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Is It Time for Spring Cleaning Your Business Files?

Is It Time for Spring Cleaning Your Business Files?

How much time do you spend each day looking for information about orders, customers, vendors, or employees?  If it’s a lot, a little spring cleaning might pay off.  Here are five quick tips to assess and improve your information access. Read more

Your Librarian

Large companies often have a librarian on staff that is in charge of stored documents, both physical and virtual.  It’s not a bad idea to have this function in your small business, although you certainly don’t want to devote an entire headcount to it.

Today, a company librarian might be in charge of the company’s document portal, which is a very secure area where company documents can be stored.  It might be on the company server or in a secure area of the cloud.  There are companies that offer secure file storage, accessible through document portals.

The librarian will also be in charge of creating recordkeeping policies and procedures.

What’s in a Name

One such procedure that brings order to chaos is setting naming conventions for client files and folders.  Set consistency by using a naming standard such as having a client file name always start with the last name of the client followed by a birth date, or something else unique.

It will save time each time you look up a file because you’ll always know where to look.  Even if it’s only seconds saved per lookup, that time will add up to minutes and hours saved over a year.  That will save you labor costs.  A naming standard will also look professional in front of the client.

Permanent vs. Transactional

Get uber-organized by separating your important long-term legal papers from your transactional documents.  Long-term papers such as your corporate by-laws and tax returns should have a special place away from your day-to-day invoices and receipts.  Also keep major purchases such as settlement documents from real estate transactions in a special file that you’ll keep for many years.

Your daily transactional files should be batched up by month or year and stored accordingly.  You’ll be able to delete these files after their retention period is up, while you’ll want to keep your long-term legal papers almost forever.  You still won’t be able to throw away your annual documents too soon – some agencies require you to keep transactional documents for as long as 11 years.

Paper or Paperless

What percentage of your business documents is scanned and stored online?  If you’d like to increase this percentage, then make a plan to convert your paper into scanned documents you can access online.  So that it’s not such an overwhelming task, break it down into smaller chunks:   start with one area of your business at a time or one vendor at a time.

Purchase a scanner for everyone in your office, and you’ll soon find your office getting more and more paperless by the week.  You can also have fun taking pictures of receipts on your cell phone and uploading the documents to your document portal.

A Backup Plan

So that you don’t lose your documents to a catastrophe, theft or any other disaster, make sure you have a backup of all of your documents so you are able to recover them.

This is where paperless shines over paper, because there is always risk of fire with the latter.  It’s also where a secure document portal beats your company server anytime because of the elaborate layers of security that are required for secure commercial data centers.

After you implement these five tips, you may not even need to do a spring cleaning.  You’ll be organized and efficient, and that’s good for business.

Patricia Anderson No Comments

Nine Tips to Dazzle and Retain Your Top Customers

Nine Tips to Dazzle and Retain Your Top Customers 

Your top customers are your most important customers in your business, and it’s important that you hang onto them if at all possible.  It’s much more cost-effective in most business models to retain repeat customers than it is to find new ones.   Here are nine tips you can use to dazzle and delight your top customers: Read more

1. Know who they are by name.  

Do you know which customers generated the highest sales for you last year?  If not, let us run a Sales by Customer Summary sorted by descending revenue for you to be sure.  Your top customers will be listed on the first lines of this report.  These are the customers you should be contacting at least once a month, having lunch with periodically, or doing a few extra things for.

2. Know who sent the most business to you.  

Do you track referrals?  If not, you may want to consider adding a field to your accounting system if there’s room.  At the least, you can use the report generated above and add a column to it labeled referral source.  Drop in the person’s name that referred the customer to you.  Once you’ve completed the field, you can re-sort it to total up the dollar value of each referral source.

You should be in monthly contact with these folks, just as if they were your top customers and even if they’re not a customer at all.  Make a plan to lunch with these individuals and/or do something extra for them periodically to let them know you appreciate their referrals.

3. Ask customers how they would like to be contacted.  

Do your customers prefer to be contacted via email?  Phone? Text? In person?  If a customer hates being called on their cell phone, wouldn’t you want to know?

Everyone is different, so find out by asking, and make a note in their file.  Also find out how often they’d like an update.  Some worriers might want to know daily, others prefer a short monthly email.  The best time to do this is during customer onboarding or at the time of the first sale.

4. Find out what customers need from you.

At the end of each project, ask your customer two things:

a. How could we have served you better? b. What else can we do for you?

Then empty your mind and really listen.  Take copious notes, don’t defend yourself, and thank your customer.   Think about what they said, and implement what makes sense.

5. Provide a customer service contact and great support.  

Does your customer know who to call when they need to talk with someone in your business?  If the customer has a follow up question on their purchase or service, let them know what to do ahead of time so they won’t feel lost.  This will make the customer feel at home and will have them coming back because of your great support experience.

6.     Practice “consumption marketing.”  

Consumption marketing is helping the customer fully consume their purchase from you.  The more likely they are to get benefits from your product or service, the more likely they are to come back for more.

Help clients use your products and services to their fullest by creating a consumption marketing program that includes tips sheets, educational aids, how-to videos, instructional blog posts, and the like.

7. Develop multiple relationships.

If your customers are from large companies, strengthen that business by meeting multiple buyers within the company.  If one employee leaves, it won’t be such a crisis to your account if you know multiple people in the company.

8. Say thanks promptly.  

Send a thank you note to a new customer or referral source within a week of their purchase or referral.  Acknowledge their action quickly and generously so that you make a great personal impression.

9. Create and implement a client retention plan.

Be proactive about customer retention by planning touch points throughout the year and systematizing the contact process with your top customers.  This can be as simple as taking your top 12 customers out to lunch, one each month, or as complex as planning some kind of touch point – a newsletter, email, or thank you note – once a month for each of your top clients and referral sources.

Try any of these nine tips to dazzle your top customers and boost your customer retention for stronger sales.

Patricia Anderson No Comments

Five Best-Practice Accounts Payable Tips for a Smoother Cash Flow

Watching the cash balance is one of the most frequent activities of a small business owner.  Besides making sure you have enough cash for payroll and bills, there is another huge opportunity you can benefit from: lowering the cost of processing your bills.  It can be expensive and time-consuming to process bills and handle the paperwork involved.  We’ll take a look at a couple of the many ways you can streamline your accounts payable processing costs in this article. Read more

Opportunity #1:  Go Digital

The Intuit Payment Network (IPN) is a best-kept secret when it comes to sending and receiving money.  It’s free to set up your account, and it’s also free for your receiver to set up an account.  All you do is add your bank account, and you can easily transfer funds between the two accounts just by knowing the receiver’s email address.

The receiver of money only pays 50 cents per transaction, so when you have a large transfer of funds, it’s totally worth it.  It saves you postage, check stock, envelopes and the related mailing labor.  You could even increase your payment by 50 cents so that your receiver receives exactly what you owe them.

Another way to go digital is via PayPal.  Fees vary, and are usually paid by the receiver.

Opportunity #2:  Get Control

When it comes to finances, it’s never a good idea to mix business and personal, especially when it’s coming out of the same bank account.  Keep separate accounts for business and personal, and your bookkeeping costs will go way down.  Do the same thing for credit cards as well.

If you’re comfortable with credit cards and you can maintain control of your spending, it saves accounts-payable time when you can charge everything you spend on business to your credit card as long as you pay it off every month.  Using your card is faster at checkout than writing a check these days, so you’ll save time on errands as well.

Opportunity #3:  Automate

Put recurring expenses such as utilities, rent, accounting, and other monthly bills on bank draft or autopay if the vendor has that option.  This will save you a huge amount of time, supplies, and postage.  You can also be more accurate with the timing of the payment which will allow you to keep your money for as long as possible until the due date arrives.

Opportunity #4:  Verify

We hope you never pay bills that aren’t yours, but it can happen.  To avoid it as much as possible, implement a three-way matching process on all your payables, especially those related to inventory.  The three-way part refers to the three documents involved in accounts payable:

  • The purchase order
  • The packing slip
  • The invoice

Before any invoice is paid, these three documents should be matched line by line – for quantity, price, and description — to ensure you ordered and received what you paid for.  Only then should your bill be approved.  This will ensure that you don’t pay a fraudulent bill, you don’t pay for out-of-stock that didn’t ship and that you paid the correct price you agreed to in the first place.

Please feel free to reach out and ask us about this if you’d like to know more.

Opportunity #5:  Tell Yourself a Little White Lie

There’s an old saying:  “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”  If you’re always moving money around form one checking account to another to cover bills and payroll, you’re not the only small business owner who juggles funds.  It takes up valuable time to make all these transactions, and then it costs to record them and track them.

Reduce all that by telling yourself a little white lie about your bank balance.  If your bank balance is $10,000, tell yourself it’s only $5,000 (or whatever amount makes sense for you).  That way, you’ll always have a cushion in your account that will help you reduce transfers.  There are several ways to set this “little white lie” up in your books.

More A/P Ideas

These are only five of many ways you can reduce your processing costs and save time on accounts payable processing.  Give these five accounts payable ideas a try, and if you’d like to know more, please reach out and let us know.