 Small firms don’t need accounting.
Your accountant doesn’t agree with me. He’s wrong unless your firm has over 20 members. The problem with accounting is that it requires brain-surgery-precision for a task that doesn’t much matter. When you stop to think about the time, effort, and aggravation that accounting requires; and what benefit you receive in return; something is fundamentally wrong. Basically you can’t afford to do accounting until you are large enough and complex enough to afford a bookkeeping employee. I know this because my six-person firm used accounting for most of our existence and got almost no benefit from the tens of thousands of dollars per year that we spent on accounting. Why did we do it? Ignorance. I thought I had to. I mistook AIA publications as applying to me. They don't. They apply to much larger firms than I ever had. About 93% of architectural firms are smaller than 20 people. They can't afford accounting. They can only afford bookkeeping. So what is the difference?  There are a number of things about a truck dock that add up to truck docks needing to be more than an afterthought.
I am not thinking of a distribution center when I say that. The docks are the central focus of that kind of building and will get plenty of attention. I am thinking here of the incidental truck dock that may be a convenience or an efficiency measure. In that case safety is a paramount concern, but every truck dock that isn't part of a professional trucking operation should have a safety focus because people will sometimes use the dock who haven't been trained. The first design step is to contact a local manufacturer's rep for dock levelers. They can look at your situation and give you great advice about the best way to set up the dock. Here are a few things to consider about the dock, the building and the equipment:  For over 20 years I had the benefit of having Project Financial Status calculated for me by our (pricey) accounting software after each month was ‘posted’. You could choose from two methods. Method A was automatic but gave useless results. Method B required you to input an overhead factor to allocate overhead per hour of time charged to the project. This method gave consistent results and the results were accurate as long as your overhead factor was up to date.
You can see how to calculate an overhead factor here. MyCorbu provides the same Project Financial Status as a pricey accounting system. One difference is that MyCorbu does it daily rather than monthly. 
Architekwiki is five and a half years old. It's about time that I ask whether I am on the right track. This quick survey has just five questions and will take you less than one minute to complete. Your feedback will really help me.
 The first sustainable project that I had a chance to be part of was offices for a Dutch candy manufacturer in the late 1990s. Among other things accomplished, we used Photovoltaic Panels as window awnings - collecting and using the sunlight while shading the window glass. I am sure that is where this ideas comes from: using reflective glass to form an exterior light shelf that also shades the window below. That is what my crude sketch below is trying to describe. |
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