Great Financial Statement Tools You Need for Your Business

For any business, strategic P&L (Profit & Loss) management is important to keep earnings positive and minimize expenses. If you’re tired of not knowing where your business stands financially, create a simple profit and loss statement or give one of our favorite accounting systems a try.

Choosing the right financial software can streamline the P&L management process. But with so many P&L reporting tools out there, which one is the most suitable for your business? Here’s a roundup of some great accounting tools that also offer profit and loss statements for small businesses:

QuickBooks

QuickBooks helps business owners make an accurate and professional profit and loss statement. Its P&L reports show total income, subtotals for income or expense accounts, profit margins, categorization of expenses and losses, detailed transaction lists for any entry, customized percentages, and identifications of over- or underspending. Plus, QuickBooks offers easy integrations and affordable monthly fees.

Xero

Xero’s solid accounting software comes with easy-to-use financial reporting tools that allow business owners to understand their real-time cash flow. Each package covers the basics, including financial performance reporting—meaning you won’t have to worry about paying more for the reports you need. And if you run into a problem, Xero provides customer support and has an abundance of how-to articles and tutorials.

Freshbooks

FreshBooks gives business owners a detailed breakdown of profit and loss, so you’ll know exactly how profitable you are. Each one of its packages offer financial performance reports, and to better serve its customers, FreshBooks offers complete mobile access for iPad, iPhone, Android devices, and other gadgets.

Wave

Wave has recently integrated P&L statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. Its financial reporting gives you the full picture when it comes to the health of your business. However, Wave’s number one selling feature is you only have to pay for extra services when you need them, which means the essential system is free with no strings attached.

GoDaddy Bookkeeping

GoDaddy Bookkeeping delivers real-time reports on profit and loss, total expenses, and more. Their platform is convenient even for business owners who don’t have accounting experience. Plus, they offer three affordable packages, ranging from $3.99 per month to $11.99 per month.

Effective Ways to Go Green and Maximize Office Expense

One of the most popular tag line is to "Go Green" and how beneficial it is to our lives, our businesses, and even to our planet. But unless you have taken the steps to implement the green revolution to your business, the entire act of going green may seem to be overwhelming or even impossible.

Don't worry because all you need to do is check out these simple yet effective ways on how you can smoothly direct your small business down to the "greener path."

Use recycled paper around the office.

The first step for many businesses is switching paper types. Purchasing recycled paper is as simple as heading to your local office supply store. Every major paper manufacturer offers recycled paper in a variety of sizes and uses. There’s no drop-off in quality, no major price differences, and it saves trees, water, energy, and space in your local landfill.

Reduce the paper clutter.

Alleviating paper clutter can mean many things to you depending on the size of your company, but here are a few easy tasks to complete that will make a difference.

Mailing Lists
Your company probably receives more junk mail than you realize. Some of it is unsolicited and that’s hard to manage, but plenty of it comes from mailing lists you’ve joined. Remove your company from as many non-essential mailing lists as possible and you’ll see a noticeable reduction in wasted paper from the mail.

Digital Subscriptions
Most companies today offer paperless solutions for their various correspondences. Banks, utilities, service providers, government agencies, newspapers, and trade magazines all offer email or web-based alternatives to traditional mailings. Switch to as many of these paperless solutions as possible and enjoy further reductions in the amount of needless paper in your mailbox.

Reuse Printer Paper
There will always be a need for scrap paper, so don’t throw paper away. Reusing pages that only have printing on one side is an excellent repurposing of a product. Printing double-sided documents whenever possible is also an excellent way to get the most out of your paper supply.

Use recycled printer ink cartridges and recycle old ones.

If you have to buy ink for several printers it can become quite expensive. Recycled ink and ink cartridges have gained prominence in the workplace and offer businesses a legitimate way to save real money. Savings can be as much 70 percent versus traditional ink cartridges.

Office supply stores and printer manufacturers offer rebate programs and other incentives to recycle used cartridges and purchase recycled inks. And you’ll never have to wonder if there are cartridges available for your specific printers. Recycled ink cartridge manufacturers offer solutions for every ink-jet and laser printer in use today.

Make the switch to energy-saving light bulbs.

This is one those “green” initiatives we hear a lot about but might not fully realize the full impact the right kinds of lighting products can have on your bottom line. Traditional light bulbs are horribly inefficient compared to today’s energy-saving bulbs.

LED Bulbs
These bulbs are ten times more efficient than incandescent bulbs. This translates to getting the same amount of illumination at a tenth the cost. The tradeoff for this type of technology comes in the up-front price. LED bulbs run approximately $35 per bulb, which can certainly add up to a substantial amount at one time. However, these bulbs also last 40-50 years before they need to be replaced, so that means they’re about $0.70-$0.88 per year.

Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL)
These bulbs are roughly seven times more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs and come in at a fraction of the price of LED bulbs. At roughly $4 per bulb, the ten-year lifespan comes to just $0.40 per year.

The savings on monthly utilities alone makes switching to the most energy-efficient bulbs and lamps you can afford a savvy financial move and a great way to green-up your company.

Start carpooling or using public transit.

Many companies offer employee incentives to carpool and to take advantage of public transportations. Preferred parking spaces are often an excellent incentive for employees to carpool, but there’s no limit on what a company can do to encourage participation in this type of program.

Public transportation companies also have incentives for businesses to participate in their clean air programs. These typically include discounted transit passes and some form of recognition for its participants.

There are countless ways you can take your company in a green direction; the trick is to just get started. Hopefully these ideas will get you moving in the direction you always wanted to take but weren’t sure if there was really a difference to be made.

Big Social Media No-Nos Your Business Should Avoid

When it comes to social media, many entrepreneurs are self-taught. You’ve learned your way around Facebook and Twitter with personal accounts, so you figure you’re good to go when it comes to a business account. Your experience will help, but there are some unspoken rules in the social media world that you might have missed while using the sites to dig up pictures of your old high school friends.

Whether you’ve just decided to launch a social media site for your new business, or already have a well-established social presence, it’s important to make sure your sites are professional. The following are some common social media mistakes that every business owner should avoid committing.

1.     Bad Trending Choices

When you’re posting to social media, it’s natural to take advantage of trending topics. However, it’s important to make sure your post is appropriate. Too many businesses try to capitalize on trending topics, and end up posting something insensitive.

For example, in 2012 after the mass shooting at the Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the hashtag #Aurora was trending, as Twitter users discussed the event and voiced their condolences. Apparently, the person tweeting for this clothing store didn’t know why #Aurora was trending, and attempted to use the hashtag to promote a dress. Needless to say, the tweet came off as inappropriate and insensitive.

Interacting with trending topics is a great way to generate social media activity for your business, but before attempting to utilize a trending topic to your business’s advantage, make sure to establish that the topic is relevant, appropriate, and not in bad taste.

2.     Overposting

When it comes to posting frequency, there isn’t a hard and fast rule, but you don’t want to alienate your followers by being a chronic “overposter.” You’ll want to look at your engagement levels to help guide the number of times you post, but if you’re using Facebook, three to five posts a week is a good number. When it comes to Twitter, a tweet a day is a steady amount of content.

3.     Failure to Respond

The whole point of social media is to engage with your target audience. If you’re not interacting with your followers, what’s the point? Even if a customer complains, or says something negative about the company, you still need to respond in a timely and appropriate manner.

Since social media is constantly up and running. If your business wants to establish a strong social media presence, your company should be prepared to respond to people's messages outside of your traditional business hours.

4.     Being Overly Promotional

You can mention an upcoming sale or advertise a new product on social media, but that shouldn’t be the only thing you’re serving on your sites. Use the 80/20 rule—eighty percent of your content should be engaging posts and information that your audience wants to read, while the remaining 20 percent should be promotional.

If your social media plan is to sell, sell, sell, you’re going to fail, fail, fail. You need to offer a diverse array of information on your sites. For example, if you own a clothing store, you could post links to fashion articles, ask for feedback on a hot new accessory, or post pictures of celebrity clothing trends. Diversity is the key to social media content.

Content Marketing Strategies Every Small Business Must Implement

Statistically speaking, small businesses are the slowest to adopt the latest content marketing strategies that larger, corporate marketers use. However, with SEO constantly evolving, it is clear that in order to remain competitive, small businesses have to create comparison guides, e-books, how-to's and other content products.

If you are ready to ensure that your content marketing strategy is successful, then you may want to consider implementing the following tips.

Make an Investment in Visual Content

There is no question that you live in a visual world. When it comes to content marketing, there is no difference. Digital technology is continuously evolving at a rapid pace and has provided marketers with the ability to tell stories with the use of infographics, videos, and other types of compelling imagery. In fact, 94 percent of content that includes visuals will receive more total views than strictly contextual content. This means you need to incorporate some type of visual element in all your posts, articles, and tweets.

Utilize A/B Testing Methods

Testing allows you to see what works and what doesn't. Software related to testing is now abundant and enables marketers to test and change any element of their strategy. You can use this to your advantage when you implement split testing and try out different call-to-actions, images and titles to see which one performs the best.

Make Use of Social Media

Aside from Facebook, a lot of social media platforms are also making their significant values on the web. While it is thought that LinkedIn and Whatsapp are the next contenders, sites such as Instagram and Pinterest are now the biggest competitors when it comes to social media. It is equally important that you take time to find out where your customers are in terms of social platforms and then join the conversation. Be sure to use these platforms to share content and promote engagement with your customer's one on one.

Repurpose Previously Used Content

Unless you have a large number of staff of content creators, it will likely be extremely difficult for you to produce a ton of material each day. If you want to maximize the value of every post you publish, then you should find ways of repurposing it for continual use. For example, you can take the key points of your article and create tweets or make an entire blog series off of a longer blog post. When you repurpose the content, it will extend its valuable life.

Learn to Curate Content

It is becoming more and clearer that your customers are not as interested in promotional content and instead, are more drawn to quality content that helps solve a problem. This means you need to eliminate the idea that you have to force-feed sales copy and instead invest some time and money into developing yourself and your business as a source of valuable content. When you curate content, you can provide your followers with the information that they want and need.

When Should You Invest in Dedicated IT Support for Your Small Business?

The answer to this question is simple: Today; right now; pick up the phone now or browse the Internet right now; not a minute more; do it now!

Of course, the reasons are pretty obvious if you have a small business -- it’s not practical to have your own dedicated IT or tech team directly employed to your business. This entails a large overhead with salaries, benefits, perhaps even an additional position for human resources (HR). Add this to the equipment setup that you need for the business such as desktop computers, maybe three or four laptops for higher management or the field operators, including networking and Internet access.

No small business today can do away with computers and the Internet as part of their daily operation, especially if the business needs to be visible at all levels. The main purpose of these computers is mainly to serve the business by sharing files and other devices in connection to sales and services. Another important function is communications; customers online and between the employees and management.

So, what happens when you run into all sorts of computer and technical problems that are all beyond your technical capacity?

These problems can create lost business transactions including lost customers and lost sales and opportunities. That is why it is always recommended to have a dedicated technical support service that you can subscribe to, and in terms of practicality, will cost less than having an IT department on standby.

Every business owner knows that when anything affects its computer infrastructure, then it follows that customers, potential business, and sales, and along these lines, profit and the chance for the company’s growth is lost. Unable to meet a customer’s deadline, unable to deliver a service on time, failing to answer a client inquiry, and other similar instances easily translates to lost sales.

In practical terms, any small business will benefit from an online and remote dedicated technical support service to solve any computer and related issues that may arise. Remember that all machines are similar and will eventually break down after a period of time of continuous usage.

A 24x7x365 online dedicated technical support by well-trained, well-equipped, and experienced network and technical support engineers is like owning a weapon. You would rather have it and not use it, than having a need to use it, and not have it. Best of all, the advantages of having full and dedicated technical support is quite straightforward:

§  Coverage and support for all types of networking, computer, and software issues, concerns, and brands.

§  Issues can be fixed at your convenient time so as not to disrupt your business operations.

§  Can help your business to understand computer issues and concerns to avoid re-occurrence.

§  Online remote sessions while you watch how the technicians fix your computers.

§  Repair of modem and home networking issues such as frequent disconnections including wireless concerns.

§  Setting up VoIP, Internet connection sharing, and networking.

§  Installation of programs or software including antivirus and antispyware programs.

5 Strategies to Help Your Business Succeed Thru Social Media

You may have probably been thinking how your competitors are using the best of social media in their business? Do you need help in getting started with your social media strategy? Every business has a specific set of goals and objectives that will guide them in order to successfully connect with their customers. Below, you will find some business strategies that might help you succeed and become a brand persona:

Identify the Goals of Your Business

It's next to impossible to move further without knowing the business goals you want to achieve. Whatever strategy you implement will work only when you're clear about your targets. You need to closely identify the overall needs of your business and how to reach those needs through social media.

Surely, you'll find a number of personalized goals when it comes to marketing through social media. Some of them can be included in your business strategy for attaining brand awareness, retaining customers, and to cut down the relevant costs.

Set Objectives to Measure Your Performance

Usually, the goals aren't useful if you don't have existing objectives and parameters that would let you know which goal you have accomplished. Eventually, it happens that one of your goals is already generating leads and sales, but you don't know how many leads you need to generate to move to the next target. You need to be smart to make your objectives specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, so that you can always keep track of your progress.

Once you're done with your objectives, it's also important to get those goals achieved with the deadline. If you don't set a deadline, your efforts and resources will get wasted.

Identify your Target Audience

If your business has low engagement on social media, it means you're not reaching out to the accurate audience. Your business can rapidly grow, once you reach out to the ideal customers, at the right time, in the right place. When you're clear with your target audiences' likes and dislikes, age, and interests, it will become easier for you to target them on social media.

Get to Know Your Competitors

When it comes to promoting your business on social media, you need to be aware of your competitors' social media strategy. This would give you an idea of how they work towards reaching their targets. If you find them good enough, you can also think opf ways of how to incorporate those tactics in your business. You can also keep an eye on the content and other stuff they are posting, understand their promotional strategies and ideas, and how they respond to their audience.

Choose the Appropriate Channel

If your target audiences are spending more time on one social media platform than the other, you need to choose the one which has more number of your possible audience. This is an easy way to reach out to more number of people in a very short time.

Almost every business in existence today has its own social media profiles. If you are new to social media marketing, without wasting much time, determine which network works best for your business and reach out to your audience.

Ways to Reduce IT Spending Cost for Your Small-Medium Business

We all know that running a small or medium-sized business means there are a lot of things you can’t do that large corporations can only do, such as have their own IT department and technical department. Of course, you still need some sort of IT infrastructure since computers are an essential part of any business, especially startups and those still in the stages of growing pains. So, how do you trim down the numbers without sacrificing so much and risk losing the business?

If you’re looking for ideas on how to reduce IT spending without risk of losing the forward progress of your business, these tips might come in handy.

Learn about and use open source

You can save a lot of money when you don’t have to dole out precious funds for licensing fees to Microsoft and other third parties. And don’t ever think that using open source applications will move your business backward. On the contrary, many startups today are adopting open source in wholesale fashion because it is the technology of the future, and it’s also reliable, scalable, secure, and ready to serve nearly every need you have.

Shift to virtualize your servers

Instead of constantly repairing and replacing those aging servers, why not go virtual instead? You’ll save a lot of money on hardware or buying new computers, and your backups will be much easier while and failover will be almost non-existent. Add to this the fact that maintenance on your virtual server farm will be greatly streamlined, and you’ll arrive with the same conclusion as many IT pros have seen for themselves, in that, virtualization is always a win-win situation.

Prioritize your spending

Prioritizing is especially important for fixed spending, especially for those things that your business can’t do without. In fact, this should be one of the first things you do when faced with a small and fixed budget. Go through it line by line and prioritize the items you can’t do without. Then take them off the table and move on to what you can do without. While you’re prioritizing, make sure the spending on your priority item is really in existence. If item A is a priority, make sure the budget you have earmarked for item A is accurate. If you think you need to adjust on anything, then do so at once.

Outsource to data centers

If you’ve been spending a lot of money on legitimate licenses, but that is costing you a higher percentage of your budget than you deem necessary, migrate from a local server to a hosted server. Plenty of those services are available and they will save you money. You can also migrate away from that costly local backup solution and move it to the cloud since many data centers offer that as well.

Seek good advice from others

Seek the opinion of others who were affected by IT change, especially from your friends. They will give you key insight as to what works and what should be changed.

Services Every Startup Business Should Have

When we say “startup,” it usually means the business begins at a relatively small scale, but still needs to have services even if they don’t have sufficient budget or personnel to provide such. Remember that you still need to compete with other companies that may have the resources to hire expert staff dedicated to specific services. Fortunately, the beauty of today’s technology and the Internet can cut down or provide these services at reasonable cost or at no cost at all.

General Marketing

Almost every startup business and existing ones today has a website, as it should be since this is the digital age. Having a website is one of the biggest steps in marketing in order to give exposure to your products or brand. And it’s one thing to have a really nice website (an ugly site won’t get you visitors, by the way) and it’s another matter to have good analytics, page authority rankings, inbound links, and search engine optimization (SEO) so people can find your website.

Social Media Management

This is also the age of social media so not having any form of social media marketing is a form of startup suicide. In today’s competitive social media environment, startup businesses need several social media accounts, often just for people to find the actual business website. In fact, just having a website is no guarantee people will find your business. Social media services allow potential customers real-time inquiries that should also be responded to in real-time. In some cases, some sales can even be closed on social media without the buyer even visiting the startup’s website.

Customer Relationship Management

This is quite different from the customer relationships you strike up on the website and social media. It’s more of keeping track and following up on potential and present customers. It’s one thing to make a sale, but it’s another thing to keep track of that customer and get that person to talk about your product or brand to other people. This management aspect also needs to keep track of e-mail and hangout conversations (some customers still prefer the good ‘ol e-mail), as well as contacts and deals made with other companies or suppliers. This includes all current deals existing and recent tasks involving suppliers. It also involves creating a list of contact fields for all present customers.

Accounting

Of course accounting is important because accounting doesn’t just involve overheads and operational expenses and counting profits. Accounting involves invoicing, sales, payments, and billings that all involve customers. Keeping monetary track of what your customers are buying and repeatedly buying will translate later to marketing analytics. Also, showing your customers that you can provide effective billing, invoicing, etc. is showing them that you are an effective and competent business.

Project Management

If your startup business is into providing some form of service rather than products, then you need to rely on a really effective project management in order to provide your customers the service they truly deserve, and are paying for. You need to monitor your workforce, keep proper files, resources, to-do lists, and constant updates of everything that is conveniently organized.

Why Cloud Can Be the Best Choice for Your Business's Backup Plan

What is Cloud Computing?

Instead of local computers in an office or business doing all the work, with each computer running separate licensed applications and software, this network of computers can be handled by the cloud instead. Hardware and software demands for the user decreases all the computers can be run from the cloud computing system’s interface software, which can be as simple as a web browser, and the cloud’s network takes care of the rest.

The best example for cloud computing is the use of an e-mail account with a web-based e-mail service like Yahoo! Mail or G-mail. Instead of running an e-mail program on your computer, you log in to a web e-mail account remotely. The software and storage for your account doesn’t exist on your computer because you access it on the service's computer cloud.

And speaking of storage, another useful aspect of cloud computing is as a storage backup for all your important data and files.

Cloud Storage Services

Storing your data backups at an off-site location is the best way to ensure that a copy of your most critical business data will remain sheltered from any cataclysmic event that may befall your business. And what better way to achieve geographical separation than by storing your data at various centers located across the globe?

Choosing a goodcloud storage provider that has a good track record for reliability will help ensure that your data is available when you need it. Some cloud services use innovative storage techniques to yield lower storage and operational costs. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with such efforts, you should always scramble data with robust encryption prior to entrusting it to an external organization for safekeeping.

Disaster planning storage backup: it might never happen, but you’ll never know.

It’s the same concept with having a first aid kit -- It’s better to have it there but not need it, rather than needing it, but it’s not there.

Assess the threats

Consider what could seriously damage your computers externally, for instance, a fire on your premises, natural disasters like earthquakes or hurricanes, or even a hacker attack.

Determine the likelihood of each threat

Some are definitely more probable than others. You can seek expert advice for each disaster to assess risk levels.

Assess what maximum potential damage may occur

For instance, would the threat take your main customer database offline? Or would the impact be relatively minor? Your disaster planning should prioritize threats with the highest likelihood of happening and the potential to cause most damage.

Have other backup systems in place aside from cloud storage

You might also consider adding other backup systems such as DVD’s or external hard disks. Also consider other minor disaster preparedness like having uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to keep your server running and avoid damage to desktops.

Once you’ve put a business disaster recovery plan together, test it. See how your communications work in practice, and how long it takes you to get back to working again.