I have not been that active lately on the blog since I have been extremely busy.  I am working on several client projects, hiring a subcontractor, working on Morale, and selling and buying a house.  We got lucky and sold our house in two weeks.  We started looking at new houses and we found a great one at a great price.  If all goes well at our closings on Monday, we will be moving in next month.

Here are some pictures of our new house.

The outside:

The entrance way:

One of the bedrooms (of four):

The upstairs hallway:

The master bed:

The master bath:

The family room:

The kitchen:

The backyard:

The basement:

My future office:

This post is a duplicate from the istu blog.  The original can be found here.

Innovativ Studios is currently taking on more than it can handle and we are feeling the pain.  We are currently looking for either a designer with some ASP.NET experience or a developer with a designer flare.  We are only looking for contractors as this is not a full time employee position.  This is for multiple jobs that we have taken on within our consulting business.  We are either looking for full time or part time people who can dedicate at least 20 hours per week for our projects and can accept 1099's for Uncle Sam.

I am looking for people who share some of the same beliefs as myself.  I do not believe in long functional specification documents and unnecessarily documentation.  Unnecessary processes for the sake of process sucks.  I love commented code and unit tests.  I love simple sites that hide complexity from the user.  I like rolling out simple features first and getting feedback second.  I love good design and people who can create it.  I know how much morale affects productivity and will work really hard to boost your morale.  If you share similar beliefs, I am interested in hearing from you.

If you are interested, please contact me at jwright [at] innovativstudios [dot] com.  I am not looking at resumes so please do not send any.  I do not believe in them.  If you have a portfolio, please send that to me via email if possible.  I am just interested in talking with you, scary concept, I know.

If I do not find anyone via this post, I will post this positon on the 37 Signals Gig Board so get those emails to me soon if you are interested.  This will be a fun venture.

This post is a duplicate from the istu blog.  The original can be found here.

If you are a small business, finding a good accountant can be difficult but also very rewarding.  Some businesses try and do the accounting themselves in hopes that it would save them money.  I think that this is a bad move because it probably costs you more money in the end.  Accountants know those IRS books like the back of their hand and know where they can save you money.  These savings will probably offset their costs easily.  Plus you can put more time into growing your business and providing your services instead of sitting in front of some accounting software trying to figure out what the hell you are doing.  People pay for your services because (hopefully) you are good at what you can provide for them.  If you are doing your own accounting (and you are not a CPA), then you are not practicing what you preach.

It can be troubling finding a good accountant when you first start off.  I started off just going through the phone book for CPAs and sitting down with them in their office.  I would ask them some questions and if they were not very thorough or vague or did not provide me with next actions, I went to someone else.  I went through three accountants this way and I thought that I would never find a good accountant.  Then I started asking some self-employed people that I knew as well as asking others within the local chamber of commerce.  I found a really good one through a reference.  That is the method I would recommend in finding a good accountant.  Ask around.  If people are willing to spend five minutes talking about their accountant, then I think that accountant is worth investigating.

Good accountants should not make you think that hard.  I do not know very much about accounting except for the basics and your accountant should know that.  They should provide you with detailed next actions on what you should do and be able to explain the 'why' to you in non-accountant terms.  That is what I have to do to non-technical people and so I should expect the same from accountants.  Also, you should try and find an accountant that is not too busy with fortune 500 companies to worry about your 'silly little small business'.  Make sure that you are not on the bottom of his/her's list.  You will not get good service if you are the smallest invoice that they send out.

I just paid uncle sam for my first year of business which was the inspiration for this post.  My accountant made it easy.  I provided him with some forms and various other information.  He provided me with a packett.  The top of the packett provided me with an instruction form for each federal, state, and local taxes that I had to pay, how to pay, how much to pay, and where to pay it.  It was easy, I just went through each form, wrote a check, signed some forms, and placed the appropriate things in the provided envelopes and dropped it off at their offices.  He even went through my returns from last year and got me a $550 refund that I missed using the H&R Block software.  The packett also contained the detailed forms and how everything was calculated in case I wanted to look at it.  It was very easy and 'business friendly'.

If you are in the Northwest Ohio or Southeast Michigan area and you are looking for a great accountant, I would highly recommend Casey Nowicki from Velandra, Zbierajewski, and Nowicki, LLC.  You can reach them at http://www.vzncpa.com.