Archive for the ‘business’ Category

T4 Summary Filed! Earlier than ever before.

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Perceptus is ahead of the game this year, and we’ve filed our T4 and T4 Summary for 2011 in January of 2012.

We don’t have many employees, so we use the CRA’s web forms. I have to admit, the CRA T4 Web Forms get better every year.  A couple years ago, the web generated T4’s looked… odd. They were very different from the traditional T4 layout, so we didn’t use those. Last year, that was fixed. This year, there are some nice little improvements here and there.

For some reason, you have to fill in box 26 this year, Box 26, “CPP/QPP Pensionable Earnings”.  In our case, we just have to enter the same value from Box 14, “Employment Income”.

Anyway, this is a reminder to other Canadian micro-businesses. It’s time to do the T4’s.

Oh, and happy Chinese New Year.

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Posted in business, CRA, taxes | No Comments »

Stolen FedEx Package?!

Friday, October 28th, 2011

After a long hiatus due to an extremely busy period, it’s time to catch up on some blog posts.

A couple months ago I helped someone return their Gateway netbook to Acer for repairs. Acer repaired the machine and sent it back by FedEx Ground Service.

At the delivery, someone dutifully signed for the package.  There’s only one catch, whoever signed for it, walked off with the machine. Yes, the netbook was stolen. It could have been a neighbour, or one of the contractors at the house next door, or one of the city workers who happened to be working on the street that day. Whoever it was, the FedEx driver let some random person who happened to be near the property sign for the package.

The rest of this story took over a month to play out slot games for android.

Initially, Acer was not very helpful, they told us to deal with FedEx for a claim.  FedEx “ran a trace” to try and find the package.  Eventually, a FedEx loss claim was filed; however, it required Acer to relinquish their rights making their own claim. The whole situation was a mess, and it took several calls to Acer support to keep things moving along. Further, I suspect that FedEx would only pay out the minimum $100 coverage that is included with each delivery.  Acer self-insures (i.e. doesn’t buy insurance) on their shipments (this actually make sense given their shipping volume).

In the end, Acer finally took responsibility and dealt with the FedEx claim and shipped a replacement machine (with arguably better specs).

This isn’t an exclusively FedEx problem.  By coincidence, a couple weeks later, a  UPS delivery person let me sign for a package after I got out of my car and started walking towards the house. And no, the UPS delivery person couldn’t have recognized me, I’m rarely the one to receive deliveries.

I’m surprised that stolen packages don’t happen more often – or maybe they do.

The moral of the story? Avoid shipping items to a residential address. Couriers hate residences – they’re widely spaced out (relative to business districts), and often, no one is home.

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Print-Bingo.com Pricing Change

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

Happy New Year!

We’ve hinted at this for years, and we’re finally doing it today. Print-Bingo.com Premium Access account upgrades are now $12, but we are also  officially increasing the access term by 50% to 3 years. Previously, it was $10 for a 2 year term.  The 2 years expiry was never enforced, and we currently have no plans to enforce the 3 year expiry.

A few thoughts on our pricing and term length change.

The price has never changed since print-bingo.com was launched in 2005. If we estimate an average inflation of 2% per year, we have lost 10% of our revenue after adjusting for inflation.  Further, as a Canadian firm, where our operating expenses and salaries are paid out in Canadian funds, we’ve had a large hit from the rise in the Canadian Dollar over  the US Dollar – but that’s a problem for all Canadian exporters, not just us *.

 

On the feature side, when print-bingo.com was originally launched, an upgrade gave you the following feature(s):

 

  • The ability to print up to 200 pages per run of standard numeric bingo cards.

Yes, that’s really it.

We did not have customizable bingo cards, design saving features, draw chips, randomized draw lists, or serial number features initially.  These were all added over time as the user base of the site grew.

Today, an upgrade to print-bingo.com will get you the following feature(s):

 

  • The ability to print up to 1000 pages per run of standard numeric cards, or the customizable word bingo cards
  • Generate and print randomized Bingo calling cards to quickly call your game.
  • Generate and print calling chips for drawing your terms from a hat or box.
  • Generate bingo cards with serial numbers to help you ensure that cards have been generated by you.
  • Keep your saved or emailed Bingo card designs indefinitely (vs. 30 days for guest users).

I think that we offer much better value now than we did a few years ago.

About the 2 year versus 3 year terms.  When print-bingo.com launched, we had no idea if it would be worth our while to run this site indefinitely. So, we picked a length of time that we were sure that we could promise our users.   Now that our site is well established, we’re pretty confident that we can increase our guaranteed length of access  by 50% to 3 years – even this is probably conservative.

* For the curious, our first sale was on 2005-08-10 at 13:55, at that time,  USD 1 =  CAD 1.214.  At the time of writing (late December 2010), USD 1 = CAD 1.00644 .

 

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Posted in announcements, business, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

Canada.com Email is Shutting Down… it’s a good time to move to a vanity domain.

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

I was mildly surprised when a relative mentioned to me that her free Canada.com email address was being shut down.  She’s had that email address for years – though, I know she hasn’t been using it for day-to-day email for most of that time.

For those individuals who are actively using their Canada.com email addresses still, here are a few suggestions from us at Perceptus:

  • Do NOT move to the email provided by your internet service provider.  Choose one of the major webmail providers such as Hotmail.com, Gmail.com or Yahoo.com – these services are all well run, and more importantly, they will probably be around for a long, long time.  Of these three, I recommend Google’s Gmail.com service.  I’ve written about this in a previous post: Picking an Email Address – Don’t use a Free Account from your ISP.
  • This is a great excuse to move to a vanity domain.  It’s cheap.  You can buy the rights to a .com domain for <$10 per year and have Google host the email for you.  If you have a few family members or friends, you can share a domain.  We use Google’s Apps for Domains  for all email to perceptus.ca – it’s excellent.
  • You do not have to lose your saved Canada.com email.  Read their own migration instructions here.  You can move your email to Google’s Gmail service easily.  These instructions can be adapted for all other major web email providers, and also, to download your email using POP3 to your own computer to software like Outlook or Thunderbird.
  • Remember to update all of your 3rd party logins.  eBay, PayPal.com, Amazon, everything.  You will not have an easy time getting access to your accounts once canada.com webmail goes offline.
  • Do this ASAP.  Canada.com really did a disservice to their users by providing such a small amount of notice.

I wonder if the email being shut down is related to the recent change in ownership of the site’s publisher, Postmedia Network Inc.  Seriously, couldn’t they find a way to make a buck on this by partnering with a 3rd party webmail provider and sharing ad revenue, rather than shutting it down?

Comments are encouraged.

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Posted in annoying, business, canadian, email, excuse, Google, opportunity, support | 7 Comments »