1. Getting Mobile Data and Phone Connectivity

   You have got to have mobile data in this day and age. If you are from outside the US then odds are you have a GSM compatible mobile phone, this is where it begins to get tricky. So your options to get prepaid data for this are fairly limited. AT&T have a GSM network but do you think you can get prepaid data only ... NO! There are at least 3 different data options depending on what you have/want but they are all neatly and monopolistically segmented into iPad, Other tablets and Phone and all radically different prices! I ended up throwing my hands up in despair and went across the street to T-Mobile. For $50 I got unlimited slower data (Edge rather than 3G, say 150 kbs) and spend $10 more and got unlimited txt and free calling to landlines back home in New Zealand. I then had to sort out a fall back data connection for my notebook. 150 kbs was not going to cut it, so I foolishly went back to AT&T and got a usb modem that was meant to be blazingly fast 4G. It was fast but in downtown Sacramento (with an AT&T building across the street!) the connection browned-out and eventually would not even connect from 11:30 - 4pm one day and was at best intermittent the next day. Every local I told about this nodded knowingly and said Verizon was the way to go. I would love to hear anyone else's' experience on this one.

   So mobile data recommendations:

   • For your GSM Mobile you bring with you: T-Mobile prepay with $10 extra to call home for free.
   • For your PC, try Verizon with a USB stick as AT&T did not prove reliable.

2. Charging your Electric Empire

   Take a powerboard so you only need one adapter. You will have to charge your phone, notebook, tablet... just take a 4 plug powerboard that you can plug all these into without an adapter, then just put a single plug adapter on the powerboard cord instead. PLEASE check that your power supplies can handle 100 - 240V input otherwise I am picking there will be fire works :).

3. Money -Foreign Exchange

   Check out the OneSmart card from Air NZ. If you are from New Zealand, then join their airpoints system and they send you a chipped card that not only allows 'Tap and Go' check in (unfortunately only domestically and to Australia, not the US for security reasons) but most interestingly it is a prepay multi-currency MasterCard. You can transfer New Zealand Dollars into the account overnight by bank transfer, then move your money to US Dollars (or a bunch of other currencies as well) once it shows up in the morning.

   The 3 good things about this are:

   • by my own reckoning the rates were about 3 cents per dollar better than I saw advertised at the bank/airport
   • I did not pay the exorbitant ATM fees for withdrawing US dollars from ATMs.
   • It also used the cool wireless payment technology 'PayPass' where you can tap the payment terminal and not have to PIN or sign small purchases, however I didn't find too many retailers with the new terminals yet.

4. Cash is still King

   Despite the coolness of a wireless wallet, this is the US, if you said 'cash-less society' to someone from the US they would think it a joke like the 'paper-less office'. You need to have some cash on you at all times, even if it is just to tip the service staff (which by the way should be about 15% of the PRE-tax amount, or as my good friend @schnicker pointed out, in California you more or less double the sales tax amount of 7.25%).

5. Phone a friend

   That leads nicely to my next tip, call on friends who have gone before you to get advice. They should be able to point you in the right direction. We stopped in and saw everyone at the kiwi landing pad which is full of great Kiwi startups. We also caught up with our old office room mates @litmos who have been in California for the last 4 months or so, and as well as some good advice, it also breaks up the trip to see some familiar faces :)

6. Keeping it lean

   The greenback ain't what it used to be but hey, if you can save a few bucks here and there then it helps.
   • Book the hotels that you have to, but if you have some flexibility and are going to be in a big city then try a hotel deals site like: priceline, wotif or hotels.com (in that order).
   • Equally if you need a car, look out for good deals. It might be that say, it is the middle of winter, so Mustang convertibles are on rental special. Think Thelma and Louise :)

If you have any other tips that you reckon could/should go here then please contribute.

That in itself is great news and we are really excited to get working with such a great piece of software and it fits our long term philosophy that we don’t make accounting software, we make winery software.

But what really interested me was watching what happened to our sales site after the Xero team tweeted a welcome with a link to our site. I recently found the Real-Time features that are in Beta in Google Analytics.

When the first tweet went out I started watching the real time visitors, what they were looking at and where they were coming from.  I could not look away. I felt like a possum in the headlights of an on coming car, or mesmerised like when you look at a fire.

As I watched, I saw ripples go out, as the original tweet from the API team was re-tweeted from the main Xero account then other people picking up on it. You could see each tweet reflected in a modest wave ( OK ripple ) of visits to our site. Firstly mainly in NZ, then to San Francisco and from there are few more visits from around North America.  Then a couple of folks picked up on it from Australia and you could see a ripple of visits from around Australia. As I watched the map below evolve and change I could imagine using it as a proxy for the referral network of Xero, (the UK of course is asleep, and not everyone neeeeds winery software, but it doesn’t hurt to have a few subscriptions lying around just in case).

Here is a shot of what it looked like unfolding, you can see the per minute ripples then a lull, then someone else would retweet and there would be another brief flurry of activity:

The referrals area updated with the different referring domains of the various URL shortening services like t.co, ow.ly etc so you can loosely tell which visits were from which tweet. The ‘Right now’ number floats up and down with it tapering off if there has not been a request in the last minute or so from the same browser session.

Anyway if you are running a site where you care if you are getting noticed, you should definitely check out the real-time features in Google Analytics it is compelling.

With our web version of Vinsight Software you can get info about what's in barrel from the barrel hall, you can order more yeast from the store room, you can see how much current vintage Pinot noir you have available to sell when you are visting your customer.

Watch the video…

Gewürztraminer

Pure Gold
Forrest The Valleys Wairau Gewürztraminer 2010
Waimea Nelson Gewürztraminer 2010

Gold
West Brook Marlborough Gewürztraminer 2009

Riesling

Gold
Coopers Creek Marlborough Riesling 2009
Lawson’s Dry Hills Marlborough Riesling 2007
Peregrine Central Otago Riesling 2008
Waimea Nelson Classic Riesling 2009

Chardonnay

Gold
West Brook Waimauku Estate Chardonnay 2008

Other White and Rosé Wines

Gold
Waimea Nelson Viognier 2009

Pinot Noir

Pure Gold
Akarua Central Otago Reserve Pinot Noir 2009
Amisfield Central Otago Pinot Noir 2008
Olssens Slapjack Creek Central Otago Pinot Noir 2009

Gold
Allan Scott Family Winemakers Hounds Marlborough Pinot Noir 2009
Allan Scott Family Winemakers Marlborough Pinot Noir 2009
Peregrine Central Otago Pinot Noir 2009

Merlot

Gold
Black Barn Vineyards Reserve Hawkes Bay Merlot 2009

Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot/Cabernet Blend

Gold
Coopers Creek SV Gimblett Gravels Hawkes Bay Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot 2007

Dessert Wine

Gold
Allan Scott Family Winemakers Late Harvest Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2008
Elephant Hill Hawkes Bay Rania 2009
Forrest Botrytised Marlborough Riesling 2009
Lawson’s Dry Hills Marlborough Late Harvest Gewürztraminer 2007

Open Red Wine

Pure Gold
Amisfield Central Otago Pinot Noir 2008

Gold
Allan Scott Family Winemakers Marlborough Pinot Noir 2009
Peregrine Central Otago Pinot Noir 2009

Exhibition White or Sparkling Wine

Pure Gold
Forrest The Valleys Wairau Gewürztraminer 2010

Gold

Lawson’s Dry Hills Marlborough Late Harvest Gewürztraminer 2007
West Brook Marlborough Gewürztraminer 2009
West Brook Waimauku Estate Chardonnay 2008

Exhibition Red Wine

Pure Gold
Olssens Slapjack Creek Central Otago Pinot Noir 2009

Incumbent telcos, probably the world over, but at least in New Zealand seem to have little idea that the innovative small companies that are agile and responsive with their services and offerings are about to bring these large incumbent, unweildy organisations to their knees.

For years I have been looking for any sign of life in the traditional phone market, I used to run my business entirely from mobile including a mobile fax number because the fixed line telcos had nothing to offer. I need(ed) quick access to communication wherever I am and the big guys just don’t seem to care about small to medium sized companies.

Let me give you a brief case study, I have had a mobile fax number for at least the last 10 years, and after the first year I enquired if the telco in question did FaxToEmail. It seemed to me that while the telco’s server could answer my fax call and receive the fax to digital storage for later retransmission, it should be a doddle to convert this to a pdf and email it to me. To the best of my knowledge, they still don’t offer this service.

This, combined with the blood letting on each of my monthly mobile bills lead me to pick up a small stone and hurl it at the behemoth telcos, I took my business to a small company offering hosted virtual PABXs using VOIP (voice over internet protocol). For little more than $10 a month per extension plus calls, I now have a fully automated digital receptionist that if I am out of the office, can automatically forward calls to my mobile or try a list of other numbers while the caller is on hold.

I have the unified inbox finally, voice messages (and fax if wanted) can turn up in my inbox as attachments meaning I only have one place to check all of my correspondence.

Oh and I got rid of our oversea toll free numbers that cost $ per minute to run and replaced them with local calling numbers in Australia and North America that cost ~$5 a month each and end up at our main switch board along with our other normal calls, oh and the cost per minute is zero, zip, nada.

I have the notion that incumbent telcos in New Zealand are not much better than tobacco companies or oil companies, but not quite as smart. The oil companies at least buy up more efficient patents, or some are doing R&D in other areas but I cannot see any traditional telcos being innovative.

Then there are companies like that which I have signed up with, Conversant, that can see we are now in a different world and have been for a while. Even 10 years ago, in IT support, shoe leather still counted as a major tool, however for quite a while now, on any given morning, we could be remotely administering a server in Canada, or in the afternoon doing a web based training course with someone in Western Australia and we do this using an internet connection and calls that cost us 3 cents a minute not 30 or 60 or even $$.

So find a company that is conversant with the future and take you account to them, it is a small stone, but if enough are thrown, we may just slay a giant.

We have been moving our accounting from an in house system that took too much time to look after and was not core business to starting to use Xero. I have been keen to get using an accounting  system that has a decent API to give us a chance to do some integration work from our Winery Software. To date I have looked at MYOB and Quickbooks but have been put off by their desktop centric view and how difficult this is when trying to get even some simple integration working.
Enter Xero stage left, after one day I had written an automated routine to post our sales orders into Xero as draft invoices, deal with any validation messages and sync the results back to our system.
2 things made this fall over easy:

1. Me brushing up on my vague notions about MSSQL’s XML handling abilities.
2. Xero’s great API Previewer that allows you to GET, CREATE and UPDATE a good range of the systems accounting entities.

Firstly, having done a few integration jobs in the past, getting data out of one system and knocked into shape (literally), suitable for inserting into another, is an often tedious job. Previous jobs have been variations of: Start with some object that in no way resembles what you need it to be, then try to kludge it into another object that resembles the destination, and finally try to get this object to serialize to XML just-so, finally you are ready to spend hours of painful integration testing with long slow iterations to figure out if your request and response handling is up to scratch.

Enter MSSQL and the ‘FOR XML’ clause. Previously I was stuck with doing XSL transformations of DataTables, or writing custom serialization to get these transformation done, however extracting and shaping an XML result from a SELECT statement was so easy!!
Consider the source db of a Contact table (Cnt), an AP Invoice header table (Cdr) , Line Items (CdrLgr) as well as currency (Cur) and chart of accounts info (Lgr).  In a simple SQL statement I can acheive all of the SELECT, TRANSFORM and serialization work in one step!

SELECT 'ACCPAY' AS [Type], --Nested Single Contact Element, note path is empty as it is a single element (SELECT Cnt AS Name FROM Cnt WHERE Cdr.CntNum=Cnt.CntNum FOR XML PATH(''),TYPE) AS Contact, Dat AS [Date], ISNULL(DatPytDue,Dat) AS DueDate, Ref AS InvoiceNumber, (SELECT Cod FROM Cur Cur WHERE EntNum=CurNum) AS CurrencyCode, 'Exclusive' AS LineAmountTypes, --Nested 'LineItems' Node Collection, with LineItem elements, --note path is set with the element name LineItem and subquery is aliased to LineItems --to give the node collection element name (SELECT Cdr.Dsc AS [Description], 1 AS Quantity, CONVERT(money,Amt) AS UnitAmount, CASE WHEN Abs(CdrLgr.IsSalTaxLib)=1 THEN 'INPUT' ELSE 'NONE' END AS TaxType, 469 AS AccountCode FROM CdrLgr LEFT JOIN Lgr ON Lgr.EntNum=CdrLgr.LgrNum WHERE CdrLgr.CdrNum=Cdr.CdrNum AND CdrLgr.Amt>=0 FOR XML PATH('LineItem'),TYPE) AS LineItems FROM Cdr WHERE CdrNum IN (1,2,5,6) --Root Invoices Element with a collection of Invoice nodes FOR XML PATH('Invoice'),ROOT('Invoices')

And this produces some nice nested (but not in my post!) xml ready for use in the API previewer.

From here, it is a simple matter of logging in to the API previewer and pasting and executing to your heart’s content.

The previewer has a request body area and a response body area so you can try out variations of the entities you wish to post and see the results in the response area.

This was particularly useful in error handling for invalid request data. The one area they could work on here is that if you send multiple entities, some valid and some invalid, only the validation errors come back in the response, which means that you cannot parse the response and retrieve the genereted invoice numbers for the successful AR invoices.

The other kick arse thing is that, really the Xero API Previewer is an app in itself, I used it to import all the adhoc transactions that I wasn’t going to reuse again once Xero was setup.

I hope the team at Xero continue to improve the API and extend it as it truely enables some easy app extension into the world of accounting.

Except whenever I ran the aspnet_regsql tool to configure the database it would timeout at different stages in the process. Most annoying.

In the end, I ran aspnet_regsql from the command line to generate the sql to a file and then I ran it from Sql server management studio.

In my case the command line I used was:

C:\>aspnet_regsql -sqlexportonly c:\providerscript.sql  -A mr -d  MyProviderDb

Incredibly it took over 5 mins to run!! No chance that this would have run from the gui tool with a standard connection timeout of 30secs!

The reasons you might consider this are:
1. You may wish to have a ‘spring clean’ where by  old codes and methods of doing things that are obselete are left behind in an old database that you can access when needed
2. Your database will be smaller and therefore faster.

The down side is that there will be some work to do (after all this is a spring clean), your tracbility will still be intact but will span 2 databases.

OVERVIEW OF STEPS NEEDED

1. Obtain a new blank database for your new data to go into
2. Export your old lists of data to somewhere that you can do your ruthless cleaning. Can I suggest excel.
3. Delete you old codes, tanks barrels etc and refactor any existing code to use best practice or to what you are most comfortable with
4. Import the new clean data to the new clean database
5. Finally import any wine by doing Bulk Receivals and do a Stock Level Adjustment to get stock levels correct.

STEPS TO COPY DATA IN AND OUT OF VINSIGHT

Firstly with any of these steps you could/should use a copy of your excel spreadsheet as an intermediate point to do any mass changes or move columns, hide columns etc rather than your original spreadsheet, or rather than going straight from one copy to another

Prepare your source data:

To copy all the rows of a form in Vinsight, right click the form and select datasheet view.
Click the top left hand box to select all columns and all rows then copy this.
This is where excel is useful because you can change your dataformat without damaging the real source of your data.
Paste your source data into excel, the field names will show at the top

Ensure the the source of the data, exactly matches the column layout of the destination when the columns are ‘left aligned’ ie from the left to right. Surplus or insufficient columns on the right hand end will be ignored. This may mean you will need to rearrange some of your columns or insert blank or ’0′ column placeholders if you don’t have certain data already defined.
Add dummy or blank columns in your temporary datasource (excel) if necessary.
If you are looking at changing any of your codes then this might be a good time to do it, making use of the excel find and replace in particular columns.

If going from and to Vinsight then the column orders should already be the same.

As a suggestion to minimise the to-and-fro-ing  between old and new, you might like to export all your data to excel first, before being importing. You could put data from each form onto a different spreadsheet page, and use the order of the System Maintenance menu as a logical order to do it.

Prepare your destination:

Open the destination form. Right click the form anywhere in the grey blank space and choose ‘Datasheet view’
If there are any ‘Auto Number’ fields, drag those to the right so they will be ignored. Remember to check the source format

Copy the rows and columns from excel *excluding* field names as these won’t match
To paste any bulk data, switch the Vinsight form to the datasheet view as above.
Click into the first blank row and from the edit menu select ‘Paste Append’.