Carolyn: Things are really moving along in their lives that's for sure...
Lizza: Oh, I think that they'll get caught somewhere along the line, no doubt...
Eve: Oh it's going to overwhelm them real soon now...
Cardinal: Chapter 11, they hired a professional accountant but they still have to do the merchandising, just like you said, and the only thing this accountant will do is the year end accounting, they'll do the ordering, paying the bills, and depositing the funds...the accountant will do the books.
Smilieuk: Here in the US you can open an account at any time...of course a business account usually requires a business license to do business in a city, which the girls really aren't doing actually, they will be scattered all over the US so they have not applied for a city business license. They have applied for and were granted a Federal Corporate ID number in order to conduct their business as a corporation and to use in order to file and pay income taxes. As long as the IRS gets their pound of flesh they don't care as do the banks; as long as they get their money they pretty much don't care either. The accounts at the bank are open to the scrutinazation of the auditors but in most cases the audits are to make sure the banks are being run properly. It all gets very involved and is not really pertinent to the story per se'. So, in all honesty, having set up three businesses myself...just go to the bank, fill out the paper work and give them your money. The bank will require operating numbers, such as the corporate ID number but that will have been given to the bank as soon as they had it and now that I think about it I did not put that part into the story. But keep in mind the banker and the accountant have been very helpful to them. I hope that answers your questions, somewhat, I do have a degree in accounting so I am familiar with a lot of this stuff!
***
Chapter: 13
Date: 6/11/02
The next morning Tess called Isabelle at about 8:30 just as Isabelle was waking up.
“Hey Tess, are you ready to go?”
“Not to Las Cruces; I think we need more information and I think we can find that out locally. What do you think?”
“Sounds good to me…Shall I pick you up this time, oh, and Tess, I read something in Dad’s books…did you keep track of your mileage yesterday? We need to do that so we can be reimbursed by the company. So if you didn’t we’ll need to get a rough estimate on how many miles you traveled.”
“Oh Isabelle, don’t worry about it. My dad pays for my gas.”
“No Tess, that’s not right. If its business related then the company will pay it. Listen to your president.”
Tess giggled and said fine, “I’ll pick you up in about 45 minutes and I’ll take my little note book and write down my mileage. How’s that?”
“That sounds great, now let me get a shower so I can be ready when you get here, just come on in. Nobody is home today; they’re all working but me.”
“Sounds good. Give me forty five minutes.” And they rang off.
When Tess and Isabelle got to Kinko’s they were filled in on all kinds of information they had misunderstood.
“Yes we ship and deliver to the company that placed the order…no we do not ship individual pieces that were ordered to your various addresses. You can purchase a scale and some postage labels and address labels; go on line and order your postage from the post office. They don’t charge you any fees except the postage you order and then you print out the amount on the labels; put them on your parcels along with address labels you have printed out and take them to the post office for shipping. Actually it works out quite nicely.”
“Hmmm, that’s interesting. And how many, say calendars, can you print in a week?”
“Well, once we have the layout and place the initial order you can keep adding to it. I would say… the initial order should take about a week to get back to us. We’ll deliver it to you or you can pick it up. If you know who you want to send them to you can do an address and postage printout immediately. If you are adding to the addresses you can figure out how many addresses are in a sheet of labels and just add to the list until you have a full sheet and print it out. You can get all of that stuff right over at the office supply across the street.”
“Thank you. That’s great.” And the two girls went across the street and they started checking out labels, a scale and also print cartridges.
“Isabelle, look at these cartridges, they range from 19.00 clear up to 59.00 dollars. Which one do you use?”
“You know what, let’s just buy a printer that uses the cheapest cartridge and charge it to the business. We can e-mail addresses to you or Maria, whoever decides to print this stuff and just work from there. It’s a business expense after all, why wear our printers out when we are going to need them for school.” Isabelle was thinking out loud…
“Right, we need a corporate meeting. Shall we do that tonight? I think Liz and Maria are working days all summer from here on out. What do you say?” Tess didn‘t want to make any decisions without everybody’s input.
“I think you’re right, it’s time for a meeting. In the meantime should we get the damned stuff? Did you bring your check book?” Isabelle just wanted to get things done.
“Yeah, I stuck it in the other end of my purse so I wouldn’t confuse it with my personal stuff. Let’s call them first and see what they say.”
“Great, you call Maria, I’ll call Liz.”
“Let’s hope they have time to talk.”
“Yeah…”
So Tess called Maria, who just happened to be on her break and Liz’s phone went right to voice mail…
“Hey curly, what’s up?”
“Cut that out Maria…hey we’re at the office supply store. Kinko’s will deliver to us but they aren’t going to ship each individual envelope like we thought. Should I purchase the labels, the scale and a printer and a couple of ink cartridges? We thought we’d get the printer that has the cheapest cartridges. What do you think?”
“I say do whatever you have to do and I know Liz agrees; she’s covering for me right now so she can’t talk but I’ll tell her as soon as there’s a lull. We’ll get together later. Oh, and Tess, didn’t we already figure the weight of the calendars? What do we need a scale for?”
“You’re right Maria; can you guys take lunch together?”
“Not technically, but come over around 3:00, we get off then and we should be able to have a conversation on the roof.”
“Great, 3:00 it is.”
“Well, what did she say?” Isabelle asked
“She’s on her break and Liz is on the floor but if we go over about 3:00 they should be able to talk to us. In the meantime she said to get what we needed. We should have listened to Liz when she thought about adding overhead to the COG (cost of goods sold).”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. We can get on the internet and add shipping and handling to the orders that should cover it. We’ll have to contact the credit card customers and ask them if that’s agreeable though before we tack on postage and label and ink charges.”
“Yeah, and that’s not going to be that easy.”
“Hey, we’ll do a form letter, copy and paste it and split the names into four and just e-mail the information to them. It’s going to cost more to ship overseas than the $2.15 to ship in the states, so we’ll have to figure that out. The handling charges will be a set fee based on the cost of labels and such. You know this is really getting involved don’t you?”
“Yeah, but we don’t have anything else to do really, and I think it’s going to pay for itself. We can stop the orders anytime we want to…and since it’s next years calendar I think we should stop mailing sometime in Oct. or Nov. because we’re going to be having finals and holidays and we don’t need this business during that time.”
“No we don’t…more to discuss at our corporate meeting. Let’s just get this stuff and be on our way.”
“Great, do we need a cart or something?” Tess wondered.
“No, we take one of these slips for the printer and the rest is easy to handle…”
So off they went finding what they needed and an hour later they were loaded with the necessary office supplies they needed, along with four mileage note books, and they were happy as clams. They should be, the orders were piling up faster than you could say ‘lickety split’. It was the beginning of June; they were planning on stopping in Oct. or Nov. That would give them four or five months of business…one good thing about a corporation, it never dies.
*
So Isabelle and Tess headed back to Tess’s house and set things up in her room and started to work on the internet. They decided not to deposit any of the money into their account until they composed a notice to all buyers of the added charges…explaining that the costs would vary due to the location in the world because they were getting hits from everywhere and had no idea what the postage would be for the various areas.
After they had the letter composed they printed it out and then logged onto the post office site. There they found many menus to choose from and decided that they should check out bulk mailing; they had never heard of it but the post office gave very explicit instructions that were easy to understand. There was a nice discount if you used that site and maybe if they could set their computer to sort the addresses by zip code they could take advantage of presorted mail as well…then they could just haul the calendars to the post office and do bulk mailings.
They researched that, checked the pricing on the various countries they intended to ship to so far and some of the costs were going to be almost the cost of the calendar. They incorporated this information into their news letter and decided that it was time, past time, to hold another corporate meeting.
The two young ladies headed out to Tess’s SUV and promptly made their way to the Crashdown…thank God they missed their significant others who had just headed back to their own jobs. Isabelle spotted Alex taking off the other direction as they pulled in and parked. Damn, she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet.
When they walked through the door Liz immediately poured four cherry cokes and headed over to the back booth to where Maria was headed from her exit through the back door.
“Agnes, you’re in charge now, we’re clocked out. If it gets busy though we’ll join you for a while until Dad gets back.”
Agnes looked at Maria with a disgusted look on her face and was about to say something when Jeff walked out of the back room with a box of straws to stock the dispenser behind the counter…She looked over at her boss and decided that it was time that she just accepted the fact that those two girls ran the place and went about her business.
Jeff just turned his back to her and grinned. He was going to miss Liz and he was also going to see that her final couple of months before embarking on a new life was as pleasant as possible and the rest of the crew could just suck it up. He shook his head at the thought and then noticed Jose’ looking at him through the pass through and the man grinned right along with Jeff. Jose’ had known these two since they were in diapers and nobody was going to hurt them on his watch…
*
“Well pres…what did you find out?” Liz asked excitedly.
“We bought a printer, a couple of ink cartridges and some labels for addresses and postage. Kinko’s will ship to us or deliver to us but they won’t be shipping each calendar individually…that’s up to us but the girl gave us great tips and we checked them out on the internet.”
“We can do bulk mailing, which will cost us less and we can buy our postage on line from the post office. We deposit money to an account set up for us and as we deplete the funds the post office keeps track and then we’ll need to deposit more.”
“We checked out the addresses of our depositors, who by the way are all over the world, and we decided to send a letter to them via e-mail before depositing any money. The one’s that live out of the country will have to pay more postage than in the continental U.S. so we want to make sure they are aware of the extra charges. We don’t know what to add onto to their bills for handling charges yet, so we’re going to figure out how much per calendar it’s going to cost based on the ink and label usage.”
“I think the printer should be an overhead item since we don’t know how long it will last. I would think it shouldn’t take too much of a beating just printing labels. We bought the printer based on the price of the ink cartridges.”
“Oh, and we got each of us a mileage note book…our business miles are tax deductible so anytime we do an errand for business write it down. We won’t be reimbursing ourselves since we are the principles of the business and all the money we earn is ours but Les will need to know this. Just keep a record. Keep the note book on your dash board, in your purse or somewhere. Jot down the odometer reading before and after, it’s no big deal.” And Tess was practically breathless.
“Boy, you guys have been busy. What do you think… is it going to work? You know we have to stuff these things and mail them, are you willing to do all of that?” Maria asked.
“Of course we are…” Tess nodded and the other two agreed.
“Well, okay…let’s have a look at the letter.” Liz said. Tess passed it on over to her and she read it and gave it to Maria who read it in silence.
“That’s pretty straight forward. Explaining that the U.S. postage would most likely be $2.15 and the out of U.S. would be $4.33 or there abouts.” That was pretty clear to all of them and they decided to go ahead and post it and see what happened.
They were all starting to feel a little giddy.
“When are you going to go to Las Cruces and set this up with Kinko’s?” Liz asked.
“Probably tomorrow, I don’t think we should wait any longer to get this started. They will ship the calendars to us once the initial order is set up and then when we get there for school we can just pick them up there instead of having them shipped to us.” Isabelle added.
“What do you mean ‘we’?” Tess asked.
“Well Alex and I talked it over and we decided that I should probably go to Las Cruces to school for the first two years and take as many courses as I can and then move on to Albuquerque or even Yale, maybe Harvard. Alex said that by that time we should have a pretty good idea of what paths we really want to follow. We may find something that is totally out there that we never gave a thought to before. I think it will be fun to be with Alex away from home.”
Tess scooted over in the booth and gave her friend a great big hug, she was so happy to know that one of them would be with her that she could hardly contain herself.
Jeff caught this action from his station behind the counter and smiled, it looked like Isabelle had made her decision to go to Las Cruces so their trip yesterday was not in vain. He wished Liz was going to be that close to home but she had her mind set for years on Harvard, and he smiled…so had he, and it didn’t look like anything was going to change her mind. What with Maria headed to Julliard for music and Michael headed to New York to the International School of Cooking they would be together also. This was going to be a big change for all of them. Wow…and reality started to set in, he was not only losing Liz and Maria but Michael as well.
When the girls had finished their meeting, Maria, being the good secretary, wrote down the minutes in her mileage note book to transfer to her computer when she got home and Tess smiled. Maria shrugged her shoulders and smiled back. We’re business people ladies; we have to act like it. We don’t want to be doing anything wrong here. And they all laughed, it was getting scarier by the minute. Maria was right.
When Tess got home she sat down and built a spread sheet to handle their assets and liabilities…she made an entry for Capital Investment and offset it to Cash in bank, she set up her expense accounts, using the expenses they had accumulated so far, categorizing them according to her text book, and continued on from there. She couldn’t imagine needing too much at this point and then she started to test her calculations to make sure everything was working. When she was finished everything looked great. She added Les Biby’s address into her address book, sat back and smiled. So far it had been a very productive day. She then proceeded to copy their notification letter over to their depositors and was going to send it off when she took a better look at the job before her…there were now over 6,000 hits but only 4230 depositors. She had to copy over 4230 letters and decided to call on her cohorts for help; this could take her all night. If she e-mailed each one of her friends a copy of the letter they could each take a little over a thousand it would be a whole lot faster, she smiled and then got busy.
To”
Liz@AOL.com,
Maria@AOL.com.,
Isabelle@AOL.com
From;
Tess@AOL.com.
Tess sent them a message telling each of them where to start and attached a copy of the letter and then started working on her 1000 plus. It only took her the better part of an hour and she decided that any new ones that came in after this group could wait until tomorrow.
Maria, Isabelle and Liz all received a text from Tess to check their e-mails and they laughed. Tess was making an excellent Treasurer and they were all pleased with the way things were working out.
They all did as Tess asked and when they were finished they texted her back at various hours during the evening advising her that the mission had been accomplished…Tess was with Kyle when she started getting the messages and Kyle wanted to know why she was so happy…
“Tess, you look like the cat that ate the canary…what’s got you so tickled?”
“Nothing Kyle…life is good. Did I tell you that Isabelle has decided to go to Las Cruces with us? Isn’t that great! You know what Kyle; I’ll bet we could afford to get off campus housing cheaper than dorm living with the four of us chipping in. What do you say? We could do our own food, have a washer and dryer and it would be so much nicer. If we all chipped in I’ll bet our parents would help.”
Kyle looked at Tess’s happy face and out and out belly laughed…
“Tess, do you think our parents are going to help us shack up?” And he laughed even harder.
“Kyle Valenti, what a thing to say!”
“Tess, it’s the truth. My God, the four of us living together, that’s a parent’s nightmare.”
“No it isn’t Kyle, do you think they’re all stupid? We’ve been friends forever and we’ve been couples for over three years…get real Kyle, they were our age once. They know the score.”
“Do you think so?” Kyle was a little embarrassed and shocked by Tess’ statement.
“Think so Kyle? I know so…come on!”
“Well, let’s run it by them and see what they say.”
“I don’t know about Jim but my mom is going to laugh.”
“I don’t think she’s going to laugh Tess.”
“Trust me I know her better than you, she’s going to laugh.”
“Yeah, laugh right before she says
“NO”!” Kyle picked Tess up and swung her around…”You have a dad too you know.” He chuckled as he planted a kiss on her cheek before setting her down again…
“Yeah, he might be a problem.” Tess said, and they both laughed.
*
