September 2013 Monthly Report

Monthly report:

Highlights:

• Spent ~1.3 B isk on faction standings to be able to drop a tower.
• Spent close to 1 B isk on a tower and fuel.
• Overall value down a few billion due to spending.

Plans:

• More agile production plans.
• Looking into alternate products to produce.
• Had some issues with previous products I have tried producing, leaving me with ~500 M isk on the market not selling.
• Without a 2 week lead time on copies, I can adjust to new products on the current cycle.
• Still working on tools to find those more profitable products, or those with acceptable velocities.
• Blueprint research.
• Thinking about putting up researched blueprint kits.
• Perfect ME / PE 15 T2 component packs sell for 80 - 100 M isk each.  Blueprints cost ~45 M isk per type. for a profit of 35 - 55 M isk. This can be completed in a little over 48 hours for all 9 BPOs, but volume of contracts moving is going to be an issue.
• Finishing training on a component builder / blueprint researcher.
• Training my standings inventor into being able to solo L4 missions.
• This will allow me to bring up standings even further to allow dropping towers in .7 systems.
• Eventually I will need to work a standings repair plan to get this character to be able to drop a tower in any .7 system.

August 2013 Monthly Report

Totals for August 2013:

Total
5,599,218,621.99 isk
Wallet Balance
726,472,008.33 isk
Assets
4,081,424,461.66 isk
Sell Orders
791,322,152.00 isk 

    Going with a new format for the report.  I just installed JEveAssets so I am using that now.

Break Down:

• 1.813 B in sales on 1.812 B in purchases.
• This includes PvP ship buying.
• See previous article for more information on what has been happening in the last 2 months.

Future Plans:

• Next Inventor is coming up on skill training complete.
• My main is moving to do Medium T2 ammo.  In station it's a 7-8 day manufacturing time / BPC, so that gives me plenty of time to invention and PvP.
• Starting copying jobs in NPC station for my new products.  These were found using my new Invention Profiteer program.  These should be strong sellers with good margins, all above 50%.
• Looking into dropping a POS.
• Running cost benefit evaluations on different sizes and configurations.
• Looking into standings services.
• Trying to run my standings up on 1 of my alts so that I can drop towers on my own, without standings services in the future.
• Saving money needed to drop towers.  Fully anchored medium towers, with fuel, run around 1 B each.  Although if I take Lockefox's advice and drop 2 medium towers with only a minimum number of labs each to allow future expansion, it will only come to ~1 B.

June Monthly Update

June Monthly Update:

Later is better than never...

• 414 million profit from 2.63 billion in sales.
• 1.6 billion in material costs.
• 29 million in manufacturing related costs (Maufacturing slots, Invention slots, copy slots, PE research slots, and ME research slots.)
• 218 million in skills.
• I decided to "Buy ALL THE SKILLS!!!" and hit the limit of 50 skills in training...
• 40 million on Transaction taxes, upping skills to reduce this.
• 28 million in brokers fees, again upping skills to reduce this.
• 92 million in new BPO's.
• I bought 1 each of Data Analyzer I Blueprint and Relic Analyzer I Blueprint, both 25 ME/25PE, for 25 mil each thinking I might get into the T2 Analyzers, but the market crashed.
• Bought a bunch of frigate/indy BPO's from NPC's and have been using spare slots on my 2 copy toons to do ME/PE research on them.
• 147 mil was spent on Personal stuff.  This includes Itty V's with T2 mods and T1 rigs for several characters.  It also includes my new Anathema for playing with scanning on my main.

As you can see, pretty steady month, no surprises.

Product sales breakdown.  My alt is starting to dominate the show with better products.  Need to investigate better product selection for my main.  Also, looking at bringing another inventor online in another couple of months.

Below is the Sell price vs Build cost of my mains entire kit:

And below, is a similar graph for my alt:

Plans:

• I am splitting my main off of the corp wallet and he is going back to buying/selling all of his own product.  This is in preparation of joining a corp.  He is keeping the money from his current cycle, and maybe buying his next kit out of the corp wallet, but after that, he will have to work on his own capitol.
• Working out of NPC stations, I need to get more agile in being able to move things from one station to another to take advantage of open slots.  My current home, when both my toons are done, there is usually a 2 hour wait on invention slots and a 30 minute - 8 day wait on manufacturing slots.
• Looks like whomever I am sharing the station with either increased the number of people or changed their product line up to include 8 day manufacturing runs :(
• With ~ 30 million in station costs, not to mention the 400K in contract costs moving things back and forth, it's about time I break down and start doing the math on getting a POS placed in high-sec.  My standings are nowhere near high enough to do it, so I will have to use a standings service to game the system.
• POS will allow me to take the 2 copy toons that I currently have and move them into full inventors.
• It will also remove the ~8 day delay in starting copy jobs that I now face in empire NPC stations.
• It will also give me a couple of ME/PE slots without the 30+ day wait time.
• Not sure if I will bother with doing manufacturing in the POS.
• One of my copy alts will need to start doing T1 component manufacturing for my main inventors.  This will cut up to 6 days off the wait to start manufacturing my next T2 cycle
• Most likely this will mean remaining 1 cycle or more ahead of my T2 cycles.
• I will have to look closely at the available Component BPO's and find several to fill this toons manufacturing slots with component and T1 work.
• Will need a report to constantly make sure that prices don't fluctuate from being profitable.

TL;DR

     Made another months profit.  Main is looking for corp.  Looking to make mo money.

May Financial Report

May Financial Report:

Highlights:

• Sold 2.36 B ISK, bought 1.63 B ISK, for a total profit of ~730 M ISK (~31% Profit, or ~45% ROI).
• Manufacturing accounts for 2.1 B ISK in sales and 1.38 B ISK in costs.
• I sold a Raven (148 M ISK) and 2 Gnosis (~112 M ISK each) to make up the remaining income.
• I bought an additional 187 M ISK in BPO's for my alt (A R.A.M. set and a Caldari T2 set)
• Got product to market from my alt late this month, around the 24th.  Should increase my revenue next month if I can get her on a steady schedule.
• Holding off on investing another ~300 million in component BPO's for my alt, using some from my main in the mean time.
• I was using www.myeveapi.com to extract my wallet journal and transaction data, but late this month it stopped working for my journal, so I am looking for another source to easily extract this information.    What that means for this report is that taxes and other costs are underrepresented, but it should only be a couple of million low.

Category Breakdown of May:

• No surprises here, Manufacturing kits/sales make up the lions share of money made/spent.
• Spent about 3.5 million on copy slots and 5.6 million on invention.

Sales Breakdown for May (With products removed :):

• All 4 lines that start early in the month are from my main.  I missed getting my last product to market, so it looks a little low at the end of the month.
• Of the products that I selected for my alt, 2 are not showing the expected velocity.  Looks like all 4 are going to be competitive markets.

And finally the Manufacturing report:

• I invested in another mfg cycle even though I am not complete on the current one.  This is an OCD make the graph pr0n look pretty thing.

   All in all, pretty good month.  I lost a week of play time when my credit card got stolen days before my main account was due.  We got most of the money back, but I had to wait for new cards to be issued.  My alt only had a partial kit make it to market.  I need to look into what she's doing, because looking into the sales graphs, you can see that 2 of the products (purple and dark blue) are selling good.  But the other 2 products (light green and pink) are not selling as well.
   For the next month I will be investing in some components to level out my costs during the first couple of months of Odyssey.  Also need to look into filling out some researched component BPO's on my alt to allow some flexibility.  Still looking for some filler product for both toons to keep their manufacturing lines full, but May was very tight on cash until the last week or so.
   I need to setup some planetary interactions on my main and start using some research agents for both of my toons.  Not sure if I want to add PI skills to my alt.  With my alt's training almost complete, I need to carefully consider what to do with the training time on my second account, especially in light of needing more copy slots to keep up with my invention slots.

Lessons learned:

• When creating an alt, make sure that you have all the BPO's, researched and not, that they need before starting.
• 500 M ISK is not enough to start a high-sec T2 manufacturing business without a lot of hiccups.  You need 500 M ISK or more just for kits.  You will probably spend at least that much again buying researched BPO's to make it efficient.
• Noting the bullet above, have ~1.5 billion ISK available for any new alt.  500 M ISK for implants/skills, 500 M ISK for BPO's, and 500 M ISK for kit costs. (See Locke's Everything You Never Wanted to Know: Making an Industrial Alt for more information on making an industrial alt.)
• All the bullets above being said, I am probably trying to buy too large of kits.  I am doing 4 products at 200 units/product.  Cutting that in half for each kit will be helpful.  Also, my main is doing products with components from all 4 races, and my alt is doing components from 2 different races.  Selecting products in the same race might be a better idea.
• Product selection is difficult...and probably the biggest and most important time sink you will find.  Study your intended market and spend the time needed to determine what the true velocity of your product is. (If you don't know what I mean by velocity see Metrics, again from Locke.)
• Because of the bullet above, I will be narrowing the focus of my alt, unfortunately, in high-sec station invention, this is not an agile process, you're looking 20+ days out to see the first cycle of your adjusted copy jobs come out of the oven (I have been averaging ~10 days/copy job, but I sometimes have to move 10+ jumps to find those stations with only 5 day queues).
• For my main, I had to train another character to do nothing but copy for him.  I will have to do the same thing for my alt, once I finish with the last of the training.  I have them setup for 8 slots of copying, that's enough for for 800 modules every 10-14 days/character.  Trying to maintain 8 slots of copy and still do invention makes for a nightmare schedule.  28 days or so for an 11th slot/character...doesn't seem worth it yet, not with another 3 character slots on my current account still open.
• Need to find a good way to utilize a potential 10 manufacturing slots / copy character.  Depending on how component profits come out in Odyssey, that's one option.  I would like to start producing some ships, but the T1 ship market is pretty upside down.  There are a few T1 products that look interesting, especially if I have the capital to keep them in sale orders in trade hubs, but that is probably a couple of months out.