Each year, we try to put together this informal, rough annual report. This is our 9th Annual Report write-up, but the first full 12 months as the new EHF (LLC) company.
The goal with these articles are to show in abstract, high-level numbers what the company is up too. Every company is different, but hopefully, this can be used by others as some sort of benchmark on what is “normal”.
Finances
During the year we worked with 4 different customers and sent out 18 invoices. Only 1 invoice was to an Icelandic company. We’ve managed to diversify a lot of our income. From salary, dividends, products, retainers and hourly and fixed rates projects, we have a good mixture of revenue streams. Now it is a matter of better balancing them, to make sure we’re not working too hard or overly depending on any single project.
We expect to continue working with all 4 of our existing customers again in 02023 and we’ve had a really old, local Icelandic customer approach us again right before the end of the year for some updates.
After last 2020’s bankruptcy case, our plan in 2022 was to increase our hourly rate. We managed todo that for 1 customer, but not for existing contracts or retainers. Iceland has seen a 10+% inflation, so we’re going to have to also re-adjust all contacts at some point to account for the cost-of-living as well. That’s something we need todo better at, increasing our rates with the times.
We’ve been very lucky that most of our income comes from non-Icelandic currencies. The exchange rates have been very much in our favor in 02022. That discrpency covers the 10+% inflation.
At the end of the 02022, we shuffled some of the workload around and are starting some new internal projects. That means for the last few months we’ve been spending more money than we’ve been making. It is eating into the company’s savings, but we are both investing into future product revenue streams and it is making us hungry for picking-up a bit more hourly-work to close the gap.
Services
For all but a few projects, we are not tracking our time. They are usually retainers, salary or fixed-bids (which we track to make sure we’re not losing), but the number of invoices on an hourly rate is low. This year we’ve mailing been focused on a few services.
Programming
This is still the bulk of what we do. For some customers, we’re a hired hand. They come to us with a problem and solution that needs building. Some of those are slowly morphing into a SaaS model.
For others, we act more like a CTO bring our input and skills to their problems. The surveys are a good example in that we have been working closely for 10+ years and are in constant collaboration on programming changes.
Other internal projects are “programmed” because we are both good at it, but also lazy. We don’t want to re-make an analog calendar every year, so we have software do that.
Data Analysis
For years, we’ve taking data and converted it into something more easily understood and actionable. We are still taking survey data in various forms and converting that to reports with charts and graphs of results data and longitudinal data. More recently, we’ve taking some skills from past projects around video game analytics and repurposing that for a new project.
Project Planning
For many projects, our responsibilities are not just a hired-hand. We have our input, ideas and skills we bring to the projects. That means planning, discussing and deciding goals and milestones.
We do a lot of this, but it is meta-work, work to get work done. Especially, being remote, having constant weekly planning meetings helps keep everyone on track.
Consulting
We are onboard consulting for two companies. We do both consulting and some mix of programming, data analysis and planning. It isn’t a huge portion of what we do, since we are so close to the projects, consulting and planning blur.
Expenses
We created a table of expense categories with comparisons for the last few years. There are no major surprises. Since this was technically the second year of the EHF company (LLC), there was a bigger carry-over in company tax from 02021. The SLF company was being drained, while the EHF was making the income. That explains why the lower tax in 02021 and the higher in 02022.
| Category | 02013 | 02014 | 02015 | 02016 | 02017 | 02021 | 02022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Office Supplies | 7.73% | 3.39% | 1.49% | 3.80% | 2.44% | 12.29% | 7.1% |
| Tax | 37.29% | 37.38% | 55.78% | 57.63% | 52.22% | 35.24% | 53.3% |
| Salary | 29.60% | 42.1% | 34.84% | 33.76% | 38.39% | 46.51% | 36.9% |
| Conferences | 16.16% | 4.85% | 2.34% | – | 5.05% | – | – |
| Projects | 3.71% | 1.03% | 1.69% | 0.27% | – | 3.6% | – |
| Education | 1.25% | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Professional Services | 4.24% | 2.83% | 2.72% | 5.56% | 1.64% | 2.36% | 2.7% |
| Contractors | – | 7.85% | – | – | – | – | – |
| Analog.is | – | 0.42% | – | – | – | – | – |
We also split out “Fees” and “Insurance” into their own category, but they accounted for less than 1% of our annual expenses, therefore they got rolled into “Office Supplies”. This category includes printing costs, internet, phone, office furniture and supplies and other miscellaneous computer hardware and software.
The category we need to keep an eye on is “Professional Services”. In previous years, we paid the accountant to deal with our monthly salary payments, VSK (VAT) Taxes every other month and the annual report. With the creation of the EHF, we moved the monthly salary payments and VSK in-house using a local online service PayDay.is. Somehow we’re paying for that through “Office Supplies” and an external accountant for the certified annual report, but the “Professional Services” category has not dropped. We’d expect that moving tasks internally, while it adds hours to ourselves, we have a better understanding and overview of the company, while reducing external costs (which it hasn’t, yet).
Travel & Conferences
We did manage some travel this year. We were in San Francisco in March for the GDC (Game Developers Conference) mostly for meetings. We also went back in June for follow-up meetings. We had further meetings scheduled for later in the year that never materialized.
In late summer, some of the team went to London for a trade show and to Sweden to meet with a partner there. Both of these are on a side-project which is slowly growing into its own thing, non-tech related.
Web Stats
According to the awstats server logs, these are the most popular pages in 02022. We took the total visits divided by the page visits to get the percentage. It is a long tail of articles, but here were all of them with over 2% of the traffic.
| Article | Year | Traffic |
|---|---|---|
| Poisonous People | 02010 | 6.7% |
| CERN Line Mode Browser | 02013 | 4.2% |
| Print on Demand | 02010 | 4.1% |
| What 2D Barcodes Aren’t | 02011 | 3.6% |
| SF Symbol Fonts | 02019 | 3.5% |
| PDF Creation from HTML Service | 02014 | 3.4% |
| PaperNet Boarding Pass | 02010 | 3.1% |
| Spice Inspiration | 02014 | 3.1% |
| Omnibus 02012 | 02013 | 2.8% |
| Metrics and Dashboard | 02013 | 2.8% |
| Future Predicting What Might Happen in the Next Hundred Years | 02009 | 2.7% |
| Spimes: A Happy Birthday Story | 02013 | 2.1% |
| Accessible Color Swatches | 02011 | 2.1% |
When we look back at 02021, we have several of the same articles. Old articles with lots of links continue to get traffic and are ranked highly in search engines, but we have seen some new comers: PDFs and Print on Demand were not in the list last year. Potentially trends come and go, we get linked from a popular source or the page visits didn’t change, but other topics dropped allowing the percentage of these pages to increase.
Open Office Hours
It has been over a year since we started having open office hours. There are a few time slots on Mondays and Fridays that anyone can book for a 20-30 minute video chat. We’ve had a few people take advantage of that and we’ve done the same. In 02021, we had 6 different open office sessions, but in 02022 we didn’t have any.
Projects
One of our long-running projects has been the Analog Notebooks. At some-point in 02021, the post-office started to require all larger letters and packages sent as registered mail. That means you get a tracking number, but but also greatly increases the cost! It makes the shipping costs 9-10 (USD/EUR) more than the cost of the $7 notebooks. We were happy to send it non-registered and simply send another if things ever got lost – that was more financially sensible! We also took a small stash of notebooks to the US and can do some basic fulfillment much cheaper with domestic United States Postal Service. Well, the next nail in the coffin is that the Icelandic Post-Offices are further down-sizing and for any shipments we’ll have to register the company and take it to a lock-box somewhere in town. Enter some code and lock our shipment in there for later pick-up and billing. The self-service nature of it is more and more annoying for such small volumes of sales.
In 02023, we’re going to have to rethink how we do distribution (at small scale), where we warehouse the products (not in our office storage cabinet) and low-volume, low-cost products.
On the flip-side, all digital products are annoying if you want to be completely legit. Iceland has a small VAT fee on digital products which you need to report and pay. If you use a service like the App Store or Gumroad, they collect, manage and pay the tax since they are the sellers, then pay you. If we wanted to use an online payment service like Stripe, PayPal or others, we’ll need to collect and report that VAT. The main issue is that these services can’t pay into an Icelandic bank account, so the money isn’t claimed on the company and never reported. There are local services that can process online payments, but they either require the buyers to be local, or have a high-enough monthly fee that it wipes-out the tiny, low-volume profit margin. So we’re still looking for a good solution.
Notes for 2023
We’ll continue to work closely on two of our major projects: School Surveys and Hyperion. The school surveys are always busiest in the spring time. That is also our Hyperion deadline. Once that project is launched there will be some baby-sitting for a while with minor updates, but our roll will certainly decrease and it is onto (hopefully) the next project Gauntlet.
Our partner in Australia is also keen to grow projects there and we’re getting more formally integrated into their day-to-day project management tools. Their goal is to take some of the custom software we’ve built for customers and try to more productize it and roll it out quickly to 4-5 additional clients in 02023. Our job is to support that effort in the form of a revenue sharing scheme.
One project we’ve been sitting on for a few years has recently gotten attention again. We’re planning a big introduction meeting for sometime in January. That might take us in a different direction in 02023.
We always have several internal, half-baked projects which ebb and flow in focus and priority. Castlemilk got some attention this year and we cleared a few log jams. We’ve experimented with making a few camera apps which we’ll revisit in 02023 for sure. Otherwise, we leave room for experimentation and go where the wind takes us sometimes.