Accounting

sales forecasting software

Collating the basic sales forecasting information you should have

Every business should have a sales forecasting process. Sales forecasting should receive just as much attention as cash flow management. Sales are the life blood of any business as cash is the oxygen supply. The cash flow and sales forecast reports are inextricably linked. The adoption of good sales forecasting software and a well enforced sales forecasting policy can make an significant difference to the health and performance of any business.

Key inputs

There are three key inputs or factors to consider when creating a sales forecast. The sales person, the customer and the product. Good sales forecasting software enables you to sort,correlate and present these inputs and give you a clear picture of the state of your sales pipeline and what is and isn’t going to come in when.

1. Getting sales people to gather accurate sales forecasting information.

Sales people vary in their levels of skills, experience and knowledge of your target market or industry. But with a small amount of training, encouragement and discipline they can be made to submit accurate sales forecasts. Make sure your salespeople are acutely aware of what information you need them to extract from the sales process and make sure they pose the correct set of questions to the correct people at the correct time in the correct way. Therefore the first discipline sales people should have drilled into them is planning. Call or meeting planning is vital before engaging a customer. The plan should contain what information is needed and what questions will be asked in what order. Their call plan should be recorded in the sales forecasting software for later review. Sales people who don’t attend customer meetings without preparing and writing down their questions or recording their answers are wasting everyone’s time.

2. Gathering Customer information

Keeping detailed information about the customer’s organisation, the market they operate in and the progress they are making is really useful when it comes to assessing the basis for the salespersons sales forecast assumptions

A good example of this is the customers credit rating. All of the customer records should be immediately stored and available in the sales forecasting software. Therefore every sales person should develop a habit of finding out as much as they can that is in the public domain about the customer. Naturally this information is good content for conversation when the sales person interacts with the customer. It will always lead to questions and most customers are impressed by sales people who appear to have a genuine interest or good working knowledge of their customers. Remember the art of the sale is about solving the customer’s problem. The more problems you can spot in your customer’s business, the more creative you will become and the more you might sell if what you have can address these problems.

3. Educating the Customer

This is where the third factor, the product comes into play. The easiest way to sell a product or a service is to make sure your customer is educated as much as is possible about what you do. I am not talking here about thrusting brochures into their hands. Here I would recommend using the timeless art of the story. There is nothing more complelling than a great story teller. Stories about how other customers have uses your products and services to solve their problems are invaluable. I like to think of a testimony or a case study as a good story, it has more appeal. These terms are tired and worn. You will get so much more information back from a customer if you tell detailed and carefully woven stories as they paint good pictures of the possible outcomes of using your product or service.

All of this information rigourously entered by all into a good sales forecasting software system should give you the insight to make more precise decisions and avoid errors of judgement in cash management.

small business accounting software

Budgeting is critical as it gives you an in depth of the relationship between the multiple financial activities occurring in your business and helps you anticipate and prepare for changes that will inevitably happen in the future. Budgeting makes you focus on what you have to develop to enhance profit and gets you ready for the forthcoming period. A thorough profit budget highlights what fluctuations you can expect in your cash flow.

The more cash you can extract from profit the more space you will have for manoeuvre when opportunities or problems present themselves. To track your cash flow accurately the best tool to use is small business accounting software which should give you the reports you need to compare your actual with budgeted performance.

Creating more profit does not automatically create a better cashflow . Do not fall into this trap

Any deviations from what you budgeted for your cash flow from profit should be studied carefully. Any unplanned activities from what you expected] you identify should be scrutinised to see if you have an opportunity or a problem.

Most small business accounting software will let you run summary and detail reports to help you see the critical numbers.

Expenses consume cash and it is often the case that the higher the sales the higher the cash burn as the business uses more resources to fuel the growth in sales.

You should enter all expenses and sales activity into your small business management software as soon as they occur so as you can report an accurate forecast and make corrections or adjustments in line with your budget.

To operate and grow a business you must implement a rigid discipline of tracking cash flow against budget, without this you will inevitably face problems that could lead to disaster.

All the best with your business and the future.

As corporate purse strings get increasingly tightened in this period of downturn, the need for organisations to perform IT asset tracking is becoming more of a priority.It is the IT manager whose role is to manage this process of auditing and tracking IT assets.  Following up a number of contacts in IT departments of various organizations, I looked at some of the methods different companies are using to fulfil their IT asset tracking requirements.

Spreadsheets
fixed asset register] information in a giant spreadsheet.  The basic idea is as follows. At first the spreadsheet is created from an initial asset audit, recording all the hardware and software being used.The most commonly recorded information includes location, name of staff member using the item, purchase date, model and serial numbers and warranty details.Whenever new computer equipment or software is bought in the organization, this needs to be included on the asset register. The basic issue with spreadsheets is lack of scalability.For larger businesses the spreadsheet can become extremely complicated.Organizations using the spreadsheet technique also tend not to be able to react effectively to changes in the state of IT assets, such as repairs, depreciation, licenses and getting rid of equipment.The entire sytem stands or falls on usually one person being fastidious with its upkeep.

Barcode Labels & RFID
Asset barcodes have been around for a while and are step up from manual data entry – each asset is given a specific barcode which stores all the relevant information from the asset register.A handheld barcode scanner is generally used to scan these asset tags, so that information can quickly and efficiently be obtained an update during regular asset audits. Radio Frequency Idenfitication, or RFID, is a step up because it allows hardware audits to be perfomed remotely. More importantly, RFID asset tracking allows greater flexibility for increasingly mobile equipment such as laptops and PDAs.

Asset Management Software
There are a good choice of semi-automated and customized asset management software solutions which take a lot of the pain out of the process. The most basic Access or SQL databases which are fed into the intranet, allowing multiple users to update or check the asset inventory. At the other end of the scale there is specialist asset management software which covers all the fixed assets of the organisation, including things such as vehicles, containers, property and machinery as well as IT assets.  There are also specially designed solutions to meet the growing plethora of asset accounting and tax regulations that companies need to meet – such as Sarbanes Oxley compliance software. The beauty of this integrated approach is it combines the needs of several departments including IT, accounting and management, to allow for a larger budget and amore robust solution. 

If you have any other solutions your company uses for asset tracking, I’d be interested to read your comments.

This article will show you what practical help and support an accpountant will – and won’t – give you, and how they offer their services. 

Increasingly, people have different service expectations from people whom they employ for professional advice and this is certainly the case with accountants.  Often people will expect their accountant to cost only a few pounds, then work a serious number of hours, or they expect their accountant to save them serious amounts of money.  Or indeed they may even expect their accountant to allow tax evasion.

Expectations like this can’t be met! Chartered Accountants are professionals, who have a duty to maintain professional standards, so they certainly will not ‘encourage’ tax evasion and will actively tell you that you are breaking the law if you do evade due taxes.They also expect a fair rate of pay, and as they are a professional service, this will be more than just a few pounds.

You should expect a good service to include maximising your money so you avoid overpaying tax, and take advantage of any possible savings.

Chartered Accountants abide by professional ethics and codes of conduct, service agreements, so you can expect your accountant to return phone calls, be reasonably available and give you advice about the state of your company or your books, how things are going and perhaps offer some directional advice about ensuring that you maximise profits for the year ahead.

Most, if not all accountants will say that a good accountant will save you money.They will make sure you get all the tax breaks applicable and pay as little tax as possible.They’ll also help advise on investment money and things like that.The recent recession means that even the best advice can fail, and accountants do not offer any guarantee about the future and where it is safe to place your money.

So an accountant in Wrexham can certainly help you in lots of different ways and you should look forward to a good, productive professional relationship.

With finance departments being held increasingly accountable for their fixed assets UK wide, and with the ever-changing requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, IFRS, GAAP  and the Turnbull Guidance (to name but a few), the need for an asset tracking UK wide system has never been greater amongst Commercial and Public Sector organisations alike. Whether in relation to reporting, security or providing an audit trail, organisations have to ensure they remain up-to-date with the current compliancy requirements for their sector.

And there certainly doesn’t seem to be any shortage of information and guidance when it comes to those asset accounting UK standards, nor is there any lack of seemingly endless acronyms:  IFRS, Sarbanes Oxley (Sarox), GAAP, ASB and IASB. Certain types of company or organisation are legally obliged to comply with most, if not all, of these accounting standards so it is important that they have a robust and reliable fixed assets UK system in place.  

In today’s globalised marketplace, the situation is further complicated by the international relationships that many UK companies may have in place. If you are a US company that is listed on the US stock exchange, a UK or European subsidiary of a US listed company or a UK or European company with no division in the USA, but with listings on the US stock exchange, then you must comply with SOX.

Even if you only have a slight exposure to the US market (e.g. if you are a supplier to a US-based company) then may well be affected by SOX. If you are a European company that is listed on both your own national stock exchange and the US stock exchange, you will be subject to the requirements of both Sarbanes-Oxley and IFRS regulations which dictate that financial statements provide uniformly adequate and transparent information about an organisation’s financial performance for the purpose of international comparison.

For many accounting departments, the reliance is on the ever popular spreadsheet.  They are quick and easy to set up and relatively easy to modify. Simple calculations are easily defined and they are practical tools for management wanting to make “what-if” projections.At the level of accounting complexity required in today’s environment however, spreadsheets can easily become complex and difficult to verify. Integrating a spreadsheet with other enterprise systems to track asset changes or produce a clear audit trail is also difficult.

A far better solution is to use dedicated and tailor-made software, particularly for asset register, that can control, track and record the changes that occur within an asset’s lifetime. Real Asset management UK for example has systems that will provide accurate, up-to-date and historical data spanning the point from which the asset was entered onto the system to its present state. User-definable fields means that organisations have the freedom to describe things in their internal corporate language and a Windows inspired interface ensures that users can very quickly become adept.

Systems like these save users both time and effort by eliminating the need to manually enter/update each asset and provide a seamless interface with leading general ledger products, thus allowing you to retain any prior software investment you may have made. Organisations can choose to consolidate multiple registers for group reporting purposes and can concurrently maintain discrete financial information. Any number of historic and/or current cost accounting books can be set up to allow different values and currencies to be associated with individual assets and the ability to create fully comprehensive and detailed asset histories makes it far easier, quicker and cheaper to keep track of your physical and IT assets and remain fully compliant.

small business consulting

I run a Saas company that supplies help in the form of small business management and accounting software tools and education and support to thousands of startups and small businesses worldwide and whenever I explain to people what I do, I always get asked the same question “Given my background, how could I apply it and make earn a living from small business consulting? I’m always delighted to provide wisdom as I am privileged enough to spend a lot of my day interacting with small business owners and their teams enthusiastic to chat at length about their challenges.

This is the advice that I offer:

The online world is the best way for finding customers and it makes it easy to speak to them and sell your expertise. A lot of small businesses turn to the internet to find knowledge or trusted advisors who can provide them with guidance and help them tackle key challenges.

Information marketing – package and sell your expertise to businesses through the Internet

What I discuss here is equally appropriate to businesses of any size. You can repackage and sell your expertise in a electronic format such as video, audio or documents. The systems to make professional standard content are widely available on the world wide web. Constructing a series of lessons in simple to use internet formats is now straight forward and doesn’t cost much to do. You just have to be prepared to spend a bit of time playing with the systems. The point here is to make some valuable content that you can either sell or give away to customers to persuade them to do business with you.

Commence by determining your overall goal. Consultancy and Information marketing are great bedfellows and if you do both can be very provide a substantial income as the consultancy will provide you with the questions, the answers to which repurpose for sale through the internet and sold over and over again.

If you are starting from scratch with no customers but have expertise you know would be needed by others then make a very short video to introduce yourself and your expertise to your prospect(s). Unless you know the market exact problem then make the video generic and adhere tothe following format – S.T.A.R (Situation or Task, Action, Result). Be creative and concise. Now deploy the video to your website/blog or even YouTube if you don’t have the former and send the target(s) an invitation by e-mail containing a personal message and a link to the video. Follow this up with a phone call. If you know the specific nature of the marketproblem then don’t make the video public, just put it somewhere secureon the Web or even on a disk and post it, again follow up with a call.

This method is ideally suited to situations where you are individually targeting market. You should always focus on building a list you can interact with and make sales to. Regular interaction with your list will uncover people’s needs that will help you define what to sell. The more people on your list the more consulting and information marketing opportunities you will discover. If you would like to know more about how to do this then follow any of the links in this article. I would be happy to help you.

In the market today, you can find lots of different golf club sets available.  Some fine examples of some of the brands that you will find today include names such as Nike, Nicklaus, Ping, Callaway, etc. You can also find various types of hybrid sets that are a combination of the strengths of the different types of golf clubs which help to improve your game.

In addition there are gender specific golf clubs. Obviously those two types of golf clubs include a women’s golf club set and a mens golf club set.

If you are looking at getting a men’s golf club set there are quite a few different things that you should take note of. 

Characteristics

There are several different things which make a man’s golf club set unique from a woman’s set. The two primary differences between a man’s second woman said is the weight of the club as well as the length of the handle of the shaft club. Men’s clubs are generally longer. These two differences are due to the physical differences between a man and a woman.

Sets Available

When you are choosing any golf club set for men there are lots of different options available. Some of the options you might consider looking for a new set of clubs include online, used from a friend or garage sale, or the classified ads, or from your local Pro shop.

One of the great advantages of shopping online is that you can very easily do comparison shopping on the various different brands that are available. This includes reading various reviews on the sets that you are considering.

If you’re just starting out in the game of golf, you might want to start out by purchasing a used men’s golf club set. This could prove to be a really good decision if you decide later that you don’t particularly care for the game.  If this turns out to be true for you, then you haven’t put out much money as an initial investment, so you are really losing much.

A local retailer is another option that you might want to consider for your purchase. This could actually prove to be less of a hassle as you can get a feel for the swing of the club and make sure that has the right balance for you as an individual before you fork out any cash for it.

Customizing A Mens Golf Club Set 

Also, to make a mens golf club set unique, individuals can accomplish this a number of ways. You might think about including a custom golf club in your set as an option for uniqueness. Often this custom golf club could be a special driver, such as a Big Bertha or a special putter.
In addition, many individuals choose to purchase special head coverings for their clubs. There is no real limit on the type of coverings that you can get for your clubs, as most people like them to reflect their personality or their favorite sports teams.

You can find plenty of men’s golf clubs as well as utility golf clubs at http://golfutilityclubs.com

small business accounting software

Ask any seasoned business manager how much time they spend dealing with problems in the business and the answer will almost always be a substantial amount. Problems have a habit of leaping out at you when you least expect them. You will never be able to spot a problem if you don’t know what to watch out for. All business owners have to be good problem solvers and be able to respond to them quickly.

Good financial controls are critical to the successful management of any business. Financial controls are like early warning systems that immediately send out a signal when financial problems start to occur. The majority of financial controls are based upon the results derived from your accounts which are managed using small business accounting software. For example actual costs versus budgeted costs, differences in the performance in current and previous periods of revenue and expenses, behaviour of cash flows and profits are all things you have to be able to comprehensively report and therefore should be easy to generate from small business accounting software packages. The best way to start is to identify a core group of the operating ratios you want to track and monitor and then craft the reports you need to highlight these key numbers in a coherent and easy to read format.

Always monitor the margins on the items that you sell and as soon as you detect any changes in their values you should take steps to understand why this is happening and bring it under control. Changes in margins or volumes in businesses that sell large numbers of products are especially vulnerable and losses can mount quickly if the causes are not quickly understood and addressed. Do not under any circumstances let fixed costs deviate from the plan, especially in the early stages of the financial year. Tracking the average number of days it takes to collect payment on invoices is key to accurate cash flow forecasting and most small business accounting software reporting systems will help you easily do this.

Experience is the way to learn and over time you will learn which financial controls should be highlighted in your accounting reports, just make sure you have the right small business accounting software that can generate these.

Accountancy in Great Britain has some differences to accountancy in the USA. Overall, these differences are a result of the larger number of UK regulatory accounting standards when compared to America. It is also very important to understand that there are a number of differences between accounting practices in Scotland and accounting practices in England and Wales and fully qualified accountants must sit further exams to practice in another country other than the one in which they sat their exams.

Accountants in the USA are bound by the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) as laid down by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Accountants in the UK are rather complex as they have to abide by various guidelines. Due to European Union membership, accountancy comes under the IFRS ( International Financial Reporting Standards). The standards were written to enable the easy comparison of various sets of accounts either yearly account from one company or various companies, the also made the previous rules much simpler.

Making things even more complex is the need to honor United Kingdom laws, including, the Companies Act 1985 (ammended 1989) and the Companies Act 2006, plus other minor statutes. It is relatively easy to learn more about accounting and accountancy of different countries using the Internet, however you really should take immense care to ensure the accuracy of the facts given. Always double check laws using official government websites.

The above is but a simple introduction to accounting in the United Kingdom. If you you know more why not write an article about it or why not begin blogging. Huge numbers of folk are writing blogs and starting your own is incredibly easy. Bloggers don’t even need to worry about their blogs design as there are a great many web sites with lots of different Wordpress themes which are free including those offered by Free Website Templates 4U. Bloggers can see their most recent Wordpress themes at their own blog at http://freewordpressthemes.freewebsitetemplates4u.com/

NetSuite pricing

Cutting your software costs

I want to help you save money and I am never going to ask you for anything in return.

Every year I save thousands of pounds by not spending any money on software. It was the quote containing the NetSuite pricing that caused a friend to call me up and ask if I could help me get a better deal on software for his business – hence this article. Just like me You can now do most of the key tasks in your business using software that costs zero. Only the Lord knows why this stuff isn’t evryday knowledge for most business folks. Talk to the wisest and brightest people you know who work for or run a small business and they wont know the facts I share with you in this article.

You need to do three things to make this strategy work for you.

• 10 minutes/day search on one term ie free wordprocessor.
• Go to www.evernote.com and sign up to this free “memory” service.
• Spend just ten minutes on every day on trying out one of the packages you find.

It took me about for weeks on and off spending max twenty minutes a day to discover all of the tools I am ever going to need. To get you off to the right start, here is a selection of the software I use everyday.

The software listed on the left is free and in some cases there is an upgrade to a paid version but don’t let this daunt you I get by with the free version most of the time (to help you easily identify what each tool does I have listed their “paid” for equivalents on the left hand side – I hope this helps).

Here we go:

Just type the name of the free product to the search engines

One system to manage customers and accounting

salesorder.com pricing: free NetSuite pricing – really expensive

Sorry I couldnt resist this one…

Creating and writing Documents

Google Docs pricing: $0 Microsoft Office pricing – at least $100

Or

OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org)

Sharing ideas online

Bubbl.us pricing: $0 Mindjet pricing – at least $200

Making videos

Jing pricing: $0 Camtasia Studio pricing – at least $300

Teleseminars

DimDim pricing: $0 AdobeConnect pricing – at least $200/month

My thanks to the NetSuite pricing incident for the inspiration to write this up and help you out.

I will be publishing a long list here in the near future…