Like many things over the past year, this website quickly went the route of every other “new interest” I’ve tried to pick up in order to keep busy, feel challenged, or to explore new opportunities.
Which is to say…I started it and it quickly fell to the wayside.
Quick Update
Almost three months have passed since I completed my Gmail email account purge. I did eventually tackle the last one that I considered the most daunting. It still holds numerous sheets and docs and about a dozen emails, but otherwise it has been purged.
Today, I took a deep breath and I deleted three more Gmail accounts. Four gone…two left.
Not gonna lie – it was a little nerve wracking.
I still have the account tied to my name. I might not give this account up for quite some time. It’s the last personal Gmail account I have. At this point, it’s mostly unused, although I do keep up correspondence with one person through it yet.
The other account is the GSuite account that hosts my business email.
Looks like GSuite is here to stay for a while
For most of the past six weeks, I have been busy relearning how to use power query, power pivot and pivot tables in excel.
There’s a lot of background information I need to provide in order for context to make sense here…and I’ll try to tackle that in upcoming entries…but let’s just say for now that I run a “side hustle” business in addition to working a full time day job.
I don’t particularly like my side hustle, but it works, and it netted me an extra $12,000 last year.
I have flipped flopped badly over this past year as to what the future holds for this side hustle. Part of me wants to let it die a natural death. However, there have been some “life changes” forced upon me since December where it might be more prudent of me to grow the side hustle to the point that it can replace my day job completely.
So, to get back to the point of the heading for this subsection…that means I need to be able to do more in less time if I’m to grow while still working until I feel confident I’m ready to make the leap…or until forced changes occur (given the bullshit office politics that seem to have surfaced almost as soon as my department manager quit his job, if this toxic bitch is successful in her Wormtongue ways, the changes will be forced).
I needed to find a way to semi-automate my monthly billing, and that’s where the combination of my newly created excel pivot tables and Google sheets intersect.
My current free accounting service only allows data to be imported through Google sheets using their add-on plugin in order to verify entries before activating the import. That means, until I have time…brain space…enthusiasm…to tackle finding an alternative to my current accounting situation, I’m stuck needing a Google account to access sheets. So, I might as well stay with GSuite.
At the end of the month, I export the latest data from my business website as a .csv file, feed it and a couple of other .csv files to my excel pivot table and allow it to do its thing to create my invoice entries.
Then, I can copy clip that data over to Google sheets, fire up the add-on to verify entries, and then import the data to create all of my invoices for the month.
I won’t bore you with how much work, separate “data bases” and manual entries used to go into this process. Let’s just put a bow on it and say now I can create the data once on my website and let the above process do the rest of the heavy lifting.
What projects are you working on right now to prepare for the future?