Sepp Holtzer is a remarkable farmer in Landau, Austria, who has created a lush fruit & vegetable farm in a most untypical environment, at 1000m altitude. In this book he describes his way of working, observing and experimenting with every element of the habitat – ponds, stones, mushrooms, plants and various livestock species. He describes using raised beds for creating suitable micro-climates for vegetable production and how to utilize pigs and earthworms to aeriate and enrich the soil.

In many ways he has simplifed the work in the vegetable garden, by utilizing natural processes. No digging to prepare the land, but a layer of mulch or hay. Many of the plants he uses are perennial, which means that the plant will grow on next year without any human intervention.

Holzer shares his experiences with such a positive energy, that I get all inspired to plant sunflowers and beans, and to get non-hybrid seeds. He also shares his experiences with failed experiments, which is a consolation already for the inevitable failures and misses.

Holtzer describes it as if it is easy.

I think that the most important difference with his neighbour’s monoculture of spruce is that Holtzer is farming with knowledge. It requires much more knowledge and observation to work with a hundred different plants, compared with working only with one tree type.

Knowledge and understanding of Nature is the way of the future.

Fuling - http://riowang.blogspot.com/2010/08/subjective-city.html

Peter Hessler wrote a book about his two years as a US Peace Corps volunteer (English teacher) in a small town on the Yangtze river. Hessler has a phenomenal skill in bringing to life the moments of laughter, pain, shame and frustration that inevitably arise. The self-effacing style of vividly depicting his own shortcomings make the story more personal and intimate.

It was a different world in the end of the nineties – almost no internet and telephone fees were exorbitant, so the isolation was stronger. Nevertheless, many things are the same today, even in a world-city like Shanghai. So many things that I recognize from the last few months here; a common conviction that Chinese culture is the best culture, Chinese food the best food, uncritical party members, free thinkers in taxis, conflicting rules and regulations, meaningless garden maintenance, the exodus of farmers’ kids to the cities, the stupid personality of me speaking Chinese…

It is somewhat remarkable how openly the system is criticised and that Hessler was allowed to spend another ten years in China. Sometimes the government can handle criticism, sometimes not. As Hessler writes, there is no humour in the system.

The key objective seems to be to serve the key customer industries better, at the expense of the lesser ones. It looks a lot like 80/20 thinking – the fact that 80% of the revenue typically is generated by 20% of the customers. However, 80/20 thinking has one flaw and that is the dynamic aspect – the evolution over time. The top ten customers today are not the top ten customers of ten years ago. Even in a slow business like mechanical components business, the landscape changes fast and a company that will be our key customer in five years is a marginal customer today. One of the thousands. And there is no way knowing which one it is.

On the other hand, there are undoubtedly advantages of the new setup. In some sense, the organization looks a little less complex, at least from the top. I believe in clear mandates and that seems more uniform across the board, which is good.

Many cynics are critical of reorganizations, because it is never really clear that it brings any advantage at all at the workfloor. It is often seen as a useless exercise by managers who want new titles. However, every organizational setup has strong and weak points, and it foces different people to work together, while they still know people in another part of the organization. In that sense, a reorganization is a way to strenghten the informal network, through enforcing new reporting lines and new colleagues, while people still see their old colleagues for coffee and gossip.  Therefore, I think that it is good to stir in the kettle once in a while.

An aside here, and advice for future reorganizing champions: Don’t announce before holidays. Then the worrisome among us will have sleepless nights when they need to reconnect with their family and friends. Do you think they will talk well about your company? Is this the advertisement you need? Do you think it is right to deprive them of their well-deserved time off from a demanding job?
Of course you yourself will see less torment, so you may sleep better after presenting your plans just before a long break…

“What shall we have for dinner tonight?” is the key question that is asked in this book, and partially answered. At least we know more where the dinner alternatives come from, and can make better informed choices about what we put on the plate.

Pollan writes in a very personal style about his explorations of the American food industry and how the produce is produced; grain-fed beef, organic lettuce, permaculture and corn, corn, corn… It seems like whole US is a giant standing in a quicksand of corn grains.

One of the most intriguing parts of the book describe a “permaculture” farm, where grass is the main species – on which cows, chicken and sheep graze to produce manure for the grass and plenty of meat for us. By rotating crops and cattle in a dance over the lands, the soil gets richer from the use, not poorer. It is a very compelling idea, quite different from the vast monocultures of highly specialized mechanization, like wheat fields stretching to the horizon. The goal of permaculture is to enrich the soil, not extract the nutrients as if the field is a flat surface mine.

I recognize that the Chinese family farm was very similar to what now is called a “permaculture design”, with fruit trees prividing shadow and water retention and a host of species growing and roaming below. And it has proved sustainable, at least for five thousand years.

I got very inspired to grow some more vegetables and fruit myself, even considering an animal extension of the family, albeit an edible one. We will see how much of the inspiration lasts after reading more about the permaculture alternatives and compressing the dreams into the limited timeslots of a challenging work-home-life-balance equilibrium.

The book is a collection of hilarious episodes of improbable encounters and unfathomable opportunities, painted with a backdrop of tragedy because we know that this business will fail too in the end, despite the heroic efforts from the team to make it fly.

He describes in a very personal and revealing way the dream that many of us nurture, to become “Mr. China” – the one who knows the mystic ways of the Middle Kingdom. I was also seduced by the magical characters that turns any street into a mystical land when I walked around in Beijing in 1994. 厕所 looks so much more exciting, promising and spiritual than the sign “WC”. In my eyes, it could just as well be the entrance to a lost Buddhist temple, if it weren’t for the smell of course.

But the point that he makes is that we want China to be special. I think this is very important. We want to be seduced and mystified and to stop thinking. We want to believe that all Chinese are spiritual and long-term-thinkers and different from us.

In the end, we are all humans, and I am deeply convinced that the similarities are larger than the differences.

Plastic policeman on duty in the Sichuan mountains.

On the cover of the excellent “Country Driving” by Peter Hessler, there is a photograph of a plastic policeman along the road in a desert plain of North West China. It looks so silly, with a life-size replica of a policeman staring straight in front of him on an empty piece of road. Why would you do that? Would it incite the drivers to hit the road in a more responsible fashion?
Is a policeman just a symbol, a puppet in a ritual?

In Shanghai I never saw this, so I thought it was only something done in the deserts of Gansu. Until one day, a few weeks ago on a holiday to Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan, when the plastic policeman appeared at the corner of a winding mountain road. And a kilometer further on yet another one. And another one.

The plastic policemen were guarding the bends in an otherwise desolate forest, surrounded by mighty spruces and grazing yaks, adoring the scenery.

Larger Desk is Better

We are starting up the R&D center in temporary offices inside of one of our factories, while waiting for the new building to be ready. Due to the expansion, we needed to set up some new cubicles etc, to pack as many as possible into the new space. One in my team was leading the layouting and communicating with the suppliers of cubicle furniture and office equipment, and I was following up regularly.

All of a sudden, the four-seat cubicle, where I had marked my desk as one of the twenty or so similar ones, was transformed into a larger three person cubicle, where two of the seats were traded in for a large woodden desk.

“This is better for us”, was the response. “Then the people from the other departments see who is the boss.” And the larger the desk, the more important the boss. And that makes many things easier for my team.

This is something I have to get used to…

The book is ok.
What is good is that they introduce a way to talk about consumer/provider relationships and how to analyze the hidden costs of consumption. They take everyday frustrations and convert them into suggestions for how to change the value offering to make the customer more satisfied at a lower cost.
When we buy something, like a car or a computer, it is not the ownership that makes us happy, but the enabling function. Having this thing enables me to do things that I like.
In a time of wealth and abundance, many people have more than enough things and too little time.

The main points of the book are old truisms: Capital goods cost time and energy once we have them, in terms of maintenance and services. A house is a hobby, a sailing boat is a drain.
And yes, it is crucial to look at the whole purchasing experience – make it easy to buy and I will buy more. That is a key insight in the last fifty years of retailing and is well shown in the iPhone AppStore. There is already a sea of research and examples that are not referred to in this book.

Another weak point of the book is that it feels less solid than the previous Womack&Jones’es. There are two real world examples, from Tesco and a car repair shop, but most of it is anecdotical.

If you have a choice – go for “Lean Thinking” instead.

First thing that happened was that our office was full, so we need to move to another location in the same building. Fortunately, due to other circumstances, we could only start the moving after four weeks, so there was a few days of slack to do layouting of our new premises. We have a completely cubiclized floorplan, and I would take a seat like everybody else. However, all of a sudden, the proposed layout from the cubicle-carpenter’s side included a broad dark desk instead of a cubicle seat where I had indicated that I would sit, occupying at least two seats, maybe three.
As my Chinese colleagues put it: “Otherwise the people from the other departments do not know who is the boss. It is better this way.”

I trust them. They know what works and what does not here in the land of influence. The crab has his ways and the shrimp has his, as one of my colleagues put it, while explaining why a certain procedure did not work as expected. There is a positive and a negative side of this flexibility, I guess, but so far I have mainly seen the plus side.

There are lots of things to fix both at the office and at home, one thing at a time. Our hot water stinks, for instance. It smells of glue. There have been five people watching, checking, tasting, discussing and not doing anything. I need to find an expert, but it is not so easy. I am sure there are hundreds of qualified people who could fix it, but there are twenty five million other people in town who cannot. Fortunately, I often have good help from my local colleagues, among others to get supplies via Taobao, 360buy and Newegg. Mother’s Day is better with a new Saeco Espresso Machine, directly delivered to our home (Well, to be honest I ordered it late and it was not really on time…). I hope my colleagues can also find a suitable plumber to fix the hot water. In the meantime we smell of glue after every shower.

Peter Hessler spent years in China, first for the US Peace Corps and then as a journalist and a writer. This book is a collection of stories about three of his adventures: Driving along the Great Wall, Renting a week-end house in a village north of Beijing and following a bra-supply factory in Zhejiang.

The Great Wall is tracked and traced both with the vehicle and throughout history. This artefact of Chinese Imperial defence is often used to symbolize lots of things – anything that is positive and Chinese. However, the real stories behind the building of the many walls and fortifications in Northern China are not often told. Hessler sheds some light on the multitude of walls and on life along the edge of civilization. Almost abandoned towns called “Butcher-the-Enemy” enjoy a visit of the tall American in his rented Chinese Jeep. Almost seduced by a drunk Mongolian guide in a fake museum about the “Great Chinese Hero Genghis Khan”, Hessler escapes to continue the tracks.

The village north of Beijing goes through a fantastic transition during the years that Hessler spent there. He recounts of local Party committee politics and the rise of economic activity and tourism. The road even got paved all the way! The change in lifestyle and food patterns come at a breathtaking speed and many struggle to keep the bearings.
Hessler describes his joyful weekends with hiking along the trails in the mountains and recovering from the Beijing bustle in this mountainous hardship resort. It is very inspiring to see what possibilities exist outside Shanghai!

The third story is about a factory producing bra-rings in Zhejiang. Cunning engineers and ingenious entrepreneurs push the limit of everything they can to press out a profit in this minuscule segment of the global supply chain.
The stories come interweaved with anecdotes about driving in China. Many stories could sound strongly exaggerated were it not for the fact that I have witnessed many similar situations just in the past year. Backwards driving from highway ramps, overtaking everywhere and crossing double lines… Going to work I sometimes feel like I am inside a computer game like Grand Theft Auto, where cars are moving like crazy. It is often scary, but so far so good…

A gem in the book are the hilarious examples from the Chinese driving exams – I hope that I can check this myself. It seems to weird to be true.

At the job-market in Dongguan

This is an extended reportage book about the migrant population in south China. Leslie Cheng ventures south on business from Wall Street Journal writing articles and collecting memories which are later used to build the story of this book. It is a compelling mix of autobiography, where Cheng searches for her own Chinese-American roots, modern history account and intimate portraits of the lives of some random individuals turning friends over the years.

It is hard enough to understand the staggering numbers of migrant workers: Each year 10 million move from the countryside into the hundreds of swelling million-count cities across the coastal provinces of China. The last 30 years it adds up to 300 million. Even more difficult is to imagine what it means to the individuals in such a malstroem of new jobs, houses, foods, purchase possibilities.
The timescale of a career is measured in years, not decades. Education and specific professional training is hard currency and payback time is counted in months. The teachers today were novices a year ago. The building where the training is held did not exist last year.

Chang shares her encounters and reflections upon what it means both for the individual and for society. The incidental individual experiences are recounted with a backdrop of research about the bigger picture. It is deeply enjoyable to read, I could not help but laughing out loud while reading the chapter about the English-teaching machine. At the same time I learned a lot about contemporary China. One of the books that Chang describes, “Square and Round”, was referenced yesterday by a Chinese colleague, and it helped me a lot to understand some office politics thanks to the introduction given in this book.

The lemming trek from the Chinese rural plains into the exploding mega-cities will continue for years, so the book is likely to stay relevant for a long time.

Dragons at Your Door - Cost Innovation in China

Ming Zeng and Peter Williamson have researched the phenomenon of Chinese low-cost high-performance products. Twenty years ago, that was a paradox, almost a joke. However, not many are laughing at Maytag Refrigerators when the Chinese Haier delivers superior quality and broader product range to a lower price. The same goes with upcoming world players like Huawei, the world leader sea-container producer CMCI etc. They wrote an intriguing book about it: “Dragons at Your Door”.
The recurring pattern is that these Chinese companies are able to manage products and production in a flexible way to achieve mass-production costs (low cost) with a broad range (low volume per product type). Zeng calls it “Cost Innovation”. Part of the cost advantage is of course the lower salaries and lower taxation in China, but after comprehensive research, the authors conclude that this is of minor importance. More important is that the manufacturing system is designed for flexibility and low capital investment. Furthermore, the product development is fully adapted to the manufacturing capabilities: The standard question is “what variants can we make with no change of machinery?” In a sense, most innovation has been in manufacturing and in organization structure.

[As a contrast, at my company, we are setting up a product development center thousands of kilometers away from the nearest factory. The research center is in a different country far away from any manufacturing site. The interaction between product and production is minimized, which sometimes leads to miscommunication and delays. We have some things to learn from our Chinese competitors! ]

Zeng shows in a convincing way that the Chinese companies have been able to catch up quickly thanks to modularization and standardization of components and technologies. A key question is what happens right now when these companies take the lead in their respective niches? One of the recurring newslights in the last year have been acquisitions of medium sized European technology companies by cash-heavy Chinese competitors, to get access to brands, technologies and market channels. Is this incidental or will it continue to increase? We will see…

CIMC - Container Innovation at Low Cost

Thanks to the authors unique insights in the researched companies, the book is full of concrete examples how specific problems have been resolved in innovative ways – very inspiring!

Gas Station Sinopec

Look at the picture and see what is different from any gas station you are used to from Europe or the US or most places in the world. Of course the Chinese characters are different, but that is mere cosmetics.

I think the most interesting visual item of the gas station as a roadside landmark is the absence of price. It is nowhere written how much the gas costs. Because it is the same everywhere.

In Sweden, where I grew up, the gas price varies around 5-10% between different gas stations, and it is a convenience trade-off, whether to take the full-service gas station along the highway with it’s cozy shoplet, or to stand in the wind at the JET station with no human being in sight. Convenience for cash, as the universal trade-off.

Not in China.

The ministry sets the price for each type of fuel, and that is that. No matter if it is a Sinopec, CNOOC, or any other “branded” gas station, the price is not theirs to determine. Therefore, neither for the customer or the gas station owner, there is any interest in displaying the current gasoline price.

McGregor experienced from the frontier the intense power struggle between government agencies, the party, market actors and local chiefs. All scrambling to get ahead and to increase their influence. His accounts of his own experiences are the most hilarious and warmhearted parts of the book. However, the many likely hiccups are not explored in great detail. I think it is a difficult dilemma while writing a book like this. On the one hand, including personal weaknesses and failures makes the book more interesting. On the other hand, the author wants to look like a leading expert and resourceful adviser – the book serves as advertisement for his own consultancy services. We all want to believe that the advisers we hire are fault-free and perfect, after all the fees are substantial…

I wonder what I would choose to present in an account of my own adventures near and far? Would I dare to include the intimate shameful moments of my own weaknesses? The mistakes and fiasco’s? Wasted money and time and naivety? I am not so sure. Probably I would pretend that everything was well planned and went smoothly.

One million Chinese visitors at the World Expo in Shanghai the same day as we went.

McGregor weaves into the story the larger sweeps of modern China and a handful of illustrious examples of winners and losers in the wild-east era of the last decades. The story behind famous (in China) brands like Wahaha and Unicom gives a wonderful account how government relations can help and hinder but that the market pull is the real force today. It also shows that the organizational maturity of most companies today are in a similar position as the companies in the west were fifty years ago – completey dependent on the founder/leader. It is a lean and fast way of running a company, but with a single-point-of-failure, it is not robust. It is the startup-model.

An inspiring book and I am excited to experience first hand collisions with bureaucracy and government activities in Shanghai!

Paul Midler is one of the numerous players who have been enabling China to export their goods in the last decade, and he wrote an entertaining account of his experiences. Speaking Chinese and with an American business degree, he worked on the ground to help American importers to find manufacturers for their various goods. Midler shares hilarious anecdotes and sobering reality checks from encounters with the human traits of greed, naivety, disrespect and short-term thinking, both with the Chinese as well as the foreign partners. The book is written in an unusually open style, exposing the author’s personal impressions, which makes the story stronger and it is a joy to read.

From my own experience, I know that not everything in China is poorly made, so I have my reservations for the title of the book. However, there are structural problems related to short-term thinking due to e.g. unpredictability in the legal system and lack of transparency, which make the temptation to take shortcuts almost irresistible. There is still a lot to do before “Made in China” gets similar connotations as “Made in Japan” has today.

Peter Navarro: The Coming china Wars
Where they will be fought and how they can be won

Why is it that men like to read books about war?
When I was a boy, my favourite books were in sequence “Biggles in Finland”, “The Cannons of Navarone”, “The Lord of the Rings” (an epic war story), etc., etc... However, the more I learned in the army, the less inspired I am by the so-called heroes of the battlefield. The most paradoxical book on war I find “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu (Sunzi), which focusses on identifying conflicts and resolving them without battle. It repeatedly makes the point that war is horrible and counterproductive. Nevertheless, what led me to read the book was the title that allured to some primal male driver to learn the secrets to conquer and win.

Peter Navarro continues in this ancient Chinese tradition to explain in great detail where potential conflicts are likely to arise in the coming years, where China will be involved. Just like Sunzi, (but contrary to the official sub-title printed large on the cover), Navarro suggests way to resolve the issues to avoid war.

The conflict areas are too many to recount, but they range from environmental issues (water scarcity, pollution, land degradation and desertification) to social tension induced by demographics, income distribution and urbanization. Some darker sides include the growing HIV epidemics, international drug trade and counterfeited medication finding its way around the globe.

Navarro has chosen to research the problematic issues one by one, with numerous details and facts, which makes the book very convincing.
However, I think he misses the systemic structural problem in China today – the disfunctional feedback mechanisms in society. Due to the nature of the current political system, information is sometimes hidden behind layers of secrecy and distorted by propaganda.
Democratic societies have the advantage of transparency – many eyes look at issues and feedback mechanisms are in place to identify problematic areas and address them. It often works, but not always, of course.
In centrally controlled regimes, the well-intentioned planners only have access to part of the information and become a bottleneck in the dynamics. Even though they can act with more force and momentum, they are locked down by their relatively small numbers and the time delay in the feedback.

Some of the problems described in the book are related to resource depletion, which can be described by a typical first order differential equation with delay. The longer the delay, the larger the probability of catastrophic failure. One very readable book that describes the dynamics of resource depletion is “Limits to Growth”, by Donnela Meadows, published initially by the Club of Rome, which takes on a global perspective. I am sure that the same type of analysis can be done on China, and quantify the detrimental effect of the delay and distortion of the available information.

This year, the prices on grocery soar, to which the party officials react by blaming speculators. I doubt that is the root cause.

By knowing what is going on and increasing transparency, I think China will be able to tackle most of the issues raised by Navarro. )They could start by removing the block on the PeterNavarro.com website.) But not all can be handled by China alone. For the future of our planet it seems again that we have to collaborate and act on information!

How to Manage a Successful Business in China
by Johan Björksten and Anders Hägglund

Despite the pretentious title, this book is a well-researched low-key introduction to one way of building businesses in mainland China. Maybe it is the Swedish-Chinese way. Both the authors have first hand experience from what they are talking about, which they generously share through examples and anecdotes. Both of them have been very successful in building profitable organizations, one from scratch and one as a dependence of a multinational corporation.

One of the authors is a renowned expert on Chinese, and teaching Chinese to foreigners. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that one of the main recommendations is to learn Chinese if you want to be successful in China. Still today, most foreigners coming to work in China do not learn more than a handful phrases and a most basic vocabulary. Chinese is considered impossible to learn. On the other hand, imagine going to the US without speaking English – what is the probability of establishing a successful business? It is almost ridiculous.
I am sure that Chinese is a “learnable skill”.

The most startling part of the book talks about guanxi – “connections”. The authors demystify this concept and show the equivalent concepts in the Western business tradition. Sometimes the cultural differences are smaller than we imagine.

Another myth of the one-billion-customer-dream that is debunked by the authors is that China is one homogeneous market. It is not. The vast area, the poor communications and logistics and the cultural differences makes China a difficult terrain to conquer. In many ways, China is like the European Union, with the same legal basis but different consumer preferences and with bureaucratic and practical problems for each sub-market to penetrate. Shanghai is as different from Kashgar as Paris is different from Vilnius.

The book is written in a classic schoolbook manner, which makes it slow to read and slightly boring at times. Nevertheless, it is a good counterweight to the abundant extatic China Fever literature.

After a Beijing brunch with one of the authors, I start to get the feeling that China is not so easy to describe in a book because of all the paradoxes. Speed is one example; some things are extremely fast in China, but other things are excruciatingly slow. They can build a house in a week, but it can take months to get the right stamp. How can I ever “understand” this? Maybe it is like quantum physics – you can never understand, only “get used to” how things work.

China is a worthy challenge!

Corporations are designed to be evil. At least that is the main point of Joel Bakan, the law professor at UBC, Vancouver. He published the book and the film “The Corporation” a couple of years ago, and now I got the opportunity to read it.

Bakan takes an interesting stand against the legal position as “person” that a corporation currently enjoys. At the same time, a corporation is similar to you and me in the sense that it can own things, but on the other hand it is strangely inhuman; There are laws (in most of the world) regulating that corporations _must_ go for profit instead of charity if there is a choice.
Corporate Social Responsibility is legally subordinate to Corporate Profitability, i.e. CSR is ok as long as it contributes to the bottom line – otherwise it must be ignored.
This creates a level of temptation to do immoral profitable activities that is too strong to resist, at least for the extensive list of colourful examples presented in the book.

The personality of the legal “person” of a corporation is therefore designed to be quite pervert – something that Bakan describes with sharpness, wit and disappointment.
And it is something I did not realize before.
Most of business books are written with a naive positivism regarding the powers of corporations, often spiced with idealistic values, see e.g. “Good to Great” by Jim Collins or “The 5th Discipline” by Peter Senge.

The insights of Bakan are unfortunately also consistent with my own experiences in multinational corporations. Immoral and illegal activities that increase profit do happen.

The question I am left with is – can I continue working in a corporation which is stimulated by legal requirements to be destructive?
Can I negotiate the counterforces and manage my parts of the operations in a positive and constructive way?
I sure will do my very best.

The contents are described in exquisite detail on the book’s website www.withouthotair.com. (Indeed, the whole book is available for free as a .pdf download!) However, it is worth mentioning the elegant buildup of the book: MacKay shows how much energy we use today, broken down into the ten major categories. This is compared with the possible power output of the possible sustainable energy sources like wind, solar, wave, tide, biomass,…

The buildup is very pedagogical and it is at once easy to understand the relative importance of various energy sources and sinks.

The book is written from a UK perspective, but the same calculations can be done for a country of your choice. MacKay has even setup a public wiki where people already started to do this for countries over the world.

I got inspired by the visualization techniques and the tools to get all numbers into a comparable format. It is not trivial how to compare a laptop computer with a bicycle commute, but MacKay has chosen a device that works all the way, see the columns to the right.
Since I read the book I have monitored our home energy consumption (gas and electricity) to better understand the energy impact of our family (kWh/day):

Expenses 2009 (click on image to see all of it)

This way, we can select smarter where to economize and in which domains of our family life we can afford some slack.  (For privacy reasons, I removed all numbers from these plots, but you can imagine or try out on your own transaction data!)

How to use the script: (leave a note here, and I can send you the .py file)

1. Download .csv of the transactions for the period of interest. At least from our on-line bank (Rabobank.nl – a cooperative and still well-run bank in Holland).

2. Adjust the script to categorize in your favourite way – and type in your exclusions. For us, transactions to and from our savings account do not constitute cash flow, so those were filtered out.

3. Generate graphs of your incomes and expenses!

Now you can use visual control for your own cash flow. If you want, you can even make run-charts!