You need to be able to quickly explain your idea to anyone who asks. If they’re interested you need to have a one page document that explains it in more detail.

What will the business sell?
How will it sell it?
Who is the competition and why are you better?
What costs are involved and will it make money?

These things need to be well thought out before you even think about talking to anyone about your business. The key element is to be able to explain it in very few words. If it takes longer than a minute then you need to think again.

Create a Financial Projection

Banks and potential investors will always ask for a financial projection. Create a detailed projection for the first two years and then do your best to speculate on year three.  Always start with sales and take a conservative view. Then after the sales, think about what will you need to spend and who you will need to hire to deliver on them.

It’s normal for the business to make a loss in the first year and acceptable to have a minor loss in the second year. By year three you need to at least be able to break even.

We’ve created a financial projection template on Google Docs that will help you get started. This template will help you create a three year projection for your business and it also charts your cashflow.

The aggregate loss over the first couple of years is the minimum amount of money you will need to raise and it’s always best to secure a little bit more. The funding options are many and varied and it’s always best to shop around. Be careful who you take money from because all money isn’t equal. Ask yourself;

• If things don’t go as well as planned how will this investor react?
• If things go really well has this investor access to more funds to help with expansion?
• Can I work with this investor on a personal level? Is there trust?
• Has this investor a track record of supporting similar businesses? (Speak to one of them)

Create a Hiring Plan

Hiring staff is one of the most difficult things a new business needs to cope with. You will need to think very carefully about who you want to hire, what skills and qualifications they should have and where you will find them. It’s also about knowing what company you want to be, do you want to be reliable and procedural or creative and dynamic? Think about the culture of the business you are trying to create and then recruit people to fit into this.

Recruitment consultants can be very expensive so be willing to get creative about where you can find people. But most importantly don’t make compromise decisions. It’s always better to take a pass than to hire someone who isn’t quite right.

Get a Shareholders Agreement

If you are working with someone else to set up the new business then you should get some form of agreement in place between you. This should cover what will happen is one of you leaves or wants to sell your shares or what will happen if someone wants to buy the business from you. It might seem like a hassle to do this at the start – you’re all good friends after all. But over the years things change and you might regret not putting things in writing. Online services such as LegalZoom can help you with this at a very reasonable price.

Start Your Business

If you have your plans and your funding in place then the next step is to incorporate the business. It’s easiest and cheapest to do it online. Don’t pay an advisor to do this for you, it should be something you can do yourself.

You’ll also need a bank account and probably a business credit card so get this set up immediately.

Sell Before you Buy

An easy trap that a lot of startups fall into is to start spending all of their funding in anticipation of the planned sales.

The best approach here is to avoid any major spending commitments until the sales have started to materialize and stabilize.  Don’t take a long lease on a big premises and don’t buy new expensive equipment.  Go with a short term lease and rented or second hand equipment just until you get the business up and running. After a year if things are going well then you can start making longer term decisions.

Keep Appropriate Records

It’s important to record all financial transactions that the company makes. Don’t wait until the end of the year to do it. A couple of hours every week is all you need to keep your records up to date. This is where Yendo Accounting can help. If you enter in each sale as it is made and record all of your expenses then the business accounts will almost generate themselves!

A little bit of time spent on your accounts will make it a lot easier for you to run the business. You will know where you are at in a timely manner and you will be able to make quicker decisions.

For many businesses the phone bill can be one of the biggest monthly expenses. There are many options out there that can save you money but the best and cheapest option is to switch to an online (VOIP) service.

The leaders in this market are Skype and Google Voice. With both of these services, calls are free to other users of the same service and then you pay to call landlines. Using one of these services will have an immediate effect on your bills.

2. Use Google Apps instead of MS Office

It can be very expensive to keep your business productivity software up to date. With Microsoft Office, every couple of years you will need to upgrade at a cost of a couple of hundred dollars per user.

It’s important to maximise user productivity and in general is’s a good idea to keep all of your software up to date. With Google Apps you never need to upgrade. The software is continuously updated and you will always have the latest and best available functionality.

Best of all Google Apps is free for small businesses (up to 10 users).

3. Use online meetings instead of travelling.

Travelling to your customers office for a meeting takes both time and money. For your business to run at maximum efficiency it’s better to limit the amount of travel that you do.

Having meeting online with a service such as WebEx or Google Hangouts (Which is part of Google+)

5. Do your invoicing online with Yendo Accounting

Our final tip is of course to use Yendo itself. If you use Yendo Accounting it will save you a lot of time. Yendo will generate all of your invoices and will email them directly to your customers. You won’t need to waste time and money posting your invoices each month.

The added benefit of using yendo for your invoicing is that all of your information is online and available whenever and wherever you want it.

IBS, Orlando

From Wednesday next, 8th of February, Yendo will be at the International Builders Show in The Orange County Convention Center, Orlando.

Yendo is the perfect accounting solution for your construction or building services business and we’d be happy to tell you more at IBS 2012. You can meet us at International Central, Hall A, Level I from Wednesday onwards.

We’re always on the lookout for innovative Google Apps tools and we think we’ve found the perfect solution to administering Google Apps users.  It’s called the ‘General Audit Tool for Google Apps’ and it’s an essential add on to your Google Apps tool box.

As you start to use your Google Apps for more than just email, you need some way to check what information you have shared out and to whom those items are shared. This useful tool audits all aspects of your Google Apps account and tells you who can see your files, your sites, you calendars and you email groups. For Admins it also a really useful ‘Whats’ Hot’ set of reports to show you what was shared in and out of your organisation in the last 15 days or what files most of your staff are collaborating on.

All reports can be saved in PDF or Spreadsheet format to your Google Account, ideal for printing or searching.
This tool is essential for your on-line security and powerful in multi-staff environments.

Examples of what some of the reports look like can be found here. The Free tool can be installed from here in the Google Apps Marketplace.

We hope you find this tool as useful as we did!

It’s also worth noting that Baker Security, who made this app are also Google Apps partners and it could be worth talking to them if you are trying to deploy Google Apps in a large or complex organization.

Getting paid quickly is critical for your business

In service businesses where work is invoiced, rather than paid for up front, it can be hard to get paid. Too often you work very hard to meet a customer deadline only for the customer to then drag their heels on paying their bills.

Every day that a payment is delayed damages your cashflow and constricts your business. You need to take control of the process and be in charge of when you get paid.

1. Agree a Payment Plan Before you Start Work
Customers will use any ambiguity to invent a reason not to pay you. The objective here is to explicitly and clearly agree, before any work begins, when you will get paid. This needs to be done in writing and signed by the customer.

Typically this is done on an ‘Order Form’ or ‘Terms & Conditions’ sheet. In this document you can outline the work to be completed and the payment schedule. Get them to physically sign it, don’t just accept an email saying ‘yeah, that’s OK’, you need them to understand that they are entering into a formal agreement to pay.

If your customer operates a Purchase Order (PO) number system make sure you get a valid PO number from them before starting. In larger companies, this is essential for getting paid.

2. Get Paid in Stages
It’s also important to get paid in stages as the work is completed, don’t allow the whole amount to remain outstanding until the work is fully complete. You need to avoid giving the customer the ‘I’ll pay you as soon as you finish one last thing’ excuse. By the time your work reaches this finishing stage you should have been paid for at least 75% of it.

If you haven’t done business with them before get enough to cover your costs up front. This is a reasonably normal practice so don’t think your customer will get offended by being asked for cash up-front. If they do take offence then maybe it’s an early warning sign of trouble to come.

3. Send Invoices Immediately
Very often businesses process their invoices at the end of every month, which often becomes the start of the following month.

You should create and send your invoices as soon as you possibly can. If the work is completed early in the month then don’t wait, send it immediately. After it’s sent put in a call drawing their attention to it and get them to confirm that they have received it and that everything is in order. If there is a problem fix it immediately.

In larger companies supplier invoices will need to be signed-off by several layers of management before they can be paid. The quicker you get into this process then the quicker you will get into their list of payments to be made.

4. Send Statements/Reminders
Sometimes customers genuinely forget to pay. People are busy and often they only deal with the tasks that are causing them the most distraction. Make sure that your customer knows about your invoice. Call before it is due to check that it is scheduled to be paid, don’t wait until after the payment date has been missed to make the call.

Send a statement every week if payments are overdue. Don’t give them the excuse that they never got the invoice or that they lost it. Using Yendo Accounts you can easily generate and send customer statements by email.

You need to give your customer a little breathing space to make a payment but as payments become overdue by more than a week or two it’s time to start making a nuisance of yourself.

When payments are overdue, call every second day. This may seem like a lot but they will become tired of this and will pay just to get rid of you. If this isn’t getting a response, call to their office and ask for a cheque. It may seem a little bit rude but so is not paying you.

5. If Necessary, Agree a Payment Plan
If your customer cannot pay then be realistic and quickly agree a payment plan. Meet them face to face and have an open and honest discussion about the situation. If they are genuinely struggling to pay then there is no point threatening them with legal action or other escalation.

Try to split it up into monthly amounts they can afford. The key thing is to get something from them, however small,  never accept nothing. Once you have agreed a payment plan, keep in regular contact and regularly remind your customer about the schedule.

Our Brazilian customers now have the benefit of Yendo in Portuguese

We’ve been working on it for quite a while but we’re now happy to announce that Yendo Accounts is now available in Portuguese. All of our customers in Brazil & Portugal can now enjoy online accounting in their own language.

Also, keep an eye out for some new Brazil specific reports to help with tax and Nota Fiscal.

As always, to change the language that you see Yendo in, just change the settings in your web browser.

www.assistly.com

Yendo isn’t the only cloud based application that can dramatically improve your business. From our own experience and the feedback we get from our customers it’s clear that there are several other areas of your business that could benefit from moving to the cloud.

Much has been written about moving CRM to the cloud so instead we want to focus on what we think is the next big area to go online; customer support. While this may seem mundane at first it is in fact the core of any business – keeping your existing customers happy.

So what are the options? Well we have looked at a few in Yendo and there seem to be three serious options; ZenDesk, GetSatisfaction and Assistly.

Assistly is probably the most comprehensive customer support solution of all the options and we thought it would be good to look a little bit closer at how to set it up and use it. It’s also worth noting that the first user in Assistly is completely FREE, which is a real bonus for small businesses.

Just like Yendo, you can start setting up Assistly directly from within Google Apps (or signup directly).  There’s a three step wizard to get going which overall is very easy. The most important part is the third step which links Assistly with your Facebook and Twitter accounts:

Linking to email, Twitter and Facebook is probably the biggest advantage of using a system like this over Excel or older software. It lets you respond to your customers however thay choose to contact you. No more logging into Facebook and Twitter separately to check for comments, all of this is now available within Assistly. We quickly found that we stopped using TweetDeck in favour of Assistly, it’s so much easier to have it all in one place.

In a discussion with Matt Trifiro, Senior VP of Marketing for Assistly, he explained that;

“The world is ever more social, and customers are reaching out to companies in lots of new ways. Gone are the days of just email and phone. Now customers are talking to companies (and each other) on lots of channels—Twitter, Facebook, live chat, forums, through community Q&A—and more every day. How can businesses keep up with this massive demand, and still deliver the customer support that becomes a differentiating business strategy? That’s where we see Assistly playing a critical role—coping with the extraordinary demands of customer support in a shrinking and highly competitive world.”

Another, perhaps unique, feature of Assistly is that it allows you to create logins for temporary or part-time staff. As your business grows (or occassionally shrinks) you can change the number of users you have on the Assistly system and pay by the hour, not by the month.

In our discussion with Matt, he went on to add;

“One of the most exciting innovations in the customer support market is the evolution of simpler business models that make it easier for businesses of all sizes to get access to great tools. In July, Assistly moved from a tiered pricing program to a simple  method that expands or contracts seamlessly based entirely on business demand and provides a free Full-Time Agent seat to every account. Seasonal uptick? Add a few Flex Agents for $1 per hour—just for the busy season. We came to believe that a streamlined system of “use what you need; pay as you go” is the ideal solution for progressive businesses.”

Within the system itself everything is driven by a fairly easy to understand dashboard screen. It lists each open ‘case’ for your organisation and lets you make updates as needed. It blends together all activity from emails, Facebook and Twitter into one ‘stream’. Each can be responded to directly within the dashboard.

This dashboard hides a lot of very intelligent functionality underneath. Behind the scenes in Assistly it applies rules that you can pre-configure to each customer comment/enquiry. It takes a little time to fully configure but once it’s up and running it’s amazing how much time this will save you. These ‘macros’ let you do things like send a preset reply, update the case status and categorise the case, all in one button press.

We have certainly found that ‘modern’ helpdesk software has become an essential tool for doing business. Here in Yendo we use it and we would advise all of our customers to at least try it out. It will save you both time and money.

In closing here is one last quote from Matt who echoes something we have been saying here in Yendo for a while:

“Small businesses now live in an environment where a couple of college kids in their mom’s basement can be serious competitors to larger, established businesses. We see a major restructuring of the competitive landscape as progressive companies vie to service the new global, social, mobile customers of today.”

1. Set a sales target.

It may sound obvious but if you don’t have something to aim for then you won’t know when you have succeeded. You shouldn’t have just a monthly sales target, if times are tight then this should be weekly. Write it on a board so the whole company can see it and make everyone understand what it is and why it is there.

2. Build a prospect list.

Build a prospect list  and work through this list every day. If you get turned down ask ‘do you know anyone else who might be interested?’ Everything you do should start with this list. How can I get more prospects on it? How can I convert more prospects to sales?
Don’t rely on your memory to keep track of this list. At the very least keep a good spreadsheet and ideally spend time setting up a CRM system.

3. Make 5 sales call a day.

A very easy mistake to make is to spend all of your time organising, planning and managing.  You will end up with a well managed failure. Set a goal to contact 5 sales prospects a day. Even if they don’t directly lead to a sale, it’s good to talk and sometimes further opportunities will follow.

4. Ask for feedback.

Find out what you need to change about your business. Provide a feedback form on your website, conduct a survey with Surveymonkey or email all of your existing customers. Get them talking!
You can’t change the state of the ecomomy but you can change your own business. If you don’t actively solicit feedback then you will never know what to change.

5. Give customers what they want

There is no point in trying to sell something that nobody wants. If after all of your sales calls and collecting feedback you realize that your offering is wrong, then change it, and quickly!

These customers are very important to us and it is always very frustrating when they are prevented from using our service because of payment issues. In the last month alone we have turned away customers from countries such as Haiti and Cameroon. Businesses from these countries, and several others, cannot yet use the online payment services that we take for granted.

The big players in online payments, PayPal and Google Checkout both only service a restricted set of countries. While this remains the case these countries will continue to struggle to develop a strong online SME sector.

One has to ask why this is the case? Is it because of security concerns? This cannot surely be the case as payment services are now supported by a very sophisticated security infrastructure to alert administrators to potentially fraudulent transactions are the happen and to block these transactions if necessary. It is unreasonable to say you won’t do business somewhere because it has a reputation for high levels of fraud as the tools and procedures for dealing with this possibility are well established.

The only conclusion that can be drawn is that payment providers do not want to do business in developing countries because they simply do not offer the profits.

There is a small possibility that things may be starting to improve. PayPal has recently acquired Zong who specialise in payments by mobile phone. There service allows payment to be approved by text message. It’s a great start but there is still a long way to go.

Alongside this development virtual credit cards are becoming more common. These offer trmporary credit card numbers that are pre-loaded with a credit balance. Entropay for example offers these ‘cards’ in several countries including Haiti. While this is not an ideal solution as these card can be cumbersome to set-up and use, they at least offer an option for people in developing countries to buy online.

www.softwareadvice.com

Our friends in softwareadvice.com have posted an interesting analysis of the accounting marketplace.

They ask, is Quickboks under threat? Well we certainly think so. The argument for using cloud based apps over CD-ROM based software is very compelling. Why would any business want its key administrative functions tied to one single user sitting at a single desk in an office somewhere?

In the modern business environment being flexible is critical. You need to be able to respond quickly to changing customer demands and if this means being able to raise an invoice while out on the road or being able to check the balance on a customers account just before walking into a meeting then cloud based software is the only way to go.

The days of working 9 to 5 in an office are also slowly waning. To maintain and incentive your workforce you need to give them flexibility to work from home if family circumstances mean someone can’t always come in.

None of this is possible with CD-ROM based software and we at Yendo say long live the cloud!