By now, if you have been reading this forum for any period of time, you know I am a huge fan of Excel spreadsheets. I love making ‘workbooks’ where all of my information is at my fingertips. I was putting together one as sort of a genealogy of my goats today since we are about to have a round of new kids and my old paper notebook of who begat whom is falling apart. The question is whether a male offspring of any of the moms will be genetically distant enough from the gals I currently have to be safe to breed without a high probability of defective offspring due excessive inbreeding. The answer is that a male from one of the moms could work provided he is strong and healthy but it would be wiser to do a ‘buck swap’ with someone else to bring a fresh set of genetics to the herd. This brought me to proselytizing once again for using spreadsheets.
I of course keep track of shops with a spreadsheet workbook that at any point allows me to see exactly where I stand thus far for the year, I keep track of who shops whom as a page of that workbook, another page allows me to know what shops I am in rotation for where speed and agility is needed to hone in on shops ASAP when they post, another page is the spreadsheet of companies I am registered with including log ons and passwords. A handy all-in-one tool, but fragile so not for the faint of heart or the folks who aren’t familiar with Excel. Of course I have a basic spreadsheet I have always been willing to share because it was shared with me long ago by a gal who no longer shops.
For restaurant shops I also use a spreadsheet that is set up to calculate elapsed times. There are likely to be multiple timings happening simultaneously on a restaurant shop (time from order to delivery for various items that were ordered at different times and have not yet been delivered, etc.). In the restaurant I just tell my DVR ‘beverage order 7:11:16’, ‘beverage delivery 7:13:12’, ‘appetizer order in 7:14:29’, ‘entrée order in 7:18:57’, ‘appetizer delivery 7:22:49’ etc. When I get home I open the timings blank spreadsheet and start entering the times from the DVR in the appropriate box and the spreadsheet does the calculation of the elapsed time for, for example beverage delivery, by subtracting 7:11:16 from 7:13:12 and returning an elapsed time of 1 minute and 56 seconds. It means I can have an accurate elapsed time without sitting here trying to convert minutes to seconds to do the arithmetic. If anybody wants a copy to play with, PM me with your email address.
But I use spreadsheets with the rest of my life as well. For nearly a decade I have kept a spreadsheet of my bills to pay each month. I do NOT like bank bill pay where they are responsible by sending payment by ACH or snail mail. I want to put the responsibility on the vendor to ‘come and get it’. Then there are the issues of bills getting lost or delayed in the mail and I got them too late to pay them in a timely manner. On or about the 20th of the month I open up my bill paying spreadsheet and every credit card, mortgage, insurance, property tax, vehicle licensing, utility, bank and brokerage account is there with the website, my account number, my login and my password. I have a Firefox bookmark that has all of these vendors, banks and brokerages so that I can ‘open all in tabs’ and start setting up the payments to be paid from the appropriate bank account on their due date. As I enter the payment date and amount on the vendor’s website, I also enter it on my spreadsheet. I can then sum up the entries and make sure every account paying has enough money to cover and I still have a few days to get money moved around if needed. By checking the bank accounts and brokerage accounts in that same session I can enter current balances and see where there is money that can be moved if needed. My spreadsheet now has data going back since I started keeping the sheet and as a ‘trip down memory lane’ about what my taxes, home owner insurance, utilities and health care USED to cost, it is quite revealing. But the main thing is that I have had NO LATE CHARGES for almost a decade because I can’t overlook any of the bills without overlooking all of them. A back page of this workbook includes deposit information and whether a deposit was from shops or some other source. This helps support my overall Schedule C information for the year.
I use a spreadsheet for ‘freezer control’ as I HATE pulling something out of the freezer that has gotten lost in there and I have to pitch it because of frostburn.
I use a spreadsheet to remind me of monthly, quarterly, semi annual and annual chores around the house. HVAC filters need to be replaced monthly, the jet dry in the dishwasher monthly, decalcifying the coffee pot monthly, lube of the moving parts of the garage electric door monthly, citrus fertilization quarterly, draining the HW heater semi-annual, etc. Since none of these thing are ‘fun’, without the reminder it would be easy to forget them even though each one takes only minutes to do. Early during each month I pull the sheet up, get the jobs done and the date performed or the materials ordered and then I don’t have them hanging over my head or wondering what I forgot to do.
Spreadsheets of investment performance are also important to me.
Spreadsheets of medications my significant other is on with date and dosage changes has avoided those medication changes to things that have historically been ineffective for him.
I don’t know how I managed to tie my shoes before spreadsheets :-)
I of course keep track of shops with a spreadsheet workbook that at any point allows me to see exactly where I stand thus far for the year, I keep track of who shops whom as a page of that workbook, another page allows me to know what shops I am in rotation for where speed and agility is needed to hone in on shops ASAP when they post, another page is the spreadsheet of companies I am registered with including log ons and passwords. A handy all-in-one tool, but fragile so not for the faint of heart or the folks who aren’t familiar with Excel. Of course I have a basic spreadsheet I have always been willing to share because it was shared with me long ago by a gal who no longer shops.
For restaurant shops I also use a spreadsheet that is set up to calculate elapsed times. There are likely to be multiple timings happening simultaneously on a restaurant shop (time from order to delivery for various items that were ordered at different times and have not yet been delivered, etc.). In the restaurant I just tell my DVR ‘beverage order 7:11:16’, ‘beverage delivery 7:13:12’, ‘appetizer order in 7:14:29’, ‘entrée order in 7:18:57’, ‘appetizer delivery 7:22:49’ etc. When I get home I open the timings blank spreadsheet and start entering the times from the DVR in the appropriate box and the spreadsheet does the calculation of the elapsed time for, for example beverage delivery, by subtracting 7:11:16 from 7:13:12 and returning an elapsed time of 1 minute and 56 seconds. It means I can have an accurate elapsed time without sitting here trying to convert minutes to seconds to do the arithmetic. If anybody wants a copy to play with, PM me with your email address.
But I use spreadsheets with the rest of my life as well. For nearly a decade I have kept a spreadsheet of my bills to pay each month. I do NOT like bank bill pay where they are responsible by sending payment by ACH or snail mail. I want to put the responsibility on the vendor to ‘come and get it’. Then there are the issues of bills getting lost or delayed in the mail and I got them too late to pay them in a timely manner. On or about the 20th of the month I open up my bill paying spreadsheet and every credit card, mortgage, insurance, property tax, vehicle licensing, utility, bank and brokerage account is there with the website, my account number, my login and my password. I have a Firefox bookmark that has all of these vendors, banks and brokerages so that I can ‘open all in tabs’ and start setting up the payments to be paid from the appropriate bank account on their due date. As I enter the payment date and amount on the vendor’s website, I also enter it on my spreadsheet. I can then sum up the entries and make sure every account paying has enough money to cover and I still have a few days to get money moved around if needed. By checking the bank accounts and brokerage accounts in that same session I can enter current balances and see where there is money that can be moved if needed. My spreadsheet now has data going back since I started keeping the sheet and as a ‘trip down memory lane’ about what my taxes, home owner insurance, utilities and health care USED to cost, it is quite revealing. But the main thing is that I have had NO LATE CHARGES for almost a decade because I can’t overlook any of the bills without overlooking all of them. A back page of this workbook includes deposit information and whether a deposit was from shops or some other source. This helps support my overall Schedule C information for the year.
I use a spreadsheet for ‘freezer control’ as I HATE pulling something out of the freezer that has gotten lost in there and I have to pitch it because of frostburn.
I use a spreadsheet to remind me of monthly, quarterly, semi annual and annual chores around the house. HVAC filters need to be replaced monthly, the jet dry in the dishwasher monthly, decalcifying the coffee pot monthly, lube of the moving parts of the garage electric door monthly, citrus fertilization quarterly, draining the HW heater semi-annual, etc. Since none of these thing are ‘fun’, without the reminder it would be easy to forget them even though each one takes only minutes to do. Early during each month I pull the sheet up, get the jobs done and the date performed or the materials ordered and then I don’t have them hanging over my head or wondering what I forgot to do.
Spreadsheets of investment performance are also important to me.
Spreadsheets of medications my significant other is on with date and dosage changes has avoided those medication changes to things that have historically been ineffective for him.
I don’t know how I managed to tie my shoes before spreadsheets :-)