Moving Forward

I'm back properly at work now and there's a few things on my plate:

Yesterday I completed (but couldn't file due to a technical issue) my self-assessment tax return for the tax year from April 2007 - April 2008. This was for before I quit my job to concentrate on Reiver Games full-time, so it's fairly small fry and I wasn't drawing a salary (not that I am yet!). The return took nearly a full day, it was more complicated than the previous year's and as a result I needed to spend a decent chunk of the day on the phone to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. There's only so much time you can spend listening to hold music before you lose the will to live. Still the bottom line is: last year my turnover was 250% higher than the previous year (actually only 9 months) and my profit was 1000% higher. This year there will be a huge jump in my turnover, but I doubt I'll be profitable, having had to pay the manufacturing cost of It's Alive! and Carpe Astra up front and only having seven months to sell It's Alive! (it was delivered in September) and four and a half to sell Carpe Astra. Still, in the current economic climate I think I'm doing ok. Not stellar, but ok.

Today began with a trip into town to meet my new Business Specialist at the local branch of my bank. I took along It's Alive! and Carpe Astra and she loved them, she was very impressed. I think she was also impressed by how the company was doing too. We chatted for an hour and a quarter and I think I'm off to a good start with the new branch.

This afternoon, I was back to struggling with the technical issue for my tax return. After several calls I've managed to fix the problem (the error message: 'You're logged in elsewhere, or your agent is logged in at the same time' means 'This text box accepts up to 255 characters, without carriage returns' - that's some quality programming!), so I'm just waiting for the system to acknowledge that I've filed, so I can pay the tax I owe on my Reiver Games profit for that year.

In other news, I've picked up another German distributor, I'll be sending them their stock on Monday, their order came in too late for today's courier deadline.

In other news, a US distributor wants to return the consignment stock of It's Alive! they took at Essen, they thought they were getting a North American exclusive but I didn't. The crossed wires led to me sorting out deals with several other US distributors and them ending with a lot more stock than they wanted for a non-exclusive deal. They want to return 240 copies of It's Alive! Sounds terrible, but conveniently another distributor in the next state wants 250 copies of It's Alive! I can see a deal where the other US distributor gets a cheap shipping deal, as instead of paying to get the games from the UK by sea, they just pay for a couple of hundred miles haulage :-) Now that was well-timed!