Saturday May 10, 2014

Today was a really BIG day.

I woke up early to a totally filthy room.  Of course I only noticed it was filthy, because my mom was coming that day.  I was actually really impressed, because in the 30 minutes I had before dance practice began, I was able to shower, dress, and completely clean my room.  Dance practice went for around two hours (10-12) and then I ran off to go complete some community service (12-2).  Community service was really fun, I helped out at an Arbor Day celebration at Washburn Park.  There were tons of kids, a petting zoo, and a lot of free ice cream and pizza, so I was pretty happy.  After community service was mom time.

My mom drove down, as promised, to help me with the budgeting portion of my project.  I think we worked from around 2 to at least 6, on the budgeting and spreadsheeting alone.  Somehow or other, I managed to learn more about Exel during this afternoon than I have ever learned before.  (I did not realize it was possible, but I have fallen in love with a computer programming system.)

So the first thing we did was set up my budget for year one.  We ended up splitting my categories into my culture system, facilities, permits & licensing, insurance, labor, and professional services.  As you can see from the example above, each category was further split into items, unit prices for the items, inflation, the number of units, a description, and the total cost of the item.  This organizational system helped me a lot, since many of my frustrations came from not being able to figure out how to organize my information. 

The other main source of frustration came from not knowing how to mathematically model my information.  Of course my mom and Excel had an answer to that as well.  It's called a formula.  When you click in a box, you can either type in a number, words, or a formula.  (There might be other things, but I am not sure.  Those are the ones I use.)  Before my mom showed me how to use formulas in Exel, I had been doing all the math on my own, on a dinky four function calculator (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division).  Instead of using Excel, as a glorified table, I can instead make it do all my math for me an more!

I will try to post a link to a video of me building my budget.