Location, Location, Location

Now that you have your Categories set up, it's time to enter locations of where your Items might be. That could be anything and anywhere. US, Canada, Mexico would do or it could be Kitchen, Dining Room, Bedroom or it could be Safeway, Trader Joe's, Albertsons or all of these and more.

The important thing to understand is that you can keep track of various Items in Record Sage and each Item can have a particular location specified (although it's optional). Then when various Reports are run, many sort by Category and Location or vice versa. For example the Shopping List will break things down by Category and simply show the location, thus for that kind of a list, the Location would specify what store to buy things in.

Of course you can augment this list of locations at any time using the standard Record Sage data management approach, same as used in managing Categories.

Hello (again)

Well, this blog has been neglected long enough. Now that PCS has a new web site (finally), we have a new President (let's hope he makes the right changes) - time to keep everything advancing forward. More soon...

What do I do first? - Categories.

A typical question for any new piece of software. Record Sage, being an online application, is no different. Even though it's very simple to use (especially for me, since I wrote it) - some people do have questions, so I'll try to elaborate on various related topics and if anyone has any questions - either enter them in comments or Record Sage Forums.

The first thing you should do is create some Categories. Record Sage provides many reports and most of them sort the data by Categories. For example if you're setting up a shopping list - you could have the Categories represent types of food or store departments, thus making your shopping experience that much easier. Another example would be the report that shows Business Cards - those will also show up nicely segregated into Categories, so all your vendors could be together and your clients could be together etc. The Skype Directory report does the same segregation for all your Skype contacts.

Since the Categories is such a prevalent part of Record Sage - you have the convenience of ease access and maintenance of them via the Categories link at the top of every page you see. You can set up as many as you'd like and use them as you see fit - there are no limitations. The maintenance for Categories is as simple as any other list maintenance in Record Sage.

Just be careful not to delete Categories that you've used in some Items.

Record Sage - Introduction to tracking your life!

A while back I had an idea to develop software to keep track of personal and/or business belongings (aka assets) for the purposes of having information handy when a disaster, like hurricane Katrina or Rita, struck, where it would be very easy to deal with an insurance company and get appropriate action taken.

This idea never materialized because... well, there a number of obstacles at the time.

Fast forwarding a number of years, with the Internet coming into our mainstream lives, I had a good friend of mine go through a very tragic experience. I stopped by to see him in the evening and went home... the following morning I got a call from his father stating that his house burned down! Talk about a shock to the system... Luckily my friend and his dog escaped unharmed, but the house was gone, with most of the belongings gone with it. Another piece of good news was that his insurance was very competent and they immediately started working on his case to get his life back. But it was still a major hassle to try to present the insurance company with the details of what was lost. My friend had thousands of CDs... anyway, that prompted me to revisit my idea from before... I wanted it to be Web-based service, but one thing still concerned me - privacy. It had to be something that would be very private, kind of like a Swiss bank account.

That analogy gave me my answer. The result is a Web site - www.RecordSage.com - which is a service that allows you to log in with a number and a password. Nowhere online can anyone find the relationship between the login number and e-mail address or your name (in fact even I don't know it). Everything is referenced by a number, so even if someone got a hold of the information and knew what the content was - they'd have no clue who this content belonged to, i.e. making it pretty useless. In addition to anonymity, all of the manipulations of data in Record Sage is handled via a secure server with 128-bit encryption.

As it turned out - tracking of insurance-related info was just a beginning... I had another idea for how this could be used to track all kinds of stuff, thus the slogan - TRACK YOUR LIFE!

This is how Record Sage was born and I invite you to try it at www.RecordSage.com using our FREE account!