Yeah, It's a !#$)#*^! Monday...
I finally managed to talk to a human at Dixie Sales, the company that handles the warranty work for a slew of other companies, including Champion Power Equipment, Canadian Tire, MTD, and others. MTD seems to have various channels, since I'm already getting parts for them through PSC and Yetmans. It gets confusing at times, to say the least. The issue I've had with Dixie is that even though I've had an account with them since last year, I've never been able to access the online parts section, which is rather critical. Emails went unanswered, and phone calls invariably wound up talking to voice-mail, which was also never answered. Today though, I finally spoke with a living person. Turns out that the reason my ID and password don't work, is that the account was never created! Geeeeeze!!!! I was told that it would take four to five hours for it to all go through, but it should work after that. Well, it's been about seven hours now, and still nothing. Yup, I'm really impressed guys...
I was finally able to completely disassemble the Honda carburetor, and make sure that it was 100% clean inside. Just to be absolutely certain that old fuel wasn't an issue, I decided to make sure I had 100% fresh fuel. I had less than a gallon of gas left in the jerry-can anyway, so I poured it into the Ranger and headed to the station to get more. Of course, with Murphey coming along once more, the pumps for Premium and Mid-Grade are not working. The new co-op has eight pumps, all of them the new "blender" pumps that can dispense all three grades of fuel. I guess there must be some kind of master pump somewhere that supplies the higher grades to all the pumps, rather than individual pumps in each machine. At least, that's what I gather given that all eight of them are down, and the staff tells me that they have the fuel, they just can't pump it. Wonderful. There's no place else in town that sells Premium, and I have no gas left at all. I do have a full jerry-can of Premium back at the farm, but that's for the generator. Plus, it's not fresh, though it does have the fuel preservative in it. Using it would defeat the whole point of being sure that old fuel wasn't a possible issue, plus it would mess up my accounting.
Speaking of accounting... Since I couldn't do much work on gas-powered engines without any gas, I finally completed all of the 2011 entries and told the computer to file my 2011 GST return. Well, it seems there's a glitch in Quickbooks 2009 when it comes to "GST/HST Payable on the acquisition of Real Property" - IE, the GST due on the purchase of real-estate. Normally, you enter a debit in Box 205, and credit it back to yourself in Box 105 if you qualify (and I do.) Box 105 is a tax credit, and when it's combined with the tax collected from earlier up, you may or may not get a negative value. It will be negative if you have more tax credits than tax-collected, which is often the case for retailers since you pay the GST up-front, and collect it as you sell the products. The end result is Box 108, Net Tax, either owing or owed to you. You're supposed to add Box 108 and 205; Since Box 108 should contain credits for Box 205, they should cancel each other out, and you'll be left with the credits (or balance owing) that you would have had without all this extra mess in-between.
But QB doesn't make it that simple. As I said, there seems to be a glitch; Rather than adding box 205, it's subtracting it! Worse, it's also subtracting (as it should) the credits entered in 105. So you wind up getting a double-refund of tax-credits, which in my case would be over $10k! This is the kind of thing that makes Tax Auditors sit up and take notice, salivating at the thought of what they're going to do to you. I had to manually tweek the entry as a negative value so that subtracting the negative value would be the same as adding a positive value (basic Jr-high Math, negative numbers) to get the proper figures. To make matters even more complicated, this year the CRA isn't including the paper worksheet for people who have filed electronically in the past, so I had to spend another couple of hours combing through the Internet to find a blank copy of the blasted worksheet to double-check all my numbers on!
I've finally got it all balanced out properly and filed, and I should be getting a refund of a little over $2300, but I'm just waiting for another Murphey Surprise Butt-Sexx. I really hope that they just send a nice cheque, but maybe I'd better stock up on Vaseline just in case. :/
In other Monday Sucks news, I just found out that Jack Tramiel passed away on Sunday. He was the founder of Commodore Business Machines, the creators of the Commodore Vic-20, the Commodore-64 (the best-selling home computer of all time), the Amiga series, and others. He also revived the dying Atari company after being booted out of his own company, making it a fierce competitor to the Amiga line. He was one of the "Greats" in the industry, and like Steve Jobs, he'll be missed by those his legacy touched.
I was finally able to completely disassemble the Honda carburetor, and make sure that it was 100% clean inside. Just to be absolutely certain that old fuel wasn't an issue, I decided to make sure I had 100% fresh fuel. I had less than a gallon of gas left in the jerry-can anyway, so I poured it into the Ranger and headed to the station to get more. Of course, with Murphey coming along once more, the pumps for Premium and Mid-Grade are not working. The new co-op has eight pumps, all of them the new "blender" pumps that can dispense all three grades of fuel. I guess there must be some kind of master pump somewhere that supplies the higher grades to all the pumps, rather than individual pumps in each machine. At least, that's what I gather given that all eight of them are down, and the staff tells me that they have the fuel, they just can't pump it. Wonderful. There's no place else in town that sells Premium, and I have no gas left at all. I do have a full jerry-can of Premium back at the farm, but that's for the generator. Plus, it's not fresh, though it does have the fuel preservative in it. Using it would defeat the whole point of being sure that old fuel wasn't a possible issue, plus it would mess up my accounting.
Speaking of accounting... Since I couldn't do much work on gas-powered engines without any gas, I finally completed all of the 2011 entries and told the computer to file my 2011 GST return. Well, it seems there's a glitch in Quickbooks 2009 when it comes to "GST/HST Payable on the acquisition of Real Property" - IE, the GST due on the purchase of real-estate. Normally, you enter a debit in Box 205, and credit it back to yourself in Box 105 if you qualify (and I do.) Box 105 is a tax credit, and when it's combined with the tax collected from earlier up, you may or may not get a negative value. It will be negative if you have more tax credits than tax-collected, which is often the case for retailers since you pay the GST up-front, and collect it as you sell the products. The end result is Box 108, Net Tax, either owing or owed to you. You're supposed to add Box 108 and 205; Since Box 108 should contain credits for Box 205, they should cancel each other out, and you'll be left with the credits (or balance owing) that you would have had without all this extra mess in-between.
But QB doesn't make it that simple. As I said, there seems to be a glitch; Rather than adding box 205, it's subtracting it! Worse, it's also subtracting (as it should) the credits entered in 105. So you wind up getting a double-refund of tax-credits, which in my case would be over $10k! This is the kind of thing that makes Tax Auditors sit up and take notice, salivating at the thought of what they're going to do to you. I had to manually tweek the entry as a negative value so that subtracting the negative value would be the same as adding a positive value (basic Jr-high Math, negative numbers) to get the proper figures. To make matters even more complicated, this year the CRA isn't including the paper worksheet for people who have filed electronically in the past, so I had to spend another couple of hours combing through the Internet to find a blank copy of the blasted worksheet to double-check all my numbers on!
I've finally got it all balanced out properly and filed, and I should be getting a refund of a little over $2300, but I'm just waiting for another Murphey Surprise Butt-Sexx. I really hope that they just send a nice cheque, but maybe I'd better stock up on Vaseline just in case. :/
In other Monday Sucks news, I just found out that Jack Tramiel passed away on Sunday. He was the founder of Commodore Business Machines, the creators of the Commodore Vic-20, the Commodore-64 (the best-selling home computer of all time), the Amiga series, and others. He also revived the dying Atari company after being booted out of his own company, making it a fierce competitor to the Amiga line. He was one of the "Greats" in the industry, and like Steve Jobs, he'll be missed by those his legacy touched.