll Register (Detail).
4. T4 Summary report
5. T4 Summary form from CRA
   

Guidelines for completing T4 slips:

• Complete the slips clearly and in alphabetical order.
• Report, in dollars and cents, all amounts you paid during the year, except pension adjustment amounts, which are reported in dollars only.
• Report all amounts in Canadian dollars, even if they were paid in another currency.
• Do not enter hyphens or dashes between numbers or names.
• Do not enter the dollar sign ($).
• Do not show negative dollar amounts on slips; to make changes to previous years,
• If you do not have to enter an amount in a box, do not enter "nil" - leave the box blank.
• Do not change the headings of any of the boxes.

For information on how to complete the form visit
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tpcs/pyrll/rtrns/t4/smmry/menu-eng.html

Simply Accounting Roll Over

I managed to fix that problem of the not being able to invoice in USD. It turns out in our Simply Accounting 2011 file the accounts receivable linked account was switched to "interest receivables". In the previous file it had been "accounts receivables". After switching this we were once again able to process USD invoices.

It was only coincidence that our first invoices with terms were in USD and that is why I only noticed it with USD. In fact it would have been the problem with any pay later transaction. It just happened that our CAD customer all paid at time of sale.

Joys of Simply Accounting

Ahh the joys of Simply Accounting. The time has come to start a new year and fiscal year too. Last year we made the switch from MYOB to Sage's Simply Accounting in hopes of making the start of a new year easier.

Everything seemed to start out okay except when we tried to enter a USD invoice. We have lovely message:

"The Program cannot find a Account that is part of this transaction. Another user may have removed it. Please select another Account and process the transaction again."

I scanned the forums and it seems like a few people have had this problem. I still haven't found a solution but will toil at this.

Year End Wrap

In preparation for the year end I usually get together with my accountant to ensure things are on track. It gives us more time to make sure things have been done correctly before we reach the end of the year.

Here are some of the things to do:
- Print your profit/loss statement (P&L) , chart of accounts and Balance Sheet for this year and last. Make sure these are for the same periods. (i.e. Jan 1 - Nov. 15, 2009 & 2010).
- Compare each account and balance between years. Did your Sales go up or down? Did your Purchases go up or down as well? Are there any accounts that have shown large increases/decreases. Can you explain the changes?

Here are areas that I have founds errors
- Postage/Freight - in our case we had a huge decrease but we did more sales so logically this should have increased. Turns out we missed input invoices from Canada Post.
- Check the retained earnings account to ensure it lines up with last year end. If they don't coincide then something is wrong.
- Accounts receivable amounts should be reasonable. If not then start collecting.
- Merchandise inventory - check that this is not too high or too low. Have you done an inventory count recently? Maybe do this before the year end too.
- Foreign exchange - market changes could explain some variance but it has to be reasonable. If not you might have an accounting problem that you do not know about.

This is some of the fun stuff about owning your own business in Canada.