Wolf Luecker's dashboard

SeanWest replied on November 18, 2008 17:08 to the question "Distinguish work within the same application - using regular expressions?" in RescueTime:

I just discovered RescueTime and love the idea but without this feature to be able to see which documents I'm working in rather than what app, it's not of much use other than to track my web browsing.

For my example, I'm a student so it would be most useful to me to see which of my 3 or 4 classes I've been spending time on, plus I use my computers for personal use and sometimes volunteer work (and in my last job, I also used my personal laptop there). If I am working in MS Word, I could be spending time on any one of those things. I can tell which one by looking at the document title (or better yet, the document path) but the app by itself doesn't tell me what I need to know.

Also, I'm in the legal profession. EVERYTHING is about the billable hour... and who it's going to get billed to. This would be a FANTASTIC tool for helping ensure that billed time is accurate in amount and for billing it to the right client if I could tell which client's file I was working on and not just that I was working.

Stuart Jones replied on October 30, 2008 08:25 to the discussion "Ho could I account for 'work in progress'?" in FreeAgent Central:

WIP can be complicated. What I wanted to point out was that it isn't always hours x rate.

A comment on the discussion "Ho could I account for 'work in progress'?" in FreeAgent Central:

I was just asked to say what value of work had been done which hadn't been invoiced yet. To be honest, I thought multiplying rate by time *was* a considered calculation of the WIP. What other method could be used?

If it was up to me, I wouldn't bother with WIP and I'd only book revenue when it's invoiced, but it doesn't look like I've got a choice!

Shouldn't free agent have some method for calculating the WIP at any point in time and including that in the balance sheet and profits? Or if there several suitable methods could the user pick what they want in the settings? – peter, on October 29, 2008 20:13

Stuart Jones replied on October 29, 2008 17:57 to the discussion "Ho could I account for 'work in progress'?" in FreeAgent Central:

Whatever is decided I would still recommend this approach:

Make sure you think about the value of the WIP and the figure which appears in the final accounts is a considered calculation of the value of the WIP and not just a calculation based on hours multiplied by hourly rate?

Your accountants should be helping you arrive at the correct value not just accepting the figure you give them. After all it may be too high!

peter replied on October 29, 2008 17:04 to the discussion "Ho could I account for 'work in progress'?" in FreeAgent Central:

I thought I'd resurrect this thread, and give people a heads-up.

In previous years I only booked revenue when I actually raised an invoice, so if I did some work at the end of one company year and then raised the invoice at the beginning of the last year, the revenue counted against the later year. This seemed reasonable to me and my accountant was fine with it.

For the year just gone my accountant has just told me that the revenue are cracking down on this and that I now needed to provide a Work In Progress amount, so that I account for revenue when I do the work, rather then when I invoice for it, so that I pay more tax earlier.

Personally, I think it stinks - having to book revenue and pay tax on work you haven't even invoiced for, let alone received the money for.

But if this is what we have to do, shouldn't the balance sheet in FreeAgent have a line that says: "work done but not yet invoiced" - it can pull this figure from the Time section?

I thought it might be worth moving this up the priority list if the W.I.P. calculation is getting more important to HMRC.

Thanks. Peter.

Ed Molyneux replied on September 19, 2008 11:21 to the problem "Bank Balance Brought Forward Incorrect" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi everyone.

We think we've isolated the problem.

This week we upgraded to the most recent version of the software framework we're using: Ruby on Rails 2.1.1.

Turns out that one of the functions we're using to generate our balances is returning data of a different type than before, and it's throwing out the numbers somehow. Our automated test suite didn't pick this up because it uses the same function.

We're in the process of reverting to the previous version, which should happen in the next few minutes.

Once more please accept our apologies for the inconvenience, and thanks to all of you for bringing this to our attention and bearing with us as we resolve it.

Wolf Luecker started following the problem "Editing an explanation type causes it to recount itself" in FreeAgent Central.

Teerock replied on September 13, 2008 02:38 to the question "How do I create a new expense type?" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi Guys,

I just trialled your application and think it is excellent. I am looking forward to using it very much. The only issue I see is not being able to add my own expense types. Specifically I need to have both "web hosting" and "domain registration" as an admin expense and cost of sales as well.

Is this possible? I am very keen to sign up and start using FreeAgent Central.

Cheers,

Roan replied on August 14, 2008 11:07 to the question "Minuscule Elliot Jay Stocks invoice template bug" in FreeAgent Central:

Will do Wolf.

We'll get this sorted ASAP.

Wolf Luecker asked a question in FreeAgent Central on August 14, 2008 11:00:

Minuscule Elliot Jay Stocks invoice template bug

Hi,

Really not a biggie, but if someone could edit the Elliot Jay Stocks template, adding a space after the "VAT Registration Number" and "Contract/PO" colons, I would be ever so grateful.

Thanks!

JackH replied on July 03, 2008 19:29 to the question "Distinguish work within the same application - using regular expressions?" in RescueTime:

I like this idea. I'm concerned about sending the full website/application titles to RescueMe and I want to be able to change the locally. For example I want to delete usernames from the page title just leaving the information that I've been to facebook or twitter. And I want to send that I used OpenOffice, but I don't want every document title to be sent. (I also want to send domain names instead of full URLs)

xurizaemon replied on June 28, 2008 13:50 to the question "Distinguish work within the same application - using regular expressions?" in RescueTime:

@lunde: genius. thanks. nice to see an OSS fix for software that isn't OSS yet :)

@rescuetime: how long before you open-source and let us add features like this for you?

Stuart Jones replied on June 08, 2008 07:57 to the discussion "Ho could I account for 'work in progress'?" in FreeAgent Central:

First the gobbledegook!

1. WIP is not an accrual or a prepayment. It should be a separate current asset.
2. I would tend to show the WIP separately on the P&L account rather than add it to sales.

Then the surprise:

The basic premise is fine!

Ed Molyneux replied on June 06, 2008 10:15 to the discussion "Ho could I account for 'work in progress'?" in FreeAgent Central:

Wolf,

Sorry it's been a little while to get to this.

What the accountants we know seem to do is to find the invoices which relate to work done partly in one accounting period but dated in another, and split the income across the periods (as 'accruals' or 'prepayments').

Since it's all done historically (normally only needs to be considered a least 6-months after the year end for either income or corporation tax) we don't need to look at timeslips etc. It's all in the invoices.

We could easily automate this, for example by assuming the invoice date itself is the 'end of work' date and allowing you to specify a start date. Or by looking at the included timeslips and using those dates.

As Stuart identifies, we could then journal the WiP figure (between a WiP capital account and the Sales account, right Stuart?) at the end of the period, reversing on the first day of the next. Or we could just split the invoice numbers according to the specified fraction of work in each period.

Sorry to get technical, but does the basic premise sound OK?

(manual journal entries coming in the next couple of weeks, for those so inclined).

Andrew Lunde replied on May 22, 2008 21:20 to the question "Distinguish work within the same application - using regular expressions?" in RescueTime:

My proxy is working pretty well for me. If you want to try it out, send me an email at andrew at lunde dot com.

A comment on the question "Distinguish work within the same application - using regular expressions?" in RescueTime:

I've created my own proxy server to accomplish this. If you want to try it out, please send me and email at andrew at lunde dot com. I'd be happy to see if it works for you as well. – Andrew Lunde, on May 22, 2008 21:10

Matt replied on May 11, 2008 21:10 to the question "Distinguish work within the same application - using regular expressions?" in RescueTime:

Are we any closer to release on this. I consider this critical to effective use of rescuetime

Ed Molyneux replied on April 09, 2008 20:59 to the discussion "Ho could I account for 'work in progress'?" in FreeAgent Central:

We could certainly make that information available, but we would like to generate a good year-end adjustment for revenue calculation purposes and so that we can get the tax right.

That's what we'll plan to do...

We do want to get closer to 99% quality nirvana, y'know!

alunde replied on April 09, 2008 05:08 to the question "Distinguish work within the same application - using regular expressions?" in RescueTime:

I've been working on accomplishing this with a custom proxy server. Basically I funnel the request through it and modify the app_name accordingly. Here are a couple of the regexps I use.

This is a snippet of PHP from my proxy server.

case "phped":
$preg_match_str = "@^\'(.+)\+-\+(.+)\+-\+.+\'$@";
preg_match($preg_match_str, $this_val, $matches);
$app = $matches[1];
print("app:" . $app . ":\n");
$project = $matches[2];
print("project:" . $project . ":\n");
break;
....
This works for strings like 'phped+-+Project+-+blahblah'

This would be similar to the VisualStudio example above.

-Andrew

Mike Koss replied on April 08, 2008 21:54 to the question "Distinguish work within the same application - using regular expressions?" in RescueTime:

I would love to set up more specific rules - I think you could use keywords in window titles to infer tags. E.g., when I'm working in Google Docs, you could look for the project name in the title of the document to derive which tag I want to apply to that work.

Alternately, an on-screen widget that lets me declare that I am working on one project or another in real time.