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Late payments and lost payments

17th February 2015 by Alan Leave a Comment

And online tools that can help!

As we research topics that could be interest to our clients, we do occasionally come across something that really makes us think. Only a few days ago, we came across a post from October 2014 that we could relate to and, we are sure, so can many of our customers.

Time is of the essence

Tempus fugit (time flies), as the famous Latin saying goes and it is certainly true when it comes invoicing for the work completed by business on behalf of other businesses.

Increasingly, small and online businesses are realising the potential of email their invoices to companies, ready for payment. Some larger businesses, perhaps more cumbersome and lumbering in their accounting procedures, may send out paper invoices. Before this paper invoice is generated and mailed to clients, the hoops that have been jumped through and the swings that have been swung in order to generate it will have been fairly gargantuan.

Keeping track of these paper invoices can be an entirely separate task in itself and, in larger organisations, it is. Once one section has produced the invoice, another section within accounting is responsible for chasing and securing payment. For corporations, this is a huge task…

The 30, 60 or 90 day rule that could be preventing businesses from growing

But, it is not just the time spent in chasing payments that is the issue here; for suppliers, there is a far more pressing concern. How many times have you completed work for someone, submitted your invoice only to be told that the company has a 30, 60 or, worse still, a 90 day payment window?

Although irritating, these payment windows and slow payments from companies have never really been challenged… until now and it is the power of cloud based accounting that is really beginning to push the boundaries of what is an acceptable time lapse between submitting an invoice and being paid.

What is an acceptable time frame between invoice and payment? The answer is… there isn’t. In order for commerce to flow, and for small businesses to manage their cash flow (as well as the larger organisations too), the time has come to kick the 30, 60 or 90 payment period in to touch.

Cloud based invoicing, claim some experts, is introducing transparency, ease of administration and speed to both invoicing and payments, excellent news for the small and local businesses out there trying to manage a cash flow.

A cruel reality

Running a business is about taking a degree of acceptable risk; someone likes your products or services. You may charge a small deposit but, in most cases, businesses will complete the work before payment.

The invoice is submitted and then you must wait… and wait… and possibly wait a little longer. In all this time, you are attempting to manage a cash flow that may have dwindled to nothing, or very little. Late payments, the cruel reality in many a case, are responsible for driving many businesses to the wall.

And, if you think it only affects you, think again. One global insurance company estimates that there is around $2 trillion locked into late payments at any one time across the globe.

And the solution is…

As well-being clear about YOUR payment terms – payment due on receipt is a nice way of saying ‘pay now’ – there are other tricks too…

Discounts – before you all faint at such a ridiculous suggestion, experts suggest turning the ‘fines’ for late payments on its head. Include a payment fee, they suggest, on the invoice amount (adding 20% for example) but, if payment is received within xx number of days (you set the time), this 20% is automatically deducted.
Get a 3^rd party to do it… and chase – some businesses are also realising that investing in their cash flow is important and thus, outsource their invoicing and chasing payments to a third company. For those of us who ‘hate asking for money’, this is a perfect way of completing the transaction.

Cloud computing – does it have the answer?

The crux of the article from 2014 was simple; a clever chap had realised that the issue lay in not only generating invoices, but keeping track of them and speeding up the whole process. At the time, he was working for the Danish Government, who generated thousands of invoices per year as well as paying thousands of invoicing per year to suppliers, large and small.

Developing an online system, he not only made the whole payment system faster and more transparent, but doing business with government departments became a far easier process; local, smaller suppliers felt more confident doing business with departments, and working on larger projects too, for payment was easier and quicker to come by.

Invoicing software – generate invoices and track payments

Running a business is hard enough without worrying about generating the right invoices for the right people for the right amount… and keeping tabs on who has paid and who hasn’t. Larger businesses create their own system and for the smaller business, short on time and skills, there are many online invoicing systems that are just right for your business; some are paid for and some are free.

However, type in accounting or invoicing software and you will have a plethora of apps and programs to choose from. Your invoices and money are important, thus the issue of trust is important when it comes to such things, so exactly how do you make your choice?

Subscriptions and size

Many online invoicing systems offer a subscription service by which you buy ‘enough’ invoicing capacity for your business; this works especially well for businesses who may not generate many invoices within a monthly period, enabling you to keep costs down. The dashboard of the online application should be easy to use, self-explanatory and, if possible, offer you the features that are not superfluous to requirements. In other words, make sure it does everything you want without the fancy (expensive) extras.

For example, if you have recurring payments or send out invoices in batches, does the program offer this ability?

Security

Just like accessing your bank account online, the security for any online invoicing app should be at a high level. Also called ‘bank level security’, there should be three factors that are apparent (but you may need to read the small print to find them!):

Encryption – data needs to be encrypted to prevent it being useful to hackers
Bank level security – as we have already mentioned, any online app you use, especially where you are creating links to bank accounts or online payment systems such as PayPal should have the highest level of security
Redundancy – this refers to the storage of your data by the provider; in most cases, there will be two server sites, one a replica of the other. Should the system be hacked or compromised due to weather and other natural disasters, you should be able to still access your mirrored data from the ‘other’ site.

Billing

These invoicing apps can also be used as a billing gateway; in other words, your customer receives the invoice and they pay via online means. Again, such sites need to have all the security and data encryption expected, as you customers will expect this too. Look for online solutions that off you a range of payment gateways that are popular, such as PayPal and Google Checkout. If your online business operates globally, the more options you have for payment the better.

However, there are processing fees – either on a per transaction basis or a monthly one – from some payment providers, which can seriously cut into your profit margins. Check these fees carefully.

Ease of use

A common issue with many services of this ilk is the fact that using them requires a PhD in in Mathematical Computing. If they offer a free trial – as most online software programs do – why not opt for a dummy run, to see how easy it is to use, as well as whether the program suits your business? Many of these software programs offer brilliant features which you don’t realise how useful they are until you have them – for example, tracking sales and payments are two essential components of keeping tabs on the financial health of your business.

Scalability

You may be expecting your business to grow in the coming months and that is all fine and dandy… until you realise the online program you have been using will not scale up with your business and you are back to square one.

Those that offer a modular approach work really well; buying more chunks as you need them, as well as add-ons are a perfect of scaling up, without having to buy the ultimate package.

And finally…

Help and support are two key components of online invoicing and financial tracking programs. Many of these apps offer instant chat options, perfect if you have a quick question or query. Email support is also invaluable but, sometimes, there is no compensation for having a telephone chat…

Appreciating the hamster wheel

14th October 2014 by Alan Leave a Comment

How running an online, local business can zap you but here we look at how you can hold on to your creativity and well-being, whilst still ‘producing volume’

We came across a great article about creativity and how for us ‘creative types’ – web designers, graphic designers, writers, gardeners, teachers, any business-owner really…– struggle with this thing called creativity when clients want or demand it in VOLUME.

Volume is a word that sends shivers down many a creative person’s spine, which is not surprising when you consider the implications it has for you, so we will try not to mention it again.

But we all know the tug, push and pull of it.

You started you company or business, got it going on line and in the pull to make money and create a viable business, you needed (and still need) to pull in paying customers but you want to remain true to the smaller details that you think sets you apart from everyone else.

You want to maintain quality, but still bust the quantity targets every month… you see where we are going with this, don’t you?

It’s a never-ending task

In fact, it’s a hamster wheel that you keep on turning until you fall off, exhausted at the end of the day, sleep, eat and then get back on.

In fact, it’s not really a ‘task’; it is life and it is business but, just as you want to avoid the treadmill and the rat race of working for someone else, preferring to set your own hours and working conditions, you find that the treadmill has crept back in.

But, every turn of your hamster wheel is creating something. You just need to start appreciating it…

There are all kinds of hints and tips that you may find useful and, here at Locally, we are a great believer in sharing with others and using what works for us. And so, as we trawl around the web, just going about our daily stuff, we come across all kinds of great things and we stumbled across this little gem of an app… idonethis.

Go find it at www.idonethis.com

At first glance…

It doesn’t look much; it’s free to register and then basically, it sends you an email every day at a time that suits you (you set it) and in this email it asks you “what have you done today?”.

In the email is a highlighted box and you press the ‘today’s dones’ (not brilliant grammar but wait for it…) and you complete the box.

Is that it?

Well, er… yes and no. You can also ask it for analysis, spotting keywords and it can then tell you what you seem to be spending most of your time on.

Not that interesting is it?

Well, er, no BUT it does something that is psychologically amazing.

Picture the scene…

You have been at your desk since 7.30am. You have completed various menial admin tasks and created a few exquisite products. It is not 5pm and people are leaving for home and you should be too but you feel somehow deflated. The day has been busy but you don’t seem to have banked any money – in fact, the bank balance is the same as it was this morning. Everyone else seems to have been beavering away too but what have they done, what have they achieved?

Up bobs your email from ‘idonethis’ and hey presto, you have to think about what you HAVE done…

As you start to type in those small boxes, the list starts to lengthen and, before you know it, you flick the desk light off and skip out the door because, actually you have achieved quite a lot – a lot more than you think.

Instant positive mental stroke. G-R-E-A-T!

Other features

Add a team!

It also has, as part of the ‘free’ app the possibility of adding team members; so if you work with people remotely it is a great way of sharing what people have done and when. Rather than seeing this as monitoring their work or assessing the quality, it is about touching base, just seeing where people are at. We also like the fact that if people are struggling, they are more likely to point this out and ask for help.

Or, like us, you may find that your small team will be dispersed across the country and if you have a client waiting for a website, just knowing what the left hand is doing/has done also means you have the information at your fingertips.

Export and create spreadsheets

This is great for those of us that like graphs and spreadsheets that pick out key data but, you need to be systematic not just in entering data but how you add it, the language you use etc. (* see ‘tags’ below)

The downside – well, we quite like this little app. It’s inoffensive and have a gentle purpose that some people will love. Others will find this simplicity annoying and others will find it unnecessary, hence some people will not fill it in and it becomes like ‘the diet’ – always starting it tomorrow.

On the up side – It can be linked to various other apps and programs; for example, it can be a delightful little icon that can be added to the Google Chrome desk top and it also has some quite helpful features for when working on multiple projects.

For example, you can create a * tag for a pieces of work such as ‘#projectX’ or highlighting some tasks as being part of a wide business objective.

Again, like most apps and program you get out what you put in.

In summary…

Gentle, non-intrusive and easy to set up, it is an app that can be used for you alone or spread across you team
It can from part of project management, especially useful at busier times of year or when your team is dispersed across the country
You can see, at a glance what each other have done and what is left outstanding
It is a great way, by spending literally seconds, to log what you have actually done and appreciate the volume of work that you have achieved

There are other more ‘bespoke’ packages out there for specific project management purposes; Wrike, for example, is increasing in popularity and, as we always say, it is worth taking time to research apps and packages that are right for you.

SEO, spidering, page rank and tags – know what they are all about?!

29th August 2014 by Alan Leave a Comment

Search engine optimisation (SEO) – a basic guide for all local, online businesses

Yup, you have all heard those words and we have all sagely nodded, pretending we know exactly what is being talked about; we’ve sucked in breath at what seems like an opportune time in the conversation and rolled our eyes to register our disapproval at something we think we should do… when really, as a local plumbing or luxury spa resort, we haven’t the foggiest what is being debated.

The stock answer tends to be ‘our web design people do it’ and, with a flick of the hand, we have washed all SEO responsibility from ourselves. We assume the web design people are doing it; they could be but, it does pay to know what it is you may have agreed to (as some of it may cost you money!).

SEO – what is it?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and it is the process by which a search engine – such as Google, Yahoo etc. – push your website to the top of the pages that a searcher will see when they are looking for something. Get it right, and your website will be at the top (or near it) on the results page and that is a really fabulous place to be.

There are lots and lots of articles on what SEO is, attempting to shed off the veil of uncertainty and mythical powers such as in this article https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2014/jan/16/what-is-seo-how-website-google-visibility

The search engine – a creature with mythical powers

Unseen, yet powerful, the search engine has an immense power in the background that spends all day and all night, wondering around the Internet, all-seeing and all-knowing. And these are some of the things they do:

Spidering – not the hairy-knee’d tarantula type but more a description of the research phase of a search engine’s cycle. It takes a quick look at all or some of the pages on your website and then it will group it along with other, similar websites. So, if you are a beauty therapist, your website will be placed with all the other beauty therapy websites.
Page rank – this is when Google or another search engine after indexing your website, will assign a certain level of importance to it. The more reputable and authoritative the search engine believes your website is, the higher the page rank.
Search results – this is the list of websites that pop up when a user has typed on a phrase or words they want to search. The users types in ‘gardeners London’ and it will throw a whole load of websites into a prioritised list that it thinks best matches the search that user is making. These are the natural search results, as opposed to the sponsored adverts.

Many companies and local, online businesses want to improve their performance on these search engine rankings, not surprising when you consider how searchers use the listings; how far past page 2 do you look?!

How to improve your ranking

1. Key words and phrases

These are the words that point the search engine to you website, telling it in one word or short phrase what your company is about. The start of this process is quite simple – simply match the words that are obvious such as an accountancy firm would use ‘tax’, ‘book-keeping’. ‘Self-assessment returns’, ‘small business’, ‘VAT’ etc.

But, the second step in this first process is to delve a little deeper in to how customers would search for a company offering a product or service like yours. There is a technical trick to finding what their keywords are so you can match theirs… (right click on a text area, this will open a new window of code; at the top of this box you may see their hidden keywords).

2. Use these keywords on your website

This is where the ‘marathon not a sprint’ bit comes in to play and why so many online business invest in professionally written articles and posts. You can, of course, write blogs etc. yourself; if a key phrase is ‘website designer Gloucester’, then you can create a blog that has these key word phrase peppered through it (Note the word ‘peppered’, not over stuffed!).

Companies tend to be a little over-zealous about the number of different keywords and phrases in an article. One blog is not going to cut it – you are looking at creating a series of blogs and posts that have these keywords in them… the marathon, not a sprint bit!

3. Links

There are many articles on the use of links on websites but stay away from the whole buying links as this sends the wrong message to the search engines, especially Google and once you have a black mark against you, it can be difficult to claw your way back.

So, in your articles and posts you add some links to other authoritative websites (like we do in our posts). They need to be appropriate and fit with the content and have an obvious reason why they are there. Like keywords and phrases, just stuffing them in is not the right way to go about optimising your website for the search engines.

4. Measure

Many websites, serves and hosting companies have the ability to measure the number of visitors to your website and you should start to see an increase as soon as you start to make these changes. Some people say that when you posts your articles and blogs is important; potential customers tend to be browsing in an evening and over the weekend, so having your articles online before these times is a great way of tapping into a ‘market’ (Monday morning, some experts say is the time people are least likely to be surfing the web, with later on in the week is the ‘best’ time).

But, this is an never-ending task… once you have completed this cycle, you need to start again!

And this is why https://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/01/11/5-big-reasons-to-monitor-your-website/

SEO is the process of getting your website as close to the top of the results page as possible. There are many other technical aspects to getting your website noticed all of which can be helped along with some expert input, such as meta tags and more.

Is your website search engine optimised? If not, what help do you need?

The latest update of WordPress, 3.9 ‘Smith’, changes the editing experience, but do you know how?

25th April 2014 by Alan 2 Comments

WordPress 3.9 was released last week and it has some major changes, mainly focused on the usability of the editor. We feel these improvements will help make the WordPress editing experience easier, especially regarding images, which has traditionally been a bit tricky.

Editor

The WordPress editor has been upgraded to use the TinyMCE version 4 editor (from TinyMCE 3 ), this has editor multiple improvements.

The first set of changes to note is in the actual icons on the editor ribbon.

Below is the 3.8.3 editor ribbon

3.8icon

and this is the 3.9 editor ribbon

3.9icons

First the ‘expanded’ mode icon moves over to the far right.

A new ‘horizontal row’ icon is added, this will insert a horizontal divider.

The ‘Insert from WordPress’ icon completely disappears, this is because the new editor is meant to be able to handle copy and paste from Word directly, creating a much cleaner markup. We still recommend that for best consistency across your site, you only paste as text and then apply formatting via the WordPress editor, but if you are confident in the consistency of fonts and styles in your word document, this might make your life easy if you have a lot of formatted word documents you need to insert.

And finally, the ‘Text Colours’ icon no longer has the ability to specify completely custom colours, instead you are restricted to 40 standard colours. We believe this is a good move as it remove the temptation to have too many colour variations. Of course custom colours can be created using HTML and CSS, but in general for your site to look good, it is best to stick to the site’s predefined styles.

Images

WordPress 3.9 has made multiple improvements to the way the media manager interacts with the editor, all designed to make image handling a bit easier.

Drag and Drop

Now you can simply drag and drop images from your computer into the editor workspace. Once ‘dropped’ the media manger will open up where you can set options and captions etc.

drag_and_drop_images

Re-sizing images

Now you can resize images in the editor workspace by dragging a corner or side out to the desired size.

image_resize

Image Editor

The image editor has been restyle to be more intuitive and accessible. When you edit an image from the editor workspace the panel is simplified, and has a preview, but importantly also has a button to click through to the image editor, which whilst having the same features as before (crop, rotate, scale etc) is much cleaner and obvious.

image_editor

Gallery Preview

In WordPress 3.8 a Gallery in the editor just showed as a grey box. This meant you couldn’t easily see what images were included. In 3.9 the Gallery now shows these images in a preview style in the editor workspace. Of course this isn’t WYSIWYG but a big step forward.

3.9_gallery

Other Changes in 3.9

There are several other changes in WordPress 3.9, but we won’t go into detail here as this article is focused on the user editing experience. Hover changes include introducing media playlists for video and audio, improving the theme selection screen and adding widget previews to the ‘customiser’

You can watch the official WordPress TV 3.9 video here.

How to set up an Auto Reply or Out of the Office message with Usermin

28th January 2014 by Alan Leave a Comment

Usermin is the interface we provide for managing email directly on the server. There a couple of things that work well if done on the server, such as setting auto replies, this is because your PC or Laptop don’t need to be switched on to be able to send an automated email.

The two most common forms of auto replies people use are

a generic, thank you for your message we will get back to you shortly
an out of the office message,normally set for a specific date range

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The Usermin interface isn’t the most user friendly interface, but it is powerful and for the first option you would rarely change the reply message. However, for out of the office messages, there is a little tip that can help.

The key is understanding that all auto replies and auto forwarders are all, in fact, forms of message filters, and the filters section has far more options available that are not seen in the ‘Auto Reply’ tab.

The following video demonstrates how to set up an out of the office for a date range.

(note: whilst multisite.locally.uk enable filters, not all systems using UserMin will have these features turned on, so if you are reading this and can’t see these options, you wil need to talk to your systems administrator)

Adding code to WordPress widgets.

6th January 2014 by Alan Leave a Comment

Only certain levels of user can add complex code to their site, if you are at that level then it is relatively simple to add code snippets to your WordPress website by using the Text widget. (for our clients we recommend they talk to us before adding extra code ). Each WordPress theme should have one or more sidebars defined, and each of these sidebars can be used to contain multiple widgets.

A common request is to add some custom code to a WordPress website, and one way to achieve this is using the Text widget in a an appropriate sidebar.

In this video I will demonstrate adding Twitter widget code into a Footer sidebar of a WordPress site.