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Issue 19.4 ('SpeedTest')
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GoalMonitor

Keeping Track of Income

Issue: 19.4 (July/August 2021)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 19,875
Starting Page Number: 66
Article Number: 19406
Resource File(s):

Download Icon project 19406.zip Updated: 2021-07-01 11:16:27

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

Since elsewhere in this article we're talking about "Tools We Use" here at xDev, I thought I'd write about a simple utility that I've found indispensable for my business.

Way back when, more than a decade ago, I was frustrated with the unpredictability of my business income. Some days would be great and others not-so-great, but it was hard for me to get a good mental picture of what was going on each month.

For example, say I got a large order for some back issues or a printed book collection. I'd feel that things were financially good. But at the end of month, I'd be short. I'd been misled by a few big sales into thinking that my total sales were positive.

I realized I needed a way to track daily and monthly sales so I'd at least know where I was. Now I'm sure bigger businesses do accounting more regularly than me and have daily sales summaries, but I was too small for that and I hate accounting. I wanted something simple that I would actually use.

So one day I whipped up a simple app I call Goal Monitor (see Figure 1). The idea was to give me a way to track sales every day instead of at the end of the month. I keep the app running in a corner of my Mac 24/7 and any time I have a sale, I add that amount to my daily income.

The interface is a simple TextArea that lets me type freeform data (the app cleans up my input) so I don't have to mess with a fiddly, precise input mechanism.

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