A little book caught my eye while paying in Dubray books: ‘The Essential Guide to Apartment Living in Ireland‘ by Robert Gogan. At 15 euro for under 200 A5 pages, I thought it was a bit steep. I had a quick flick through it and it looked well thought out. I was further encouraged when I saw that it has only just been published. Being an apartment owner, I thought that it could be a wise investment. After all, it costs less than 3 tubs of Ben and Jerry’s!

I have had a good read of some chapters already, and I think that it’s a handy book to have. It’s well laid out with sections on buying, what you own, management, day to day life, finance, legal matters and insurance. There is a helpful glossary at the back too. The author has both a legal and property management background, which makes for a good mix - the book is very thorough, but it focuses on the practical issues. So while it explains all about management agencies etc, it also has helpful advice on how to deal with troublesome neighbours. Best of all, it is written in plain English, despite the somewhat complex nature of the legal aspects of apartment living.

I’ve already picked up a few things I was not aware of. I’ll be checking that I have my management company membership certificate for a start. Other points that I had a vague understanding of are much clearer now. While the material is not the most fascinating, the tone is quite down-to-earth throughout and it makes for lighter reading than I thought. The author shares his own view from time to time. Perhaps that’s not a great idea for a factual book like this, but it makes it a bit more entertaining. He informs us that there are “thousands of unreasonable people living all around us” and, therefore, “inevitably” “these individuals” will be in your apartment development. He finds that tenants do not “have as much regard for the considerations of their neighbours”, an opinion based on his own experience of 90% of House Rule breaches involving tenants.

Diversions like these may be better suited to a blog, and I discovered tonight that the book has an entire website to go along with it complete with forum, guestbook (how quaint!) and blog. It seems that you have to register to comment which I don’t like, but I think they are still working on the website, so that may change. While I know that neighbours.ie is great for individual developments, this is the first site I know of devoted to apartment living in Ireland in general, despite it being such a big niche. I’m increasingly out of the loop these days, so there are probably dozens of other websites already! Holler if you know any.

Keeping financial records is a vital part of running your own business, but with so many accounts software packages available at all sorts of prices, how do you know where to start? I have used 2 free programs to date: TurboCASH and QuickBooks Simple Start. For the benefit of anyone else who is currently looking into free accounts software, here’s a run through of what I liked and disliked about both programs.

TurboCASH was the first program I tried. On the plus side, TurboCASH is the kind of program that will suit people with an accounts background. You enter your transactions in journals, and then click a button to post to the ledger. There is also a double-entry T-account viewer available for each account that I found very handy. This use of traditional accounts terminology etc means that there is quite a learning curve for anyone without a basic knowledge of accounting. I still have a good grasp of accounts from school, but having been away from it all for a few years, I found I had to buy the TurboCASH Accounting Made Easy e-book for £14.95 to really get to grips with the program. The book goes into lots of detail on setting up TurboCASH and keeping accounts for both typical retail and service businesses. Once I worked through the tutorials, the program made a lot more sense. I also found the forum helpful when I was not sure how to treat unusual items in my accounts.

The interface does not look very slick, but I would not mind that if it did the job. My main problem with TurboCASH was that mistakes started creeping into the reports over time, particularly relating to transactions I had previously edited. Luckily, I had so few transactions that I was able to spot when reports did not look quite right and go back and fix things. When this happened a third time within 9 months, I stopped using the program, because accounting software that produces inaccurate figures is worse than having no software at all! The site does state that the software is in beta, so I realise that bugs are to be expected and that I used it at my own risk.

Before resorting to paper ledgers and red pens, I googled for alternative software and I came across QuickBooks Simple Start. Oddly, this software costs 72 euro + VAT + P&P if you look at the Irish QuickBooks site, even though it is available as a free download here at QuickBooks.com. The free version has been made with US users in mind, but the program is so basic that international users don’t really miss out on anything. Perhaps QuickBooks Ireland have added some fancy localised features for Irish users that justifies the price tag?!

Unlike TurboCASH, Simple Start is suitable for anyone to use, even if you have never kept any accounts before. The interface is a lot more visual and intuitive. The main screen is a diagram showing the path of money through your business, and you just click on the icon that you want to record something for (invoices, bank account, expense etc). There is no mention of posting, contra entries or other accounting lingo here. It’s plain English all the way - just money in and money out. There is very good help within the program, although it is so straightforward and intuitive that I have not needed to call on it much. Despite the easy interface, I like the way that you can still look under the hood at the raw ledger accounts and transactions by viewing ‘Accountant Reports’. You can also quickly run profit and loss and balance sheets for each month, the year so far, last year etc which is very handy. Backing up your accounts is also very quick (less than a minute), whereas after a few months of using TurboCash it used to take about 10 minutes!

I have been using QuickBooks Simple Start for about 2 months now and so far the only disappointment has been the lack of a cash flow report. I know that the whole idea of Simple Start is to just give you the basic features and reports that you need starting off, but a cash flow report is often the key report for a start-up. A minor niggle is that you don’t seem to be able to tag certain expenses as being part of cost of sales either. If you upgrade to QuickBooks Pro, you get cash flow reports and a ton more bells and whistles that I will probably never need as a freelancer. Again, there is a big price difference between buying the Irish version (370 euro + VAT + P&P) and the US version ($199.95 or $179.95 if you upgrade from Simple Start) of QuickBooks Pro. The US price is becoming more tempting as my business grows, but I will have to find out what I will miss out on if I don’t buy the Irish version. I do my own accounts at the moment, but if I ever start handing them over to an accountant, it could be false economy buying the US version if the accountants can’t work with those files or there are other issues. All that’s a bit down the line - for now the free version of QuickBooks does the job very well and my bank balance is happy with it too.

How sad and dated my blog looks, with a Christmassy post still the latest news at nearly the end of January. I did get my tree in the end, but very shortly afterwards I also got the flu. I’m very lucky that I got sick at Christmas when I had time off, because it took over 3 weeks for me to get back on my feet. It probably would have taken a lot longer if my Mum had not been looking after me for a week! Thanks for the TLC Mum - spoilt is not the word.

It’s only the 2nd time I’ve had a really bad dose of flu. Normally I just get colds, or something in between cold and flu. Like many people I used to often say I had the flu when I just had a bad cold, but once you have had the flu you never mix them up. You always hear lots of talk at this time of year about the differences between the two, but I think the best one I heard is very simple: if you were in bed with a dose and you suddenly saw a fifty euro note on the floor, you would get out and pick it up if you had a cold, but you would stay put if you had the flu.

Last Christmas was the 8th Anniversary of my first flu. If I go another 8 years without it I’ll be happy. It took me nearly 6 weeks to get fully over it the first time, so at least I set a personal best recovery time this time around! I think the decrease in my daily commuting might have something to do with that. These days, I work from home but 8 years ago I was heading from Blanchardstown to UCD by bus. Even in the best of health, that journey can be tiring at times! I still remember those cold January days 8 years ago when I would try to get from UCD library to the 46A bus stop, ordinarily a couple of minutes stroll that you would not even notice. I had to just keep trying to get to the next lamp post along the path and hold onto it for a couple of minutes rest!

So, the moral of my waffle is, if you ever have the flu, rest up completely for as long as you can. If you try to keep going to some extent, you could be clinging to lamp posts for weeks!

I’m a bit late getting my first proper Christmas tree organised. I figured an artificial one was the most practical option from the off, but when I saw the dire selection of overpriced mangy tat around town, my romantic vision of a real Christmas tree returned. Admittedly I was late to the party, but I am not sure I missed too many stunning artificial trees. Having faced up to how expensive they were, unfortunately the only half decent ones I saw displayed in Arnotts and House of Fraser were already sold out. Having toured a couple of small local real Christmas tree sellers, I saw that mangy, overpriced real trees are not uncommon in Dublin either!

This afternoon it was starting to look like the 2 foot Christmas tree I’ve always had in my bedroom, dating from when Penneys sold excellent quality decorations, would be the height of it. But tonight we discovered what can only be described as a Christmas tree superstore on Milltown road. The smell of countless trees greets you on the way in, and they are available in all sorts of sizes. They even have small real trees available for apartments. We wanted a 6-7ft tree, and saw some proper, full trees at long last. We were quoted a price of around 60 euro, plus 10 for a stand. That’s not too bad considering that some are selling far inferior trees in Dublin 6 for upwards of 50 euro. One note of caution - the netting machine was broken when I visited, so once they take the netting off a tree for you to see what it looks like, it cannot be put back which makes getting big trees home fairly tricky. I think there is a delivery service available, but I’m not sure what charges are involved.

Right at the back of the long fairy garden of real trees is a shed with about a dozen stunning artificial trees on display. They are more expensive than many on the high street, but there is no comparison. While you can get lots of cheap artificial trees, the decent 6ft trees I had spotted in the stores ranged from 100 euro to 240 euro. Apart from table top ones, the smallest artificial ones in Milltown are 7ft tall and cost from around 200 euro up. That’s a significant amount, but in the context of what the department stores charge, it seems reasonable when you see how well they look. Besides, once you use it for a few years, you see the savings from not buying a real one each year. Of course, your carbon footprint gets smaller too - if only I could reduce the size of my real footprint as easily!!

So if you have not got your Christmas tree organised yet either, Milltown Road (near the Murphy and Gunn car showrooms) is well worth a visit. They have an outlet in Blackrock too - check out IrishChristmasTrees.com for more info on what’s available, or if you’re really lazy you could buy online. The artificial trees look much better in reality than in the pictures on the website. Artificial is definitely a better option for apartment dwellers without a car like us. Having seen these magical looking artificial trees, I’m hoping to indulge in one while they are still available - pictures to follow if I’m successful!