offcntr | Entries tagged with numbers

I use Square to process credit sales, and also track cash, to make it easier to rectify the books at the end of the day. They also send daily and monthly sales reports, which I basically ignore, as I record everything to my ledger from the app at the end of the day or weekend. They also send an annual summary, which I never realized, nor, indeed opened, until today.

It contains some well, duh information: my best sales day of the week is Saturday, best sales month is December. Some useful information: My total credit/debit sales were up over $5000 from last year, which may explain why my inventory is so hammered at the moment. And some huh information: best sale day of the year was Friday, August 1, the first day of the Anacortes Arts Festival. (I looked up last years, when it was Saturday of that weekend.) And the best selling item: Tall mugs. 232 of them.

Wow.

We did our end of the year inventory this morning, which basically involves bundling Denise up in warm clothing with a clipboard and pencil, marking things down on the tally while I open every box and recite items and patterns. This will be necessary at tax time; in the meantime, it's a good snapshot of what I need to make to get ready for the new year.

Right now, I have exactly one dinner pasta bowl left. Three dessert plates. Five pie plates, six tall mugs. I have no covered casseroles, only one baking dish, a small square in woodpecker pattern. No small covered crocks, no tool crocks, no yarn bowls. One honey jar, one canister, one each of the three sizes of cookie jar. I'm entirely sold out of teapots, have been since Thanksgiving weekend. Down to one gravy boat, one covered pitcher, two creamers. I'm out of frog banks, though all the others are still good. Four incense dragons left. Three cat food dishes.

I still have at least one of every pattern of soup bowl, surprisingly, ditto todder bowls. Meanwhile, six patterns of stew mug are out of stock, and eight of painted mugs.

I would be frantically throwing pots right now, except I'm also down to less than one bag of clay until my ton order gets delivered, sometime next week. So in the meantime, I'm taking an enforced holiday, while figuring out where to start my next making cycle.

Like this!

Taking the week off from the studio to make a first pass at my taxes. Got all the 1099s assembled, transferred my ledger to the laptop, and got everything through -INT and -DIV entered into the software yesterday. Today I start tackling Schedule C, business income and expenses for Off Center Ceramics and Pulp Romances. Wish me luck. I'm hoping to have the first draft ready by Saturday, when I have to start glazing for my April firing.

Missing my studio already.

Bacon Numbers are floating around the internet again. I've come across a Tumbler survey several times asking for your degree of separation from Kevin Bacon. Just for funsies, I clicked through to the Bacon number calculator. Turns out, I've got a number of possible routes: musicians I've had on the radio show (eg: Peter Oshtroushko links to Tommy Lee Jones via A Prairie Home Companion, Tommy was in JFK with Kevin) that give me a Bacon Number of 3. But I can do even better.

I once sold a piggy bank to Casey Affleck for his son at Saturday Market. Casey was in Lemon Sky with Kevin.

My Bacon Number is 2.

Got a letter from the Oregon Department of Revenue Thursday. I messed up my taxes again.

I've done my own taxes for years, even with the business(es. At one point we had three of them). I long ago set up an Excel spreadsheet to sort all my expenses into the correct columns for a Federal Schedule C as they come in, and add all the columns at the end of the year. Add to this Basic level tax software (I started with MacinTax/Turbo, but switched over to HR Block one year when the former required new system software and the latter didn't) and I can knock out my Federal taxes in less than a week, usually sometime between firings in February.

Oregon taxes used to be easy, too. Copy this number from this line on your 1040, that number from that one. They used to not even have their form for itemized deductions; you just attached a copy of your federal Schedule A. So I didn't bother paying extra for the state software; it didn't seem necessary. I'd finish the Federal form, put it aside while I did another pottery production run, then review it in late March, fill out my state form, and send them both off before I started preparing for Saturday Market in April.

The last couple of years have gotten complicated, though. The Oregon form has a whole series of extra worksheets, examples, and sections for additions and subtractions, and I get lost. Well, this year, I got lost; last year, I did something differently stupid. Filling in forms late at night, I put in the numbers for my Fed estimated tax payments, not State. I didn't owe money, in the end, but I had lots less carry-over than I thought.

This year, I seem to have made three mistakes. The first was in the section where you can take off excess medical expenses from your income; I read my maximum off the wrong part of the table, and deducted $400 too much.

The second was a simple addition error. I ended up with a number $30 too low, but it was on the deduction that was already $400 high. So, $370?

The third one was in figuring taxes--we fell off the top of the tax table, so I had to do the [base number] + 9% of [your income over x amount]. I did the math perfectly. I just used the numbers from the Single table, not the Married.

So I got an extra $200 back.

Next year, I'm gonna buy the state package.

Update: Today, I got a letter in the mail from the IRS. Heart sinks immediately; What did I do wrong now? It was a form letter from Trump saying, Did you get your stimulus money? Aren't you grateful?

Feh.

This week's project: making banks. I started doing these at the very beginning of Off Center Ceramics, with pigs, elephants, and cats. Like everything else I do, the varieties burgeoned. Eventually, I found myself doing two dozen different varieties, including dogs, chickens, walrus, whales (blue and killer), rhinoceros, hippopotamus, I shudder to remember what all else.

I originally sold them for $20, which even back then was a ridiculously low price; they're a huge amount of work. Now days I charge $40, and only make the best-selling patterns: pig, elephant, cat, hen, frog, and three varieties of dinosaur. And I put off making them until this time of year, because they're still way too much work.

This week, I made eight each of pig, cat, brontosaur and stegosaur banks. That's 32 bodies to throw, but also 16 head-and-necks (the dinosaurs start as two separate thrown pieces). I extrude the legs as coil and then shape them: 96 legs. Twenty-four cat paws, plus eight fore-legs and tails. 32 ears, between the cat and the pigs. Twenty-four eyebrows (cat eyes are sketched in with a fingernail, squinted closed). Stegosaurs average 18-20 back plates each, so that's around 160 of those. Porcelain eyes, 48, colored porcelain pupils, also 48. Pink porcelain tongues (for the cats, natch), eight. Plus I have to cut coin slots and punch withdrawal-stopper holes and put everything together and… you see why I try to only do this once or twice a year.

Twenty-four years ago, when I did my first Schedule C for Off Center Ceramics, I had no idea how important the question was: Does this business maintain an inventory? I checked "yes."

So every year since, I've had to count the pottery.

It's actually a good habit. I've taken to doing inventories several times a year--after big shows, when preparing for a firing. With as many different items and patterns as I have, it's good to have better-than-guesswork on what I have and need to make.

We've gotten more organized over time. This year we even kept an inventory, in real time, of what pots we had at Holiday Market, updating as things were sold or replaced from storage. I keep a blank tally form on my computer that we can print off and use every time we need it, checking off standard patterns on bowls and mugs, filling in the less predictable pie plates, bakers, serving bowls and jars.

We just did the end-of-year 2017 tally on Tuesday; I shifted and opened boxes, Denise wrote things down. I haven't gone through and totaled up value of the whole works--that'll wait until I start my taxes in late February--but I do have a better idea of where I stand before my first firing of 2017.

I have more soup bowls than I expected--108--though within that there are a few patterns I'm almost out of. I also thought I'd sold more toddler bowls, but I still have 42 of them, in a good spread of patterns. Fifty-nine stew mugs, with no fox and only one bunny pattern left. Fifty-two painted mugs, but I'm out of one pattern, down to one each of five more. I made two bags of mugs--50 lbs., 48 mugs--for my next firing, and it won't be any too many.

Tableware I'm lowest on are dessert plates and tall mugs, 29 and 28 respectively. I've also got only 29 tumblers, but they're less popular, so I can put off making more of them a bit longer. Baking and serving pots show some surprising holes: only two $50 serving bowls and no $60 server, two small batter bowls, three small square bakers. Large pitchers and covered pitchers are also a little thin, though I'm okay on teapots tureens, and cookie jars.

I'm also going to have to make more banks before spring, but that'll wait for my next firing. Right now I'm focussing on plugging holes in the pottery inventory, and getting through the full page of special orders for the new year.