The team has been working very hard under the hood.

Over Christmas and into the New Year there haven’t been very many new features released because on the surface nothing has changed, however, behind the scenes key functionality has been migrated over to an MVC framework.

In simple terms this new structure to the code makes it easier to debug, re-use, test, optimise and change in the future.

Whereas in the beginning Clear Books code was written in a very procedural way with code and content interwoven, it’s now very abstracted with code in one place and content in another using OOP practices.

Re-writing an application is a daunting prospect that may be ill advised. It has the potential to drag on to the detriment of producing new functionality, features and usability.

Here’s how we approached it:

• Identified the top 40 most used scripts/pages/features in the app and focused only on rewriting those.
• The rest of the app remains in our original procedural style.
• Set a deadline of 14th February to complete the migration.
• The lesser used pages will be migrated over time as and when we either fix bugs or improve the feature.

This change provides a solid foundation to the app. From that base our next mamoth task is a huge design and usability review which has already been initiated and an update will follow in due course.

And of course we’re always on the look out to recruit talented PHP developers to join our development team.

In my first year at Nottingham I had emailed Paul suggesting I should drop out of university and join Fubra. I am pretty sure he did not want that responsibility on his shoulders as he told me to stick at it until Fubra was doing better.

With no graduate career lined up in my final year, I arranged to start at Fubra as soon as I returned home from university in June 2003. At this time Fubra was beginning to really prosper and had a team of 6 full time employees, 2 summer students and 2 students from Holland on a placement year. It felt like a proper company. I was appointed their Technical Innovation Manager or TIM for short.

It was at Fubra that I learned how to program in PHP (the same programming language that Clear Books is written in).

(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim’s personal blog on  startups & small businesses)

Skipped lectures, missed tutorials and money making schemes did not seem so clever now. I made the decision to stop applying for jobs and focus on my degree. If I pulled it off I would apply for graduate jobs after university.

I began going to all my lectures, working in the library after tutorials and studying during the holidays. My final year was very much about hard work and it paid off.

In the end my final year mark was 69% bringing my overall average to 64%.

I had done it with a little room to spare.

(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim’s personal blog on  startups & small businesses)

My MacBook’s days are numbered. The arrow keys have stopped working and the battery overheats which slows the machine down to a painful crawl. Do I replace it with another MacBook or do I switch to a laptop?

Pro or Envy?

At work I use a Dell desktop and at home I use my dying MacBook. This setup has been beneficial as it means I am constantly testing Clear Books on the two main operating systems used by our customers.

Operating Systems

Here’s the breakdown. In the blue corner we have Windows winning with 69% and in the green corner we have Macintosh with a respectable 25%.

Browsers

When in the office, on the Dell, I use Internet Explorer a fair bit (gasp). Internet Explorer is the main reason I use a PC and recently I even turned down a spare iMac because no one else in the office likes Internet Explorer. It’s down to me to represent, on a regular basis, all the non techies who use Clear Books.

Here’s the breakdown of our customers by browser: Chrome 33%, Firefox 26%, Internet Explorer 26%, Safari 15%.

I am debating switching to a laptop because I am more comfortable with the development tools on a PC as I am using them throughout the day in the office (e.g. WAMP server, Tortoise GIT, PHP Storm) .

So which wins? The MacBook and cross OS/Browser testing or the PC and a favoured development environment?

The “S” in SEIS could stand for “Supercharged” as the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme is effectively a supercharged Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS). However, SEIS is only helpful to new small businesses rather than ALL small business which just seems like backward thinking.

Off the back of our coverage in the Telegraph, which documented our application for a £1m bank loan, we were approached by a couple of private investors who were interested in making an investment via SEIS.

Clear Books is exploring a number of funding options at the moment, however, SEIS did sound like an attractive stepping stone.

SEIS  is due to be introduced in April this year, but Clear Books won’t qualify because of one condition: The company must be less than 2 years old at the date an investment is made. Clear Books is now 3 1/2 years old.

The government wants to encourage small businesses to employ additional employees and help drive down unemployment and stimulate the economy. That much is widely reported.

SEIS targets small businesses which makes perfect sense. The following conditions are in place to ensure that only small businesses can participate in the scheme:

• unquoted
• permanent establishment in the UK
• fewer than 25 employees
• gross assets of less than £200,000
• independent and not control any other company
• not received any previous EIS or VCT investment

The maximum that can be invested in a small business under SEIS is £150k, enough to employ 3 people for two years (based on average wages).

So why the 2 year condition? Shouldn’t the scheme’s goal be to encourage investment in as many small businesses as possible so that they can employ 1, 2 or 3 extra people. Isn’t that what the government wants? Drive down unemployment and stimulate growth.

For those small businesses fortunate enough to be relatively new, the scheme looks promising and Shoosmiths provides a good summary, highlighting some of the other main points including:

• income tax relief of 50% is available on the amount invested
• the maximum investment per tax year per investor is £100,000
• the investor cannot be an employee of the investee company from the date beginning with the incorporation of the company and ending with the third anniversary of the date the shares were issued to the investor (‘qualifying period’), however, they can be a director
• the investor cannot own more than 30% of the issued capital or have any loan from the company during the qualifying period which would not have been made (or would not have been made on the same terms) if the investor had not subscribed for the shares
• the money raised must be for the purposes of the qualifying business actively carried on by the company
• the money must be spent by the third anniversary of the date of issue of the shares
• the investor company must be unquoted, incorporated in the two years before the investment, have a permanent establishment in the UK, be independent and not control any other company, have fewer than 25 employees and gross assets of less than £200,000, and not received any previous EIS or VCT investment
• the maximum that a company can raise through SEIS is £150,000

Shoosmiths also notes that perhaps the most attractive part of the new proposals is that there is a complete capital gains tax exemption on gains made in 2012/13 which are re-invested in the same year under the SEIS scheme, and the fact that gains arising on shares on which SEIS relief has been claimed are exempt from capital gains tax.

I play by direct debit so that I do not have to remember to buy a ticket each week or even to check if I have won. It’s all automatic. I have not won more than £90, but nor am I missing that £1 each week and one day it could be me.

The same principle applies to premium bonds where the top prize is £1 million. Buy at least one premium bond for £100 to give yourself a chance of scooping the top prize. Plus with premium bonds you are entitled to your original investment back at any time.

(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim’s personal blog on  startups & small businesses)

Failed investment

I did not know the first thing about valuing companies or investing in them when I was at university. When my friend (another Tim) and I were looking through the business pages one weekend and saw that Eidos shares had hit a 52 week high of £4.00 but were now trading at £1.80, we were convinced that a chunk of our student loan would be well spent on Eidos shares. The share price would go back up and we would double our money as Eidos had the popular game Tomb Raider starring Lara Croft.

This was my first investment lesson. A company’s past performance is no guide to its future. The share price actually drifted lower until we eventually cut our losses.

£50 per referral

I had to sign up to an online stock broker, Comdirect (now Selftrade), to buy my shares in Eidos. As it happened, they had a promotional offer on at the time: If you referred a friend to the service, and that friend signed up and placed a trade, then both you and your friends’ accounts would be credited with £50.

If I could get my housemates, university friends and course mates to all sign up, I could make £50 a pop. I had to persuade my referrals that as long as they placed one trade and bought a penny share then the cost to them would be the £12.50 trading fee plus the 1p penny share. From their £50 sign up bonus they could make a guaranteed £36.49 and could then go on to male their own referrals. It was a win-win for everybody.

The guaranteed bet

One of my housemates was a social gambler: fruit machines in the pub, the odd footy match prediction at the weekend, and then he stumbled upon online gambling. It was great for him as he did not have to leave the house to make his occasional “cheeky bet”.

It turned out that all the major betting websites were offering similar deals in which they would match your deposit of up to £50 if you bet the entire deposit. To me this was another guaranteed money earner.

If I deposited £50 and bet half on one snooker player winning and the other half on his opponent winning then I would get back my original £50 from the sign up offer and also my winnings from whichever snooker player won. A guaranteed profit. I did this on every gambling website I could find and even set up a second credit card registered at my university address so I could do some of them a second time.

(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim’s personal blog on  startups & small businesses)

I picked up the Local Thompson business directory and took down the details of computing companies in my home village, Crowthorne. I drafted a CV and posted it to the seven or so companies I found.

A company called New Information Paradigms replied and invited me to their office for an interview. They offered me a job for the summer and I ended up returning to work for them for all of my Easter and summer holidays for the next three years. The initiative I showed started their student placement scheme.

(Written January 1st 2009. Republished from Tim’s personal blog on  startups & small businesses)

This got me thinking, I’d like to showcase everyone who is enjoying Clear Books on the website, so please, if you still have your chocolates (or even just an empty tin if you’ve indulged already) tweet or email me a picture of you enjoying your chocolates and it will be uploaded to the gallery. If you weren’t one of the few to receive chocolates but still want to show your appreciation of Clear Books, send in a picture of yourself enjoying using the software – your positive feedback wont go unnoticed.

I am keen to get more fun freebies and competitions on Twitter so please follow me to make sure you don’t miss out @EmmaClearBooks and if you want to email in a picture send it to emma@clearbooks.co.uk

The accountant said ” if something changes within Clear Books I need to know what has changed before 150 worried clients start calling me and asking why, what and how.”

This morning we set up a Clear Books Feed on Twitter allowing customers to keep up to date with changes and additions to the system.

These updates will be automatically pulled into everyone’s Clear Books account.

There really will be no avoiding us