@ilovepiccsy #Bohomamma is drawn to the discovery tool you’ve created. Not so confident in your targeted ads. twitter.com/bohomamma/stat…

— BohoMamma (@bohomamma) January 27, 2013

Targeted Advertisements, Piccsy, Revolver, “Videos for Men”

Targeted Advertisements, Piccsy, Revolver, “Videos for Men”

And then, let’s face it, there are those pins that for whatever reason we want to save, but we’d rather others not know about.

The privacy features seems to apply to new boards only. However, the “secret” featured is easily turned on or off.

The Impossible Instant Lab is a nifty gadget. A gadget none of us need, but a gadget that taps into nostalgia for those like me. The company has pledges of $250,000 of a $309,596 goal (with 25-days to go). And if the company doesn’t meet their Kickstarter goal, I do hope that somewhere down the line they figure out how to bring this product to market.

Just think of how your inspiration board will look with all of the thousands of digital prints printed in Polaroid form.

Things have changed. Pinterest has released new iPad and Android apps for its users that…well, it creates the Pinterest experience on mobile devices.

There is a browser within the app, which allows a user to visit websites and pin directly from within the app. And, the ease of use in terms of repinning a photograph from someone you follow to a board you love got a heck of a lot easier.

There are a few additional features, which may be a benefit to power pinners, such as the ability to swipe from the left of the screen to call up a user’s categories and the pins from those one follows.

Brands will like the new touches, because when a user double-clicks on an item, the brand’s website is opened within the Pinterest site.

I did experience one glitch when the app froze mid-pin, but I reinstalled and am on my way again.

You’re a woman who is either managing her household finances, a woman who is working to create a business or you’re a woman like every other woman and have too much to to manage in your life. You need a personal assistant. Someone who can input that cash receipt; organize your financial data; and file paperwork so that you can get on to more important things.

But really, filing and inputting data makes assistants snappy too, because no one likes the job. It’s tedious. It doesn’t require much brain power and there is no immediate reward.

So, what do you do?

If you are a woman entrepreneur (whether you’re selling cupcakes or services), run – do not walk – to your nearest computer and visit Shoeboxed. The service has changed the way I do my filling and financial business. I am tapped into technology – I have iPads, iPhones, computers and scanners. If there is a piece of technology that I think will help me become a more efficient OCD, Type-A New Yorker with a husband and two children, I’m in.

But no matter how diligently I work to maintain my cash and credit card receipts, I fall behind; which means, come tax season, I lose out on deductions (which are mine to claim); I spend a week or two leading up to the tax deadline immersed in paperwork and stress; our accountant and bookkeeper grow to resent me; or I try a new system here or a new one there…to no avail.

Keeping track of my finances (especially credit and cash receipts) has whooped my Southern behind.

And then I read an article about Shoeboxed, a service which helps a user to organize and keep track of their cash and credit card receipts (as well as bills, contacts/business cards and other important documents).

Can I hear a Hallelujah?

When I first tried the service, I was most excited about the scanning software that I downloaded to the iPad. I envisioned myself quickly scanning a receipt while still in the cab, but that was a pipe dream. We have a five-year old and a two-year old and they tend to want to open that yellow door and bolt, which means my plans of on-site organization died during my first attempt.

I still use the scanner app and it’s great, but I have receipts – lots of receipts - and it wasn’t practical to scan the receipt in a shop or in a cab.

So, this is where the brilliance of the service comes in:

• Users can scan those receipts with that iPad app.

• Users can clip their receipt directly from their computer screen. I am the girl who makes about 90% of our household purchases online. So, I’ve just ordered those water shoes from Amazon. Instead of waiting for an e-mail receipt, I clip the receipt and it is directly uploaded to the service.

• Or users can meet and  fall in love with the blue envelope. It’s now a relationship for me. The blue envelope stays on our counter.  I come in, place my receipts for the day in the blue envelope and at the end of the week send it to the service. Shoeboxed takes those crumbled little receipts; scans them for me; recognizes the text with OCR technology; and, uploads the receipts to my account. There are no stamps. There are no worries. There is just me and my gal Friday, the blue envelope.

I log-in to my account. Look to see if there are receipts that need to be recategorized or categorized and then I get these pretty little reports, which speak to my OCD and I’m happy and I’m less stressed and I wonder, why in the hell did someone not tell me about this service sooner?

Honestly, this service has made life better for me. You may not be like me. You may not have receipts growing at such a pace that you throw them out just to gain peace of mind and space. But if you are a woman, with a business and a lack of cash flow for multiple assistants, I highly encourage you to take a peek. Promise.

The fees for the service is free (5-receipts per month, don’t even consider it) to $50.00 per month for the business plan/500 documents. I’m currently utilizing the Classic Plan at $29.95 per  month/150 documents. I have plans to upgrade soon.

Look, women need to be smart about their money and their time. And Shoeboxed is just smart.

Photography Credit: lisamurray via Photo Pin cc

Visit the OneShare.es site, click the button and type or paste the confidential information you wish to send to the recipient.

The information is encrypted and you are provided a unique URL that you forward to the person with whom you want to share the information. Once your recipients visit the URL, the information is deleted forever. A great tool if you are sharing confidential trade or financial information.

The cover photograph is a custom wax seal made by FollowStudio.

Stylish Cokes curated by Elaine Nasser. Who knew that there was such a wide array of designs for Coca-cola packaging and products? We didn’t, but we’re happy someone is keeping us in the loop. It is a fun board full of color and whimsy.

Glory Be to the Goddess curated by Anna David. If this board wasn’t such a female inspiring one, we would still recommend, because of the sheer work Ms. David has invested. Beautiful imagery accompanied by lovely descriptions of Goddesses throughout time. An effort and worth a follow.

Cultures of the World curated by Honey-and-Bee (Jodie). Ms. Honey-and-Bee has a an eye for what makes beauty complete. The board is curated with the most rich and vibrant images of people around the world.

Sailing Away curated by Melanie Xeinalem. A beautiful board with mixed images of boats and summer days. Sailing Away successfully creates a mood for those who love the water.

Diana curated by Ellary Branden. What an inspirational and empowering board. Diana is a board filled with iconography and images of women as warriors.

BohoMamma’s Boards. Take a peek and if you find something you love, please give a follow.

If you know of boards that we might like or if you are a curator who would like to be included, please send us an e-mail or leave a comment below. If you have a suggestion for a board that BohoMamma should consider, please also drop us a line.

You are a female who is about to launch her own business. You could be selling cupcakes, clown costumes or content. We’ll assume your idea is a good one and we will assume that you can make your idea work.

So, what will impede your rise to the role of titan? Organization, but more specifically organization of financial information. These are three (often free) services and applications that we utilize every day. We think these apps should be on your radar. 

The first piece of advice I would give any woman who is about to or has recently launched her own business (be it a blog, a product or a service) is to organize her finances and to create a system to handle financial information before a business launch. The reality is that most businesses begin with a bare bones staff (probably you and…you). It’s easy to throw the receipts into the wallet and then into a file and then into a drawer, until you have receipts in every room of your house.

In an article by The New York Times, Top 10 Reasons Small Businesses Fail, ‘poor accounting’ is listed as number four.

The New York Times writes,

With bad numbers, or no numbers, a company is flying blind, and it happens all of the time.

If you allow six-months of receipts and bank records to pile up, assume it will take you that long (and longer) to organize that information. I say longer, because come tax time when you are trying to find out how much you actually spent on office supplies, you’ll be rifling through drawers and boxes to find the actual receipts; you will be up into the wee hours serving as your new company’s data input specialist (hours typing the information into a spreadsheet for your bookkeeper); pulling your hair out, and essentially out of commission for the next several days. And, as a small business owner, you need to know how much money you have, how much money you are spending and how much money you can budget for future plans.

There are better ways and today there are services – many offered free of charge for basic packages with associated fees for premium features – that will help you create a financial management system which allows you to focus on the business.

Mint

Mint is considered a ‘personal finance tool’. That’s fancy talk for an online software system that collects your financial data and then allows you to view all of your banking and credit card information in one place. The service also delivers reports, updates and balances on those accounts. But the genius of Mint is that the program categorizes your spending (which you can update or re-categorize if needed) into tax-oriented classes, such as ‘entertainment’, ‘taxes’, ‘meals’, ‘fees and charges’, etc.

The service also sends e-mail alerts to a user concerning bank fees charged to the account and e-mail alerts concerning low balances on accounts (saving you fees, because you’re less apt to overdraw). There are many banks that are beginning to offer these types of financial services for their online customers, but if you have multiple accounts or hold a credit card with a different bank than your banking institution, Mint will help you organize the accounts into one central location.

Mint is currently a free service. You will have to provide your banking log-in and password information (which is a bit scary), but Mint utilizes the same encryption technology that banks use, so…

And, once you begin to see the benefit of having your banking and credit information in one place, you’ll be sold.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud based storage service. Essentially, storing files in the cloud allows one to organize files, photographs and other documents on a server outside of your home. So, instead of saving my business proposal on my personal computer, I could store that same document on a server hosted by Dropbox. Why should you care?

To begin, this alleviates the hassle of carrying files, a computer and other information from one place to another. If you need a document in California, but you aren’t happy about carting your laptop cross country to retrieve that document, you can hop on a plane without the laptop, log-into your account from anywhere and access that same document. Same is true for a business lunch across town.

Using Dropbox, I can also provide access to others for certain folders that I pre-select. My office, bookkeeper and accountant have access to financial folders in my Dropbox folder, which is a less costly and less time-consuming way of doing business than copying, faxing or sending those same documents via Fed-Ex.

And for me personally, saving files in cloud adds an additional layer of protection, in the event my personal computer crashes or is lost or stolen.

There are some concerns regarding the safety of the information stored in cloud and I’m not just referring to whether someone peeks into or is able to access your documents (which is a concern for which everyone should be aware and gain some knowledge).

The biggest flag for me is whether those files are safe from being lost, if something happens on the hosting side. My suggestion is to utilize Dropbox as a storage service for ease of use and convenience, but to not rely on these types of services as your sole backup solution for important documents.

I don’t think that I would store information which contained my social security  number or other identifying financial information, but in terms of utilizing a service to file and store documents, it’s a much simpler solution. Pricing is free for 2GB of storage and $20 per month for up to 32GB of storage.

Shoeboxed

Shoeboxed. I have been using Shoeboxed for the past month or so and the only thing I can offer is that every time I use the service, I think to myself, “why didn’t I have this service a year ago?”

Shoeboxed, as its name would suggest, is a way to capture, organize and reference those receipts so many of us keep in ‘shoeboxes’.

With Shoeboxed, I can clip a receipt on my Internet screen and it will be uploaded to my account; snap a picture of a receipt with my iPhone or iPad and have it uploaded to my account; e-mail my Shoeboxed account with receipts that have collected in my inbox; and, if I am really pressed for time, I can mail my receipts to Shoeboxed, whereby those same receipts will be organized, scanned, uploaded to my account, with the hard copies returned to me. It’s sort of like having an assistant.

And, when I need to print a quarterly cash or credit card report for our bookkeeper, I can organize that report and send it to him or to my personal e-mail account.

Organizing cash and credit card receipts is the most time intensive, tedious aspect of a business, but it is essential business because all those receipts add up to deductions at the end of the year.

You can spend the time to input that data into a program such as Quickbooks yourself, but sometimes time is better spent. The service is free for 5 documents per month and can cost up to $30 per month for up to 150 documents per month.

Before you begin with visions of yourself concealing a transmitter in the cut-out of your daily college planner or in your son’s P&J, what Etsy is calling a female hacker, is really an effort to encourage, educate and enlist more female programmers into the technology industry.

Etsy is offering ten “Etsy Hacker Grants of $5,000 each” to women who apply and are accepted to attend The Hacker School in New York City (actually, Brooklyn, the other New York City). The school is a 3-month, full-time program, which begins June 4, 2012.

There is no tuition to attend The Hacker School. The $50,000 in Etsy Hacker Grants is meant to aide students with living expenses.

Of a total of 40 students accepted into this summer program, The Hacker School and Etsy are attempting to accept 20 women into the June program.

In a blogpost on Etsy, Marc Hedlund is VP of Engineering at Etsy writes, “Twenty is a small number, but it would roughly match the total number of female engineers I’ve hired in the past 17 years.”

If you are a female interested in programming and engineering, apply. What’s stopping you? Three-months in best city in the world; tuition free; money for living expenses; an introduction to engineers and employees from very large company that supports women and women’s businesses….it’s a no brainer. Apply!

And if you happen to know a young woman with an interest in programming and engineering, be an e-mail mentor and please forward her this article.

Editor’s Note: I looked and looked for a stock photograph of a cool looking female computer programmer (one in keeping with the aesthetics of BohoMamma) on our stock photography sites. There are none.

There were several photographs with women in white lab coats; a few stock photos of two women staring over a computer, also in white lab coats, with their hands up to their mouths in surprise; one with a lady on the floor staring at the camera, her computer a second-thought and what looks to be very cold legs because she was wearing some sort of mini skirt and socks that came to her knees; and, the others, you really don’t need the other images in your head today.

I was looking for the lady with her legs kicked up on the desk; two empty coffee cups next to her; her hair tossed upon her head; paperwork strewn about; and, maybe a one-year old pulling at her chair.

So, please do your part in expanding stock photography options in this country.When there are more women programmers, there will be more cool women programmer stock photographs for sites like ours.