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Foundation By Brian Koscienski and Chris Pisano
Well, now we have a corporation. We are a corporation. Naturally, we can't get anywhere without money. So, off to the bank we go. Since we're both working class monkeys, we had to go on a Saturday. Of course, that goes without saying that Chris was hung over from the night before. His squinted eyes furrowed his brow lower, his parched mouth addled his speech, and his lack of desire to see 8:00 a.m. caused him to drag his knuckles when he walked, only adding to the theory that he is truly a Cro-Magnon man. However, I am an accounting nerd and I keep about 20 different bank accounts, so Chris took great joy in busting my chops as I called a dozen banks, tapped half a dozen MAC machines, and used no less than three checks to fund my portion of the pie.
The bank representative who opened our account for us was cute, but it kind of disturbed us that she had car engine parts attached to her wall corkboard. Trust me, I can't make this stuff up. Yes, we live in a part of Pennsylvania that could be easily mistaken for a Jeff Foxworthy act, however we were in a bank in a city that is 50,000 strong. Her excuse was the parts belonged to a co-worker that shared her desk. Sure they did. Anyway, as authorized signers to the corporation, Chris and I had to sign everything she had in her office and then provide photo IDs. Out came the driver's licenses and she commented that we "kinda look alike" in our ID photos. Chris' hangover worsened and I wanted to jump through the nearest window.
When all was said and done, she handed us a catalog to order our checks. Holy shnikey they were expensive!! We looked through pamphlets and other catalogs hoping for something a little more reasonable. Nothing. But right when we were ready to spend too much money for too little product, the heavens parted, a ray of light shined from above onto my computer and I head a voice say, "Behold!" Whaddya know! The Internet has more than just porn and online auctions! Of course, that has its own set of drawbacks.
When you type "business checks" into a search engine, you get four bazillion hits. You'll get big checks, small checks, travel checks, computer checks, three-to-a-page checks, fat checks, and thin checks. We finally found a place to order checks inexpensively. Believe it or not, we ordered our checks through the sprawling retail giant founded by Sam Walton. Yes, not only do they piss off local communities by taking business from the small mom-'n'-pop shops, but they also sell checks. They're plain ol' three-to-a-page checks, but they came with a very cool binder to hold them-- for free! Sorry, I geek out about these things.
After we set up our bank account we left the bank; Chris was feeling a bit disappointed for not procuring the bank rep's phone number. For those single entrepreneurs out there-- if you tell a woman that you're an executive vice president of your own company to impress her, make sure you have some bucks in the bank account, especially if she's the one putting in your initial pittance of a deposit. We went to the nearest office supply store to fill our empty desks with fancy parchment paper. Get it? See, since our company's name is Fortress we went with the medieval style parchment paper to…oh, never mind. While there, we also picked up a cheap $30 bookkeeping software package.
When it comes to bookkeeping, you should always do what you can to make your life easier. You want to keep an accurate account of what's going on in your fiscal life. Sure, you can set up a few spreadsheets and you're off and running, however you would then reeeeeeeally need to know what you're doing. During my years as a public accountant, most people either hate bookkeeping, or they're afraid of it. As with anything else, there are bare-bones packages and pretty fancy high-end systems. Find one to suit your needs. Do you need check printing capabilities? Inventory controls? Tax prep interface? Sorry, I'm geeking out again. So, spend a couple bucks now and get yourself some bookkeeping software and you'll save yourself a ton of grief.
Believe it or not, we had one thing to wrap up before we could begin. Taxes. Even though we didn't get our corporate kit until 2005, we didn't get shares of stock until 2005, and the corporation itself didn't write any checks (we didn't even have money in it yet!) until 2005, we still had to do taxes for 2004. Chris and I each wrote checks out to our lawyer in 2004 to help start up the business. Those were considered loans to the corporation, thus the start up expense could be claimed on the corporation's books. And since Fortress Publishing is an "S" Corporation, that means the big fat year-end net loss is passed through to our individual taxes. Sweet!
Okay. The company's in existence. The company's up and running. The company's writers (that's us) have written a dozen scripts. Time to find some artists…
Next Issue: "Creation"
Brian and Chris reside in south central Pennsylvania where Brian is often chased by angry villagers wielding torches and pitchforks due to his uncanny resemblance to Sasquatch while Chris can often be found in newspapers and magazines under the headline "Cro-Magnon Man Found." Their obsession with writing is pretty thorough; their compositions range from stories to novels to articles to comic books to poetry. They even went so far as to start their own publishing company called Fortress Publishing. Their main mission in life is to simply do what the screaming voices behind their eyeballs tell them to do.
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