We were well prepared. We had every possible company paperwork neatly filed in a manila folder, three forms of personal identification each; our suit pants had perfect creases, our shirts crisp white. When we entered the bank, heads turned.

Either that or we were dressed pretty much like normal and didn’t have a single form except in digital format. And when we entered the bank we had to sit down and wait like everyone else. :)

Either way we have now taken our first ‘official’ action as a company, and WireLoad has opened a bank account. The idea is mostly that we want to pay things out of a company account instead of our personal accounts going forward.

Just to let you know: Washington Mutual, the bank of our choice, was not able to accept digitalized copies of company documents. The following things were needed, at least here in California and for Washington Mutual:

• Articles of Organization, with the ‘File’ stamp indicating it had been filed with the government.
• Statement of Information. In particular the bank needed to know who owned the company. There might be other ways to demonstrate this but a statement of information is probably the easiest way.
• An Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS.
• Two forms of identification for each person. Viktor previously had an account with Washington Mutual, so a single form of identification was sufficient there. I had to provide two pieces. This turned out to be easy: a primary id, my driver’s license, and a secondary id: a credit card with my name on it.
• A checkbook to make the initial deposit/pay fees.

All in all it wasn’t too bad. Apparently we can expect checks and a debit card to arrive within a few weeks. The terms for the account weren’t bad either. Free checks, free debit-cards, no minimum balance and no charges for deposits or withdrawals. That’s pretty much all we need at this point.

I just finished our EIN application. The application was fairly straight-forward, but we had to decide on a couple of things before before we could submit the application (such as fiscal year and if we wanted to file as a corporation or partnership).

You need an EIN to be able to hire people and to open a bank account.

Then you can fill out the application on IRS homepage.
I’d recommend that you read Understanding EIN before you apply.

Yesterday our first non-government paper was received.
It was from Capital One.
They offered us a credit card.
We rejected their offer.
We do not need to purchase anything on credit at this point.
In particular not on those terms.

If you’ve been with us from the start, you probably already read our article Building the Base-camp Part 1. If you missed out on that one, I suggest that you go ahead and read it. In this series we talk about software applications that we as young entrepreneurs of the open source-generation use in our daily business-life. If you’re not familiar with many open source applications, you’re likely to find plenty of new tools that you will find useful. However, even if we are using many open source applications, that doesn’t mean that we never use commercial softwares. There are a few commercial softwares we do like as you will discover in this series.

Today I’ll talk about two utilities that might not be very well known to the average user, and therefor deserves some extra attention. The reason why I chose these two softwares is because I use these softwares very frequently, and I love using them.

The first software is not so much of a software as it is a set of Perl scripts. The software is called awstats, and is a log-analyzer that creates a nice statistics page from a given log file (such as Apache or your FTP-server). We use this to analyze the traffic to this page, to see where our visitors comes from, as well as what they find interesting. Awstats also gives you other information such as how much time your users spent on your web-site, and what browsers and operating system they are using. If you enable the IP-lookup feature, you can even track down you users, to see from what country are from (assuming they are not using any proxy etc. in another country).

The setup of the software is fairly straight-forward. Just follow the instructions in the INSTALL-file, and you’ll be up running in no time. The only issue I’ve been experiencing with awstats has been related to the log-format in the config file. Make sure the config in you awstats config agrees with the log-config in your apache config file (assuming you’re using apache). By the way, do I need to mention that awstats is open source?

The second software is, in contrast to most of the other tools we use, not an open source application. If there was an open source replacement that could produce an equally good result as this software, I wouldn’t hesitate to switch. Anyhow, the software is called OmniGraffle Professional, and is a great tool for creating outlines, flowcharts and other types of drawings. Prior to using this software I always ended up with a bunch of papers laying around with numerous of flowcharts and drawings for every project I was working on. Still I usually start with some drawings on a piece of paper, but then I usually digitize it and throw away or shred the paper. The result is a fabulous looking flowchart or drawing. Not only do the result look better, it’s also much easier to send, print and share it with other people involved in the project.

I know there are plenty of similar tools out on the market to do these kinds of tasks, but I really like this software. Not only is the software easy to work with, it also uses graphics that make you want to show your work to others rather than hiding them from the world.

Nowadays I use this software for every possible usage. It doesn’t matter if I’m designing a web portal, a database or documenting a network or an organizational chart, this is where I begin. Another good thing is that it comes with numerous icons, and if these are not enough, you can download more of them from their website.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series. If you have any comments or suggestions, please post a comment.

Yesterday, we finally received a letter from the Secretary of State. After about 1.5 month of waiting, we are now finally a ‘legal’ company.

As you may/may not have noticed, we’ve already changed the footer of into stating ‘(c) WireLoad, LLC‘ rather than just Alex and Viktor.

So what’s next? Now we’re going to apply for a FBN (Fictitious Business Name).