OBF - cooking the books

[ZiggyDoodle]

While I do like OBF, the Maxis accounting methods stink when it comes to playable Sims making purchases at stores owned by other playable Sims.

Benny's Bot Shop has three Servos for sale.  The business currently is in the red to the tune of $24,924, so I decided to follow Pescado's line of thinking and priced the Servos at $28K each.

Sent Josh Avio to the robot store where he bought a Servo and a cleanbot.  Total sale was $28,960.  Josh returned home with his goodies and took them out of his inventory.  (I have to say that when playable Sims are acting autonomously in their business, they are completely inane, stupid, inattentive and irksome, to say the least!)

Took Maxwell Bennington back to his robot shop and not only was the $28,960 sale income missing from the cash tracker, but all of the cash tracker stats were wiped clean, except for the same bottom line of -$24,924. 

The Avio household funds had been debited for the purchase.  Where did the money go?  Directly to the Bennington household funds, completely bypassing the business. Foul play!  It was a legal sale and should have showed up in the books! 

Now, I don't know if this is the same case when the business is run remotely, where the income is supposedly transferred each night at midnight.  Has anyone tracked this under similar circumstances?   

Could be that Maxis is using the Enron system of accounting.....

[TheCheat]

Amazing that you managed to misspell the acronym for "Open For Business" twice. 

Regardless, yes, there are tons of bugs in OFB. Maxis probably will never fix them, so we gotta wait for JM or someone else to do it.

[Ms_Tamany]

Amazing that you managed to misspell the acronym for "Open For Business" twice. 

Regardless, yes, there are tons of bugs in OFB. Maxis probably will never fix them, so we gotta wait for JM or someone else to do it.

Huh.  And here all this time, I've been calling it Out For Blood!

[TheCheat]

Somehow, I just have to agree. EA sure does screw us over by forcing dates on Maxis...

[ZiggyDoodle]

Amazing that you managed to misspell the acronym for "Open For Business" twice.

Good grief, I sure did!  I've been having a problem with that acronym since the EP came out and have slapped my hand accordingly.  Maybe if I think of it as Out for Blood, I won't do it again. 

Mea culpa.

[Ancient Sim]

I have a similar problem with NPC, I nearly always put NCP.  Most of the time I remember to change it, but not always.  For some reason, I say it in my head as NCP, although I have no idea why.

Anyway, I like Out For Blood - good one.  Would be good in a vampire neighbourhood.  Or how about Old Fogey Businesses in a geriatric one ...  Quite like Oranges For Breakfast, too.

[vilia]

I have a similar problem with NPC, I nearly always put NCP.  Most of the time I remember to change it, but not always.  For some reason, I say it in my head as NCP, although I have no idea why.

Your head is probably thinking No Crap People rather than Nice People in Costume 

Back on topic - I'm sorry but I have simply given up trying to make sense of the accounting and just trust that it ought to make sense.  I keep telling myself that to a deranged llama with an umbrella it probably is logical and I'm just not seeing it from her point of view.  A complete & utter cop-out but it makes my head hurt.

[ZiggyDoodle]

Could be I mix them up because when I think of O F B, I come up with words you wouldn't use in the presence of your mother.

[momtogirls]

I keep seeing it on insim as OFN, and wonder what those folks are smoking.

[J. M. Pescado]

Benny's Bot Shop has three Servos for sale.  The business currently is in the red to the tune of $24,924, so I decided to follow Pescado's line of thinking and priced the Servos at $28K each.

Sent Josh Avio to the robot store where he bought a Servo and a cleanbot.  Total sale was $28,960.  Josh returned home with his goodies and took them out of his inventory.  (I have to say that when playable Sims are acting autonomously in their business, they are completely inane, stupid, inattentive and irksome, to say the least!)

Took Maxwell Bennington back to his robot shop and not only was the $28,960 sale income missing from the cash tracker, but all of the cash tracker stats were wiped clean, except for the same bottom line of -$24,924. 

The cash tracker only tracks sales made while you are running the business, and the tracker stats restart at a new session everytime you revisit the business as the owners. Older sessions are shoved back into the ancient archives. The underlying flaw with the cash tracker is that it tracks one-time expenses like construction as part of the expenses which affect your remote income. This is rather inaccurate, since the business is not perpetually undergoing construction, and that was simply a one-time thing. Thus your business is really unsuitable for remote operation a few sessions after any period of construction because of this skew on your average earnings.

Never, *EVER*, buy a new business from your current place of business for this reason: If you've earned some 150K off your business, hit 10 stars, and expanded it to more or less its final state, and then go drop that 150K profits buying your next business venture, before going home first....your current profit margin goes instantly into the terlet and your business will show as running a net loss.

Conversely, buying a ton of junk at home, stuffing it into your inventory, and then selling it off by simply deleting it will produce exactly the opposite effect.

The Avio household funds had been debited for the purchase.  Where did the money go?  Directly to the Bennington household funds, completely bypassing the business. Foul play!  It was a legal sale and should have showed up in the books!

That sounds like it showed up to me. The reason it doesn't show up in the "cashflow" summary is because if it did, you could severely skew a business's earnings through a player sim purchase. Also, no time elapses when such a case occurs, so what happens is that the income per hour would be divided by zero to produce infinite earnings per hour. Which is literally true, visitation by playable sims *DOES* effectively earn infinite money per unit time since money is earned without time elapsing. In light of the above issues, this seems nonsensical, but hey, Maxis-logic is never consistently applied and is more full of holes than a torpedoed freighter.

Now, I don't know if this is the same case when the business is run remotely, where the income is supposedly transferred each night at midnight.  Has anyone tracked this under similar circumstances?

Income from remote businesses will be credited to your account with dialogs, not exactly at midnight, but sometime shortly afterwards.

[ZiggyDoodle]

The cash tracker only tracks sales made while you are running the business

Does the cost of crafted goods made at home somehow get added as a business expense? 

The bot shop is a L10 business and last night sold all the sentry bots.  I've had Bennington make the robots at home - and his new wife, Chloe, made them at Uni.  The cost was deducted from the household expenses but I've not paid any attention to income/expense ratio when restocking.

[J. M. Pescado]

Crafted goods made in offsite factories or home do not count as an expense. Crafted goods made on-site do. So if all of your crafting occurs in an offsite factory or home, then it will not count as a business expense since it occurs off-lot. It WILL, however, count in the business expenses of THAT lot, if it is a business. Home businesses really do not care about their profit/loss statements at all since it there is no remote income for home businesses. Plus everything you do at a home business will show up in your profit/loss statements, even if it has nothing to do with the business!

[Ancient Sim]

I made the mistake of getting Malcolm Landgraab to buy another business while he was at one of his established ones, then seeing his profits tumble.  As I recall, I exited without saving and got him to buy it at home.  I've also noticed that everything they buy on a home business lot is classed as a business expense, which is totally ludicrous.  I had one family needed to add an extra floor when they unexpectedly had twins and it didn't do their business any good.

[Marvin Kosh]

It would be slightly better if there was an actual breakdown of expenses e.g. build mode, non-sale items, sale items, materials cost (for crafting), and of course wages.

[J. M. Pescado]

I made the mistake of getting Malcolm Landgraab to buy another business while he was at one of his established ones, then seeing his profits tumble.  As I recall, I exited without saving and got him to buy it at home.  I've also noticed that everything they buy on a home business lot is classed as a business expense, which is totally ludicrous.  I had one family needed to add an extra floor when they unexpectedly had twins and it didn't do their business any good.

With a home business, it doesn't matter what their profit/loss summaries are because you can't remotely operate a home business. Thus, even if it shows up as a huge loss, it doesn't really matter because this value is never actually used, it's purely cosmetic.

[anyeone]

Maybe the reason you get the acronyms confused is because you did a little too much LDS in the sixties 

[gynarchy]

I really liked the budget/family info window in TS1. I wish they would put something similar in TS2 since there are so many ways to spend and earn money.

[ZiggyDoodle]

reason you get the acronyms confused is because you did a little too much LDS in the sixties

Moi?

[Ruann]

Amazing that you managed to misspell the acronym for "Open For Business" twice. 

Regardless, yes, there are tons of bugs in OFB. Maxis probably will never fix them, so we gotta wait for JM or someone else to do it.

You know, it would have been amusing had it been done on purpose to sarcastically compare OFB to OBF, read as Out of Box Failure. 

But maybe only to me.  We get those all the time at my work.