That's the claim made by John Boney, a retired engineer and city councilman in Butler Alabama, who surveyed a cemetery in Butler  after the city was quoted a price of $30000 by a licensed Land Surveyor.  Boney, who is not a professional surveyor received a letter of reprimand from the Alabama State Board of Licensure for Professional Engineers and land Surveyors.  He made the statement that::

"PVC pipe made everyone a plumber," he said. "The wire welder made everybody a welder. GPS made everyone a surveyor."

The incident led to him contacting two Senators who  are preparing a new bill to be introduced in the Alabama Senate would allow anyone to practice Land Surveying in rural areas of 5000 residents or less, after working for a land surveyor for eight years and providing letters of recommendation.  The letters need not be written by other land surveyors.

Peter Olivero, a licensed surveyor based in Mobile, said that's the equivalent of licensing someone after "three buddies" write on his behalf.

Naturally the State Board is opposing the bill,   And even at the risk of appearing to be doing it solely for self preservation, so should we.

 

Nothing looks worse than a hand scrawled proposal written on a piece of notebook paper and mailed to a client in anticipation of winning over a prospective client.  Not much better, but certainly more acceptable is a typed up form outlining the work with the charges and a total amount due.

But better yet is a proposal for services, or an invoice prepared on a proper form, giving the client the impression that you not only have the knowledge and technology to do the job, but care enough about your client to make a good presentation.

You could use QuickBooks, often available at a discount from Amazon, but for many small operators it is simply overkill.  The program is also so bulky and cumbersome that its use is discouraged for quick "down and dirty" quote preparation.  Additionally, my experience with Quickbooks is that they seem to always be upgrading, making yearly updates almost mandatory.   I know.  I used Quickbooks and hated every moment of it.

But today I discovered a much better product, particularly well suited to the smaller practitioner who mostly lets his bank statement do his accounting but still needs the ability to provide a professionally prepared document for quotes and invoices.  That product is Quick Invoice.

Quick Invoice will allow the preparation of 1000 invoices, with up to 500 customers and 500 items of inventory within the database for a program cost of $49.99.  For $79.99, you can have 10000 invoices, up to 5000 customers, and 5000 items of inventory.  The higher priced version also allows you to have your logo on the form. Data entry is very simple as shown on the reduction below

One thing I noticed that care must be taken to enter the description within the line limits.  Multiple lines can be used, but there is no scrolling ability.  A small inconvenience, but one that should be noted.

Keep in mind that invoices can always be archived when you reach a particular limiting number, so the limits on invoices may not be too important. The reduction of the final invoice was of such poor quality that I didn't include it.  See their website for more details and information.

With the new year just beginning, now is the perfect time to prepare for next years tax filing deadline.