You know, sometimes I don’t give the government enough credit. If you know where to look, there are actually a lot of good resources available to help you with your money.

In my continuing coverage on how to reduce expenses in your small business, I give you another way to save money on bank fees.

Here’s a great resource I ran across yesterday. It’s on the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada’s site.

FCAC – Cost of Banking Guide.

This is an interactive guide, that steps you through a set of questions about your banking needs. Once you’ve given them an estimate of your monthly usage, it spits out a comparison of all the banks that offer compatible accounts. So, in my case, after I told them the ridiculous number of transactions I do in a month, and checked off all the boxes for added services I require (email money transfers is a big one), it gave me a chart with 16 different bank accounts. Here’s a partial screenshot of the results.

I guess I’ve heard of the President’s Choice accounts in passing, but I certainly never gave them a second thought in the past. Did you know they offer free, unlimited chequing accounts? I was happy to see that the account I use for my personal banking was listed at #2, so I’m not doing too bad compared to some. I also wasn’t surprise to see that, in last place, was RBC’s equivalent account that rang in at $30/month. I suppose paying 3x as much as ScotiaBank’s rates has benefits…I just haven’t figured them out yet.

I really encourage you all to go check out the link, and see where your current account ranks compared to other options out there.

There are other interactive banking tools on the FCAC site that may be helpful as well. It’s worth a look, considering this 5 minute trip might just have saved me $120/year.

When you’re a numbers junkie, you obsess about ALL numbers, not just ones that relate directly to your job.

The worse thing that has happened to my productivity over the past year is analytics. I know, in the end, that these stats don’t help me out proportionally to the time I spend pouring over them. It doesn’t change the fact that I find them absolutely fascinating. So, when I came across a post at Blogging Teacher that talked about the busiest time of the day for your blog, I immediately had to find out more. Here’s the original post.

How to Find the Busiest Time of Day for your Blog

A few minutes later, I have some official results. Apparently my blog runs, more or less, on school hours.

As you can see from the chart, traffic starts to pick up at about 7am, gets really busy at 8am, and then drops off slightly just after 3pm.

If I think about it, this makes sense. This looks a lot like my workday too. I do the majority of my work when the kids are at school, and get a few more things done while I eat supper. You see that small spike at midnight? That’s me reading my RSS feeds before bed. Apparently you and I have a lot in common.

If you run your own blog, give this a shot, and let me know what your results show.

To sites have caught my attention lately: Quora and Formspring. They both give people the chance to ask and answer questions, but in different ways.

Formspring.me is more 1 on 1, where you setup a profile and invite people to ask you questions. You can also follow other people, ask them questions, or even send out a question to all of your “friends”.

Quora is much more of a gathering. Questions are posed to the masses, and anyone can join in to answer. Quora got some early buzz, and high profile CEO’s were answering questions alongside us lesser known folks.

Tumblr also has a feature like this, although it certainly doesn’t have the social media buzz. Any Tumblog has the option to enable the “Ask Me Anything” feature, so readers can pose questions that show up on your blog.

What I’m wondering is, would this be something you would be interested in using? I have the “Ask That Bookkeeper” link on the site, but I haven’t promoted it at all. It links to my Tumblr page at the moment. I would be more than willing to answer any and all questions you may have about all sorts of topics: small business, bookkeeping, social media, home businesses, Indie Music, cool iTunes playlists, or why radio is awful.

In this scenario, Formspring seems like the best choice. I personally find Quora to be too chaotic; almost like Twitter if you followed everyone. Tumblr isn’t a bad option either, but the Q&A itself isn’t as social, so it ends up being much more 1-way. So, if anyone happens to have a question, here’s where to ask it.

Ask That Bookkeeper http://formspring.me/thatbookkeeper.

If you sign up, I’ll be sure to follow you back and ask some questions of my own. See you there!