For the small business, Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are a great option for centralizing business files. A NAS device is essentially a self-contained computer connected to a network with the sole purpose of supplying storage to other computers on that same network. They generally do not have a keyboard or display and are controlled and configured over the network. NAS devices are available at your local big-box electronics store for prices as low as a couple hundred dollars.

NAS devices are great, but businesses that have more than a handful of users and need extensive use of centralized storage will require a more robust solution. File servers offer the same types of services that NAS can and more. As the needs for centralized storage increase, additional file servers can be added to increase capacity. Businesses working with a lot of multimedia or very large files fit this scenario quite well. There are many different solutions available, the most important is that you get started.

How Can Centralized Storage Help You?

There are a few benefits to having your business files all in one place and each one is a strong enough reason on its own for you to get started even if you have only 2 computers.

Increased productivity

If person working on computer A needs a file that a person working on computer B created, many will simply email a duplicate to the co-worker. Changes are made and then emailed to someone working on yet a different computer. After a while there are many copies and it’shard to know which is current. By having them in one place you can feel confident that people are always working with the correct file.

Increased reliability

Many of the problems that affect computers are storage related, and these problems often happen at the worst possible time. One or more of your computers having difficulties is not a problem when your files are centralized. You can always access your files from any other working computer giving you the ability of printing that client proposal and winning a contract.

One location to backup

In an earlier article, I talk about how important it is to backup your files. My free step by step tutorial guiding you on creating your first backup shows you how to get started with a single computer. Backing up multiple computers can become a burden. If all your computers were looking in one place for your files, you only have one place to backup.

Files accessible to every authorized user

Each centralized solution can provide the ability of limiting access to certain files to authorized users only. You might only want your senior staff make changes to the financial planning documents, and have everyone be able to view the equipment manuals.

Delete That Email

This tip has the biggest impact on the amount of emails you need to sort through in the future, but it is the hardest to do. When you read an email think to yourself, is there any realistic expectation that I will have to read this email again next year? There are definately some emails you will need to keep, such as emails authorizing you to do work, emails the tax agency may need to see in the next seven years, written agreements between two parties and any other items that prove important in any kind of audit. Office jokes, meeting reminders and short questions between peers are prime candidates for deletion.

Seperate Business From Pleasure

Just as people have a work phone number seperate from a home phone number, you should have a work email address and a home email address. Give your work email address to your professional contacts and your home email address to your family and friends. Keeping your important emails seperate from the jokes you may receive from friends improves your ability to stay organized.

Use Folders to Group Emails

Sorting your emails into different folders helps to group certain emails. Before you go making a bunch of folders, you will need to think of what you are most likely to remember when looking for an email in the future. If your company deals with many clients you may want to have folders for each client. If you work on projects with many people involved you may want to have folder for each project. There is no single structure of folders that will work for everybody, but be careful when creating them. Folders can be great at organizing but having too many folders can be difficult to manage going forward.

Don’t Forget Sent Items

By default most email programs save a copy of each email you send, so you will want to organize these as well. You can add them to the folders that you already have created or you can create a new folder structure for emails that you have sent.

Split your Archived Email

Many email programs allow you to archive your email, and prompt you to do so every couple weeks. While archiving your email is a good thing, a little more thought needs to go into it. Should you just have one archive file for all emails you have ever received? Splitting your archive helps keep each archive file smaller and easier to manage. Again you need to think of what will you remember most when digging into those archived email. Breaking your emails into a couple smaller archived files can improve the performance of your email program. I split my archived email files into years, so every New Year I change my email program to save my archived email into a new file. I find myself rarely going back further than a year when looking for older emails.

Use a Rules Engine

If you find yourself moving similar emails to the same folder repetitively, you can set up a rule that will automatically move emails for you. The first couple rules you setup will feel clumsy, but the few seconds you save with each email processed by a rule will add up quickly! With many email programs you can usually right click on an email and you will be presented with an option of creating a rule based on that email.

Use Search

Organizing your emails into folders is a good start in being able to find a particular email. But even smaller folders can contain up to hundreds or even thousands of emails. Use your email program’s built in search to look for a particular email, it will be able to find it far faster than you browsing through emails individually.

Do you like to organize you email differently? What tips do you think you can offer that will help others?

Should I stay or should I go?

Within a few seconds of visiting your home page customers expect to be guided to find the information they seek. Your home page should be able to tell the customer in a sentence or two what the main purpose of the web site is for (eg: providing information, selling services, online retail) and guide the visitor to find what they are looking for quickly. You have 5 seconds to provide this information before they decide weather or not this website will be able to fulfil their needs.

Ease of Navigation

If a customer has decided to stay on your website after visiting the home page, they expect to find their way around your page easily. Navigation style should be easily identifiable and organized. It should be consistent throughout the entire site. Customers should be able to get to any page in your website by visiting at most 2-3 pages before reaching their destination.

Find and Purchase / Order a Product or Service

Customers visiting your website may be expecting to be able to purchase or order what you offer. The way that you offer your products on your website should be the same throughout the entire site. Additionally, some have expectations on how the order can be processed after they submit it to you.

• Can they check the status (processing, shipping) of the order afterwards?
• Do they get proactive notifications of the order through every step?
• Can they order online, but pick it up at your store?
• Can they return goods purchased online at your store?

Consistent Look and Feel

A customer browsing your web site expects to get comfortable and familiar with what they are looking at. The titles should always appear in the same area, as should the navigation and content of the page. Distractions such as pop-ups and excessive advertisements can reduce the level of comfort of the visitor and cause them to leave.

A Clear Purpose or Message

Customers expect a single, clear message from each page on your web site. Simple mistakes involving spelling, grammar and a tone inconsistent with the rest of the site are mistakes every website should try to avoid.

You may want to seek out the services of a local copywriter whose job is to write the textual content of your web site. They should write text that persuades the visitor with your message and also manipulates the wording to place your site higher in search engine rankings.

What do you Expect?

What do you expect when visiting another website? What attracts you to buy and what makes you leave? Leave your comments below!

Software

1. Quickbooks Easystart: Using QuickBooks EasyStart is as its name suggests; easy. It takes just a few minutes to get started and soon you will be creating invoices, tracking payments and managing expenses. There is a free edition if you have less than 20 customers, making it affordable for consultants just starting off.
2. Microsoft Office 2007: A popular office productivity suite among businesses. You can write letters, generate financial spreadsheets and create presentations.
3. Contact Management: In business you will have many contacts and organization will be key. Microsoft Office’s Outlook has contact management that integrates well with Quickbook Easystart. If you are going to be in a fairly heavy sales type role you might want to look into tools with additional features.

Office Equipment

1. All In One Printer: As much as we prefer not to print things, it is still necessary for presentations and providing written documents that need to be shared. There are a variety of good products made by Hewlett-Packard and Brother. Features often include: scanner/photocopier, fax, network connection and automatic document feeder (ADF) for photocopying multi-page documents.
2. Shredder: Documents no longer needed often contain sensitive information and should not be viewed again. A cross cutting shredder is perfect for protecting the privacy of your business and your clients.

Mobility

1. Mobile phone: Every business owner should at least have a mobile phone, but as a business tool I recommend a smart phone. Research in Motion’s BlackBerry is the most popular smart phone in business, though I prefer the Apple iPhone myself. Many smart phones offer the ability to synchronize to Outlook.
2. Laptop: Many professionals work away from the office as much as or more than being in the office. A laptop gives you the freedom to work out of the office and the portability you need when making a presentation to an audience of any size.

Marketing

1. Business Cards: One of the most important tools for word of mouth advertising, business cards allow your clients to recommend you to their friends.
2. Web site: Provides your clients and potential clients with 24/7 access to the information they need about you and your business. Include reference to previous work done, contact information and be sure to tell them how you can help them.
3. Social Media: There are many social media sites out there, but many business people find LinkedIn very important in making contacts. Other social media sites include Facebook and Twitter. YouTube is another popular site where you could demonstrate some of your knowledge for free. You can upload short 1-3 minute videos of yourself providing advice in your area of expertise.

The first tip is just to make sure the printer gets used. If you aren’t printing something at least monthly the inkjet nozzles (for an inkjet printer) can dry up and stop working. Dust can collect inside the printer and cause jams. By printing at least one page a month, you can prevent dry nozzles and remove some of the dust from the inside. Fill out the form below to receive a free monthly email reminding you to print something.

The second tip is to give it a gentle cleaning. Every couple of months spend a couple of minutes wiping down the outside of the printer. Just use a soft cloth slightly damp with water, stay away from cleaners as they can often damage the covers. Once done cleaning the outside, take a vacuum and remove any dust from the inside. You don’t want to use compressed air as it can blow the dust onto the ink nozzles.

The last tip is to cover it up when not in use. This tip is especially important if your printer is in a dusty environment. They are available at computer supply stores, and will help keep your printer safe and clean.

These simple tips can often be forgotten in the daily tasks of running a business. Fill out the form below to receive a free monthly email reminding you to perform the various tasks in this article to help keep your printer in good working condition.

This weekend I noticed that QuickBooks 2010 is now available (in Canada) and I went through the process of upgrading my 2009 copy to 2010. If you are currently using QuickBooks (any version) or if you are not using any business financial software, here are a few reasons that you should consider getting QuickBooks 2010.

• Company Home Page- It’s easy to find the tasks you need the most from the QuickBooks Home Page. This page is arranged the same way that money flows within your company, and there are even arrows that illustrate the flow. Starting at the left, you can create Estimates for your clients. From there you can create invoices, record payments received, create sales receipts and record deposits. If you keep track of inventory you can create purchase orders (that transfer information from estimates), record the inventory received, and enter the bills for the inventory received. There are other sections such as company management tasks (accounts, items & services) and banking (writing cheques, reconciling accounts, entering credit card charges).
• Company Snapshot – The Company Snapshot helps you save time and manage cash flow so you can make better business decisions. In a single screen it shows information like: income and expense trend, which customers owe you money, what bills need to be paid, and select account balances.
• Quickly Find Anything – With the customer centre QuickBooks collects all transaction types (Estimates, Invoices, Sales Receipts, Payments, etc) and displays them in one area. You can use the new search functionality to quickly find the invoice you did for “that one customer in St. Adolphe” and when it was paid.
• Sales Tax Made Easy – You can setup different types of items in QuickBooks for the services and products you offer. Some services and products have different tax settings and QuickBooks has the ability to handle any tax combination your product/service may have. QuickBooks will also help you prepare accurate returns by calculating the tax as you work, and it will show you reports that look just like your sales tax returns – with all the right amounts already filled in. New with 2010, you can click a single button and the tax return is sent with eFile!
• Multicurrency Functionality – The multi currency feature lets you transact seamlessly in any number of currencies from around the world – without worrying about looking up exchange rates or getting your calculator out to convert currencies.
• Compatability with Windows 7 – Microsoft has been working hard on the replacement to Windows Vista, and Windows 7 will be pre-installed on all new computers starting in late October. Previous versions of QuickBooks aren’t compatible, and Intuit does not offer support for Windows 7 with prior versions. QuickBooks 2010 is being supported and after my installation I found it works quite well.

Smart phones can function as personal organizers letting you make written and voice notes, keep track of appointments with a calendar, manage contact lists and create automatic reminders wherever you may be. You can synchronize your smart phone with your computer so that information is never lost and stays consistent.

With smart phones you are almost always connected to the internet. You can access maps and directions to destinations, weather and traffic reports, watch videos, view your email including attachments and search or browse the internet.

Smart phones offer built-in digital cameras with immediate snap and send functionality. You can instantly photograph and send images of anything from products, site inspections or damaged machinery and send them as email attachments to anybody.

One challenge in making a decision on acquiring a smart phone is that you need a voice and a data plan. The voice plan covers all the phone calls that you would make and are often measured in day time and evening minutes. Data plans cover all the information that your phone sends and receives, is measured in the number of Mega Bytes that you download, and is not quite as straight forward. A mega byte is the equivalent of approx 500 text only emails, 7 or 8 web pages, or 1 or 2 photos. A video is often a couple mega bytes.  Using these numbers as rough guidelines, you should be able to estimate what you will need in a data plan.

Various research suggests that only 25% of small and medium businesses actually backup their information although 80% conceded that they would not be able to carry on without it. As a computer ages it is more likely that the information stored on it could be in jeopardy. It can be financially tough to start a business so many are started on older computers because they are easily available.

Setting up an automated backup process for a small business computer can take as little as 15 minutes and there are various software packages out there that can be used to make the process much easier, Allway Sync Backup Solution is highly recommended. When setting up your backup software to run there are a few things you need to consider.

Subscribe to our updates and be the first to receive the video tutorial I am in the middle of creating to walk you through the process of setting up a simple backup.

How often do you need to backup your information?

If you were to lose all your information 10 minutes before your next backup, how far back would you be willing to go to rework it? This answer will be different for each scenario, but be honest with yourself. Backups can take between 10 minutes and 1 hour so having a backup done every 5 minutes is unrealistic. For many small businesses a backup at the end of the day is beneficial  so that if any information is lost it would only have to be reworked from what was done since the beginning of the day.

What are you going to backup your information to?

Depending on the amount and types of information you may chose to backup to a DVD, USB drive, external hard drive, online storage or any combination of the latter. DVDs are nice if you have a small amount of information so you have a separate DVD for each backup. However needing to be organized as they accumulate can be time consuming. USB drives are nice for a small amount of information and portability and price are a benefit. External hard drives can store a tremendous amount of information. Although their cost continues to drop, they are not as portable as other options.

What information needs to be saved?

You don’t need to save your programs, because they are stored on the disk that you installed them from. If the software was acquired digitally find out if it can be downloaded at a later date for free and if not you should make a copy onto a disk for that purpose. Data files created by these programs need to be saved. A good practice is to save everything that you create in your Documents folder (or pictures / videos depending on what you need). By having everything in a smaller amount of folders it will be easier to backup.

Where should I keep my backups?

Keeping your backups on a shelf above the computer is very handy if the computer stops working but not so helpfull in case of fire. Hopefully fire isn’t as likely to happen so a balance of off-site (away from the building your business is in) and on-site backups are the way to go. If your business is in the home ask a relative or good friend if you can drop off a backup every once in a while. It would be a good opportunity to keep in touch!

Test your backups

Many people go years in creating backups and when the backup is needed they find out that they have been backing up a blank disk. Every once in a while take your backup to a different computer and test your backup by trying to recover something you have recently been working on.

Now what if your computer goes down and were told that you had just lost all electronic information about your business?  No sweat, you have a backup solution that works!

Subscribe to our updates and be the first to receive the video tutorial I am in the middle of creating to walk you through the process of setting up a simple backup.

To help demonstrate why I think accounting packages are the best way, I will walk through the 4 phases startup business go through. In  the examples below we will focus on invoices, but the concepts can apply to many different forms such as estimates, purchase orders and more.

Document Templates- Most business computers come with some sort of Office Suite (Microsoft Office is the most common) which includes a document editor. Startup costs are very important to control, and very often tools already available are used to suit the current needs. Invoices are normally very structured in layout whereas document editors usually produce very fluid layouts, with unprofessional results.

Initial costs of using a document template are very low, however when the business decides to upgrade the way invoices are done all the information will need to be re-captured. Also, calculations done on a document template are done manually and very susceptible to human error.

Spreadsheet Template – Months later, as the business gets more familiar with the Office suite and the spreadsheet program, they begin to realize that spreadsheets are powerful and can do many of the calculations that weren’t automatic in the document editor. The invoices produced begin to have the structured layout, however the invoices are stored in multiple excel files and after a while organization of these excel files become a problem.

Like document templates, spreadsheets are initally low in cost. Setting up a really good template can take a few hours of someone who is very experienced with spreadsheets. Invoices saved as spreadsheets are difficult to browse through or to find previous information. Organization of the invoices are key, and there are many different ways of trying to organize them.

Basic Accounting Package – Using an entry level accounting package is the first step businesses take towards having a solid invoicing solution. These accounting packages all come with a default template that has the most common pieces of information found on invoices. These templates are usually colorless and very plain.

Using basic accounting packages for recording invoices allows for easy searching, and browsing previous invoices by date or by customer. Although invoices and other form templates have not yet been customized, the data will always be there. Many accountants can work with the files that these accounting packages produce, reducing the workload required for balancing your books.

The only disadvantage that I see to using the templates out of the box is that they are very generic and don’t have the branding that your business should have.

If a video tutorial showing you how to setup one of the recommended accounting packages interests you, please request information from us.

Customizing Accounting Package Templates – Accounting packages usually have templates for the estimates, invoices and other client correspondence produced. As businesses become aware of the importance of branding and consistently presenting a single image for all printed and online material, the templates are changed to incorporate the colors and logo of the business.

Changing the template for invoices and other forms usually take effect for previous items that have already been created, so that when they are reprinted they have the updated look.

If a video tutorial showing you how to customize the various templates for your accounting package interests you, please request information from us.