As a contract web and software developer I often find myself away from the office working onsite at clients or even from a coffee shop. Then normally I would do my administrative work when I get home to send out invoices, check on payments received and marking invoices as paid etc. That was until I found two online services that really make accounting effortless, especially for a single-man operation like me.
The two services I highly recommend are Freshbooks and LessAccounting. Both services offer web-based services to manage clients, track time, projects and expenses and invoice your clients from wherever you are as long as you have an internet connection. I initially used Freshbooks but recently switched to LessAccounting. They are both great but I prefer the look and feel of LessAccounting. You can sign-up for a free trial account at any one of them.
If you really want just an invoicing system also have a look at Curdbee.com
I also didn’t get it at first, so I’ve made an attempt to understand what the hype is about and found a really good article explaining what Twitter is and how it can help your personal life and business.
Twitter Survival Guide
Follow me on Twitter
I just learned that Windows 7 (the successor for Windows Vista) will only be released somewhere in 2010 as opposed to the initial mid-2009 release date. This is kind of disappointing to me who is still using XP and decided to wait for Windows 7 before I take the big leap. Maybe I’ll get to learn and enjoy the new vista like interfaces but I will still miss the dull gray toolbars on XP desktop.
I’ve had the pleasure to go on a wild chase after a calculation bug in a stored procedure for one of my clients. A few hours later and lots of coffee led me to an age old user error when dealing with equations in SQL.
The calculation looked something like this:
SET @NewValue = @Rate * @FieldValue + 0.16
Now under normal circumstances, if @Rate is equal to 2 and @FieldValue is equal to 0 the result from the equation will be 0.16. To test use:
But what happens if either the @Rate or @FieldValue is NULL, will SQL automatically convert the NULL to 0? The answer is NO. The resulting value will be NULL, not 0, not 0.16 as we would hope. So, to avoid this common mistake amongst SQL developers use the IsNull function around field with uncertain input values. The corrected statement should be:
SET @NewValue = IsNull (@Rate,0) * IsNull (@FieldValue,0) + 0.16
