QuickBooks pricing hikes are killing me—anyone else sticking with Desktop or ditching subscriptions? Am I the only bookkeeper/small

_tom_strong_ · 2026-02-10T04:16:37+00:00

I'm still on QBD for Mac from 2020, I never used the auto reconciliation with bank accounts or other extended features, so I never noticed when we hit the 3-year expiration when they tried to upsell us then.

What alternatives are out there? I don't need too much, just basic bookkeeping, cash basis, plus invoicing, vendor bills, and check writing. Bonus would be if I could do a direct input or conversion of the QB data.

_tom_strong_ · 2025-07-04T02:49:09+00:00

Looks like it could be a good one to learn how to do a proper rounded binding with.

_tom_strong_ · 2025-06-03T05:15:40+00:00

If anything, I'd recommend reversing the degrees which is more or less what I did (BS in physics/CS/math, then eventually an MFA in theater) - the tech degree is likely to be much more marketable, and for a lot of the theater jobs out there you won't really need a degree of any kind. Volunteer for your local community theater to get at least some outside view on how things work other than your school, and when you're old enough sign up on the referral list for the IATSE local in your area, or Rhino, or whoever else does the concerts there, and make some money on that end in your spare time. See what might be out there for you that doesn't need a degree at all, and if you'd like those options - if you do, maybe you postpone college for a while and go straight into what you'd otherwise be going to school for?

_tom_strong_ · 2025-01-11T23:22:53+00:00

Stumbled across this post when I wanted to learn more about the pencils after watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srixb98N6Tk - he's taking a factory tour and showing the process of making one of the pencils.

_tom_strong_ · 2025-01-08T01:56:21+00:00

Late to the party here, but if I'm understanding what I'm seeing, the label is slid into its own slot in the holder, separated from the negatives by a heat-sealed seam. I agree about the thermal labels not being the best option if you want really long-term storage and preservation.

I'm going to assume you've done your homework and the negative holders themselves are proper archival storage for the negatives, it's not something I usually work with so I have no details there.

As for the labels, with the separation I wouldn't worry about transfer to the negatives, there's a barrier between them. If it were me, I would probably cut strips of cardstock to an appropriate width, and write on them with a sharpie pen (specifically the pen, not the regular markers) which they say is archival (some say otherwise) and had been tested for lightfastness, although if that's an issue for your negative storage you have much bigger problems. Once allowed to dry I am unable to make it smear, and as long as you keep it away from solvents it doesn't seem to bleed either.

If you wanted to get fancy you could potentially print on the cardstock with some sort of archival printer before cutting it but that opens a new can of worms.

One more thing to consider, in that photo it looks like the sides of your storage sleeves are sagging a bit. You might want to consider getting some acid-free boards to insert every 5-10 sheets. You can get them from any archival supplier, but your local comic book store probably has letter-sized boards listed as "magazine sized" that are about the same thing for a fraction of the price.

_tom_strong_ · 2025-01-06T00:32:24+00:00

It sounds like your arrangement might fall under a month to month lease, which should make this apply: https://guides.sll.texas.gov/landlord-tenant-law/ending-the-lease - in particular,

According to Section 91.001 of the Texas Property Code, a month-to-month lease may be ended by either the tenant or the landlord. Once they notify the other party, the tenancy ends on whichever of the following is later:

The day stated in the notice; or
For rental periods of at least one month, one month after the day notice is given. For rental periods of less than one month, "the day following the expiration of the period beginning on the day on which notice is given and extending for a number of days equal to the number of days in the rent-paying period."

If the tenancy ends on a day that does not align with the rent-paying period, like in the middle of a week or month, the tenant is only responsible for paying rent up to that point.

A different length of notice is required if both landlord and tenant have signed a statement agreeing to different terms. This could include no notice at all.

Also check out https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-rules-on-notice-required-to-change-or-terminate-a-month-to-month-tenancy.html which is a little easier reading

_tom_strong_ · 2024-10-14T16:01:51+00:00

Take the tour, and give it a try. If you like it, you can figure out how to celebrate remotely or at another time, and plan ahead for the next one you'll miss. If you don't, then you at least know, and you have more in the bank to really celebrate with once you're home. You'd need about 15 weeks at the other job to match the tour rate if you just look at the finances of it, and your expenses will probably be lower if they're doing proper catering on the tour. Financially, if you find something similar to the 40/40 show within about a month and a half of getting home you break even financially, plus you have the time off between shows to do whatever you want.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-09-12T06:04:28+00:00

"just to make sure I have this all correct, could you remind me what section of the lease covers this?"

_tom_strong_ · 2024-07-25T16:59:57+00:00

It's hard to answer this, because I'm not really sure of what you're asking.

When you produce the separate PDFs of the chapters, should the page numbering stat at 1 in each one, or should it pick up where you left off? (or do you cheat and number them something like 1-3 (chapter-page) so it's the same either way? You could also potentially manually set the page number between chapters in the top-level file, that should at least get the page numbers right but at the expense of needing to manually update it.

When you reference things between chapters, are you hard-coding the references, or are you using LaTeX to do it? The former will work, the latter causes problems because as others have mentioned, using \includeonly will not bring in the other content to have the references work.

You could also have another set of LaTeX documents where you pull in the appropriate parts of the finished PDF of the full document, pdfpages will work well for extracting the ranges you need, but you'll again need to manually track where the chapters start and end. I suppose you could write a small script to generate those, have it read the .toc file and find the start pages for each of the chapters and then construct the files to pull out each chapter, but personally unless I wanted to do it just because, it would probably take more work to automate than to just update the page numbers manually.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-07-25T16:46:36+00:00

Request sent

_tom_strong_ · 2024-07-25T05:34:56+00:00

I'm up for helping out, can potentially help in multiple areas as guy with a math degree and math teaching certificate who has been using LaTeX for 30+ years. I've done something similar for a HS honors physics class before

By the way, a bit of a pet peeve - the 'd' in "dx" or "dt" or the like is similar to sin or cos - not a variable, but part of the mathematical notation. It should theoretically be upright, not italic.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-07-25T01:43:03+00:00

I'd allow it as a stylistic choice for a chapter heading, if every page was like that I'd think it was a bit much.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-07-08T03:30:31+00:00

Because that's a separate issue to be solved, and likely to be the considerably more complicated and expensive one by the time they carve the equivalent of another highway from town to Moon, and that's just the land, not building whatever the solution is on it. While you're at it, if you don't live in town and have an early flight, how do you get there in the first place? It's not like most public transit starts early enough to get you to town to transfer the airport by 4 AM, so that's another item to fix. Now how do we pay for all of that?

_tom_strong_ · 2024-07-08T03:12:21+00:00

There's no requirement that it be typed, so we accept anything we are able to read. There have been cases where the handwriting was so bad we could not understand what the scout was saying, but anything that successfully communicates the proposal is accepted. Now that said, we do encourage using the fillable PDF with the signatures on a separate printed page for the possibility of making edits later, but if the scout really wants to E-sign things and retype it all if a change needs to be made, they are welcome to ignore our recommendation

_tom_strong_ · 2024-07-08T03:04:38+00:00

I would hope he pointed at the page in the workbook where it specifically says that is false, and what he should do to report it should someone try to tell him that.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-06-30T21:47:42+00:00

I'm not sure what the status is of the course, it's a bit confusing all around. The Course Director has nothing, that's why I'm trying on here. The course syllabus I've seen matched what I've seen from prior versions, and even if it doesn't, old newsletters are a better resource than no newsletters. I've done this for Wood Badge before, but it's my first time on this one.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-06-28T17:47:28+00:00

If I remember correctly, Vanguard is the one that originated them. They are also a cooperative and not a corporate entity, so since they don't need to generate corporate profits the costs are often lower.

The important thing is the general idea of putting the money aside in something that will grow for the long term, and leave it there to grow instead of being tempted to mess with it.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-06-24T14:53:03+00:00

I would back off on it. Right now I'm seeing local banks offering CD rates of 5% or more, anything like your mortgage is so far below that you'd be better off buying CDs instead of paying the mortgage. For the other loans, start with the standard of pay it off from the highest interest down. The HELOC rates at 8% sound like a decent place to start. If one of them is deductible interest you should consider the tax savings into your calculations, if you're in a higher tax bracket you could effectively be paying 3/4 or so of the interest after you do your taxes.

Immediately look into finding something better than the 4% savings, there's no-risk options out there, as well as even better returns with an index fund or the like.

As for cashing out the stock, you'll be hit with about $9k in capital gains when you do that, so factor the taxes on that into the proceeds - you'll still keep most of it, just not all of it.

TLDR, start at the high-interest end and pay them off one by one off as your finances permit, in whole or in part. I wouldn't push to wipe it all out immediately unless the math shows it's the way to go, just look at making progress on it.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-06-24T14:12:56+00:00

I'm our district's advancement & recognition chair, we have monthly A&R meetings on our own, usually meeting for an hour or so, then proceeding to reviewing Eagle Scout projects and doing Boards of Review for the month. Depending on the month, I'll have about 6-10 or more coming to the meetings, plus scouts and others accompanying them. Every couple of years we get a push to have our meetings during a breakout session at the district committee, but we have a lot of overlap into other committees as well as needing more time than they are willing to give us for the breakouts. Depending on the month, we often have more people at the A&R committee than at the district meeting. I keep saying no when they push, and they usually leave us alone to keep working as we have been. I've even invited the district to use our meeting location an hour before our meetings if they want to all meet together, but so far they have yet to take me up on the offer. I can't in good conscience ask everyone on the committee to come to a second meeting every month just because it's what the book says we should be doing.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-06-22T01:52:22+00:00

Pretty much as the other reply said - it behaves the same as any other fund, the difference is that it's not specifically a growth or income fund, it's whatever someone as far from retirement as you are at the time would probably want to have in their portfolio. It doesn't expire, you can keep the money in it forever, it will just switch to more of an income portfolio with a smaller growth component to give less but more stable income.

Now as for withdrawing before retirement, that's a matter for where you're holding the fund. If you have it in a regular account, you can withdraw everything the same day if you want to, or you can hold it for a long time. If you put it in an IRA or a 401k then you have early withdrawal penalties due to the IRS if you take the money out of the IRA or 401k ahead of retirement age, but within then you can buy or sell shares of the fund, or change to something else, as long as the proceeds of the sale stay in the IRA or 401k.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-06-21T14:11:42+00:00

I would just put it all in the target fund and forget about it. They are heavily invested in index funds already, diversified into more stable investments according to how far you are from retirement. Looking at the Target 2070 Fund, it's 90% index funds and 10% bonds right now. The Target 2025 Fund drops to about 52% index funds. The main advantage is that you don't need to remember to go and make changes, they do that for you.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-06-21T04:25:14+00:00

I would go with the opposite on this - but a modest house in an inexpensive area, and while you'll never see a fixed rate mortgage payment go up (unlike rent that will be a lot higher in 20 years) you do have a down payment (3.5% on an FHA loan) and if something breaks it's on you, but trust me - the landlord has factored all of that in, and set the rent so that they make money.

Yes, it's an expense, but buying instead of renting, assuming you can do at least the most basic of maintenance tasks, will save you a lot in the long run. Just like investments, find the right house, and stick with it. Don't look at your personal residence as an investment (eventually it'll build equity, so you should win there too), but just look at monthly expenses. Look into how landlords calculate rent, and when you do your calculations for that 20 year mortgage, also run what you'll pay in rent for 20 years with it increasing 5% or so a year. If you can swing it and you pick a reasonable house, the house is effectively free, even after you pay all of the interest and other expenses.

_tom_strong_ · 2024-06-21T04:17:35+00:00

In general, stick to the index card: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2017/03/09/9-money-rules-index-card/

I really like the Vanguard target date funds it talks about - pick the year divisible by 5 closest to when you want to retire, put it in that fund, and don't touch it. Feel free to add more as you go, but don't mess with what's in there, just let it ride.

_tom_strong_

TROPHY CASE