Small Business Accounting Software

Your business, no matter how small, needs an effective accounting management system to sustain its day-to-day viability and establish its long-term financial goals. But when you are already multitasking as the CEO, the manager, and the salesman, you don’t really have time to be an accountant too, do you? Yes, actually, you do.With a good small business accounting software program, you can still manage your cash flow hands on, without spending too much time. A few clicks here and there, and you can forecast revenues, pay bills, and generate reports. But what functionalities should you look for in accounting software? What do you really need and what can you do without? Read on for some tips.Look for user-friendly software. Choose accounting software with an interface that resembles its traditional paper counterparts so that you can immediately navigate your way around it. The more familiar the layout of the software is to you, the easier you can intuitively explore its functionalities.Internet and e-commerce features can also be important. If your small business relies on sales and orders via the worldwide web, you definitely need accounting software that seamlessly connects to e-Commerce functionalities. Find something that you can easily hook up to your bank’s online payment portal, for example, so you can automatically track payments made to you and bills you have to pay.Search for compatibility with frequently used programs. If most of your records are Windows based, find small business accounting software that easily synchronizes with Microsoft Excel and other Microsoft Office applications. Such a feature will let you integrate your existing records without the risk of corrupting data. There are also specialty accounting software programs available for other platforms.Examine the professional reports included in the software. Beware of some software packages that can generate hundreds of kinds of reports – you probably won’t use more than half of them, so why pay the extra price? Concentrate on essential reports instead, such as statements needed for tax filing and time-billing reports, if you use such.There are other extras worth considering. If your business is quickly expanding, it might be a good idea to invest in expandable, multiple-user accounting software that integrates payroll functionalities, inventory tracking, job costing, and other productivity features. These types cost a little more, but are definitely necessary for any fast-growing small business.

Impact of Smart Technology on Data Entry Processes

With evolving smart technologies, the entire process of rendering data entry services has become way easier. Smart technologies are now helping businesses strategically and economically by generating data from every possible source including mobile phones, industrial equipment, smart accessories and personal computers.Data entry services are considered to be “smart” on their responsiveness with respect to the incoming data. Businesses are looking for effective ways to manage data for obtaining better value and supporting their ultimate objectives.Smart technologies tend to engage people and various smart devices with the related business, for better processing and collection of data from designated sources. For supporting and coping with the current evolution of such technologies, processes are being constantly renewed.There are various smart applications that enhance data analytics processes and make them even better. These include Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Smart Data and Machine Learning.Need of Smart Technology
Data entry services, when offered with smart technologies provide real-time data processing, thus improving business’s economic growth and providing a business-friendly option with efficient data management.When looking for a suitable smart app for your business, you should always consult a data entry outsourcing company.Nowadays, businesses are striving for more innovative strategies while incorporating these smart apps.
It eradicates the need of paper documents.

It provides innovation with a customer-centered approach.

These technologies are all industry-oriented, providing accurate results

These are scalable and easy-to-adopt.

They work even better with unorganized data volumes.

Collection of Data via Smart Technologies
Smart technologies assist in collecting and assembling data through:
Intelligent Capture replacing template-based data extraction with an efficient capturing module and natural language understanding.
Mobile Data Entry for collecting data on various mobile devices, enabling smart data entry services.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) providing the latest smart recognition technology for improved data processing.

Data Alteration through Smart Technologies
For better use of these technologies, data entry services and methodologies are continuously being reshaped and revised, allowing organizations to take competitive advantage, along with enhancing cost-efficiency and security of business operations.Smart technologies include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things have now replaced manual processes that are more time-consuming, providing lesser room for human errors.Let’s talk about a few of these technologies:
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are more responsive and secure when it comes to managing any repetitive task, recognizing various patterns and enhancing the accuracy level.

For expanding number of data sources and creating a connection between people, internet, devices and businesses, IOT (Internet of Things) is used extensively these days.

From cloud computing services based on data entry services, businesses can derive benefit and manage the complexity of their data infrastructure.

Effect of Intelligent Technologies
Smart technologies are drastically casting a positive impact over data entry services and rendering a friendlier approach, providing benefits in the following ways:
Better and more composed process, leading to reduction of human errors.

It has become faster and more efficient with easy management of data in bulk and from different sources like paper forms, scanned images and much more.

Streamlining the business operations and changing the perception of businesses to deal with data management projects.

Increasing the potential to scale data entry processes and utilize innovative techniques.

Enhancing the ability of businesses to manage remote projects more effectively and receive client data irrespective of network availability.

With data entry services supported by smart technologies, you can better achieve your business goals with an efficient management and processing of data.

The Seven Essentials of Business Communication

There are seven essential elements to successful business communication:

Structure

Clarity

Consistency

Medium

Relevancy

Primacy/Recency

Psychological Rule of 7±2

If you are going to communicate effectively in business it is essential that you have a solid grasp of these seven elements.So let’s look at each in turn…1. STRUCTUREHow you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is absorbed and understood by your audience.Every good communication should have these three structural elements:

an opening

a body

a close

This structural rule holds true no matter what your communication is — a memo, a phone call, a voice mail message, a personal presentation, a speech, an email, a webpage, or a multi-media presentation.Remember – your communication’s audience can be just one person, a small team, an auditorium full of people or a national, even global, group of millions.In this instance size doesn’t matter — the rules remain the same.OpeningAn opening allows your communication’s audience to quickly understand what the communication is about.Short, sharp and to the point, a good opening lets your audience quickly reach a decision of whether or not to pay attention to your message.Time is a precious resource, after all, and the quicker you can ‘get to the point’ and the faster your audience can make that ‘disregard/pay attention’ decision the more positively they will view you — which can be VERY important if you need or want to communicate with them in the future.BodyHere’s where you get to the ‘heart’ of your message.It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication’s audience to take after attending to your message.Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the point. Don’t bog down your audience with irrelevant material, or charts with confusing, illegible numbers and colours.–SIDE BAR–There’s a key to rapid uptake of your message — KISS.Pitch your presentation’s graphics at a grade seven child. If THEY can follow and understand them, chances are good that your audience will too.–END SIDE BAR–CloseThe Close is where you sum up your communication, remind your audience of your key points, and leave them with a clear understanding of what you want them to do next.The more powerfully you can end your communication, the more easily remembered it will be by your audience.2. CLARITYBe clear about the messaqe you want to deliver, as giving a confused message to your audience only ends up with them being confused and your message being ignored.If you are giving a message about, say, overtime payments don’t then add in messages about detailed budget issues or the upcoming staff picnic — UNLESS they ABSOLUTELY fit in with your original message.It’s far better and clearer for your audience if you create a separate communication about these ancillary issues.3. CONSISTENCYNothing more upsets a regular reader of, say, your newsletter than inconsistency of your message.Taking a position on an issue one week, only to overturn it the next, then overturn THAT position the following week, only breeds distrust in your message.And distrust in you!People who distrust you are exceedingly unlikely to take the action you wish them to take. They are also highly unlikely to pay any attention to your future messages.As well as consistency amongst multiple messages, be aware that inconsistency within your message can be just as deadly to audience comprehension.At the risk of sounding like the Grouchy Grammarian, please make sure that your tenses remain the same, that your viewpoint doesn’t wander between the 1st and 3rd person and back again (unless you deliberately want to create a linguistic or story-telling effect — be careful with this!) and that your overall ‘theme’ or message doesn’t change.4. MEDIUMIf the only tool you have in your toolbag is a hammer, pretty soon everything starts to look like a nail.Similarly, if all you believe you have as a communications tool is PowerPoint then pretty soon all you’ll do is reduce very communications opportunity to a PowerPoint presentation. And as any of us who have sat through one too many boring slideshows will attest, “seen one, seen ‘em all.”There are a myriad of was you can deliver your message – the trick is to use the right one.Which is the right one?The one that communicates your message:

with the greatest accuracy

with the largest likelihood of audience comprehension

at the lowest fiscal cost

at the lowest time cost

Note: it must meet all of these criteria. There’s absolutely no value in spending the least amount of money if the medium you choose doesn’t deliver on any of the other criteria.So what media are available? You have a choice from any one or combination of the following:* paper-based memo
* letter
* one-to-one face-to-face presentation
* seminar
* one-to-one phone presentation
* meeting
* one-to-many personal presentation
* plain text email
* one-to-many phone presentation
* text + graphics email
* voice email
* webpage
* webcast/webvideo
* radio broadcast
* television broadcast
* press release
* tv/film commercial
* cd-rom/dvdChoosing the right medium or media is obviously critical, as the fiscal costs of some in the above list are higher than others. Get the media mix wrong and you could end up spending a whole lot of time and money on a very visually attractive business communication that delivers next-to-zero ROI (return on investment).5. RELEVANCYIt never ceases to amaze me that business managers still believe that everyone would be interested in their message–and then proceed to subject any and everyone they can find to a horrendous PowerPoint slideshow put together by a well-meaning but aesthetically-challenged subordinate.Screen-after-screen of lengthy text, in a small barely legible font size (because a small font size is the only way to fit all of the words onto the slide), which the manager duly and dully reads verbatim.Ugh!The psychological reality is that unless a person is interested in the subject of the message they are highly unlikely to pay any attention.Which means that if you force them to attend to your message you will actually turn them against you and be even less likely to receive their attention in the future.Save your in-depth budget and performance analysis Excel-generated charts for those who genuinely care and need to know about such things.If your business communication needs to touch on several areas that might not be of interest to your entire audience, let them know of alternative resources that more fully address each of these additional areas.You can do this by, for example, providing them with an easily-remembered and written link to a webpage where a greater depth of information can be stored.6. PRIMACY/RECENCYIt is essential to know that, one week later, a business communication is remembered by one or both of two things:

the power and memorability of its opening

the power and memorability of its close

Psychologists call the effect of remembering the first few items presented as a ‘Primacy Effect’. Similarly, they call the effect of remembering the last few items presented to you as a ‘Recency Effect’.Since individuals differ in which Effect is the most dominant for them, it is best to ‘cover your bases’ and make an effort to have both a powerful and memorable opening and a powerful close.A powerful opening can be anything that captures the audience’s attention:

a quote,

a joke,

a loud noise,

a preposterous statement.

Just make sure that your opening remains consistent with and relates to the subject of the communication.For example, whilst the opening line, “Free Sex is available in the foyer” would no doubt get your audience’s attention, if the theme of your communication thereafter is about some process re-engineering going on in your department, your audience would be annoyed (some would be very annoyed at your duplicity. They’d feel duped!Equally, a powerful close that bears no resemblance to the main body of the communication would just confuse and disappoint an audience brought up to expect something more.And don’t think that humour will save you.Business communication is a serious business and very few people have the skill to be able to deliver a humourous message that the audience will retain and act upon.A fantastic example of how humour engaged an audience but failed to elicit the desired response is from Jeffrey Robinson’s superb book ‘The Manipulators’.One of America’s great comedic writers, Stan Freburg, was convinced to dabble in advertising. Deciding that his own agency should be called, ‘Parsley, Sage , Rosemary and Osborn, a Division of Thyme, Inc.’, Freburg created a series of incredibly funny adverts. On the strength of these, he was hired to create an advert for Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), forever remembered in the annals of advertising as ‘White Knuckle Flyer’.”He was aiming at people who hate to fly and are forever worried that planes crash. To pacify them, he got the airline to hand out security blankets — literally, tiny blankets with the PSA logo — to any passenger worrying that flying might get them killed. It was hilarious. And the airline died laughing.”Somewhere between gag writing and all the fun,” comments Jerry Della Femina, who was called in by PSA in a panic to undo what Freburg had done because they didn’t think they were going to survive him, “someone had to sell something. The kiss of death in advertising is when you make the mistake of falling in love with your own words.” PSA had succumbed to humour and, unfunnily, went out of business.As Granville Toogood says in his excellent book ‘The Articulate Executive’, humour is a very risky strategy. If you are determined to use humour in your presentation, then please follow Toogood’s recommendation:

Tell the story as if it were true. The punch line is a lot funnier if we aren’t expecting it

Tell the story to make a business point. If you don’t make a point, you have no business telling a joke

Make sure you tell the story correctly, don’t mess up the punch line, and make sure it’s appropriate.

The opening and closing of your business communication are the two most easily remembered and therefore essential elements. Make sure you give your audience something to remember.7. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RULE OF 7±2 (seven plus or minus two) Psychologists have long known that the human brain has a finite capacity to hold information in short-term or ‘working’ memory.Equally, the brain is also structured to retain information in ‘clusters’ or groups of items.These clusters or groups average, across the whole of mankind, at seven items, plus or minus two.Which means that your audience is only able to hold on to between five and nine pieces of information at any one time. Similarly, your audience will group your business communication’s message with between four and eight other messages in their long-term memory.Now do you see the importance of clarity of message and of having a distinctive and memorable opening and close?If you want your key points to be remembered even five minutes later, it is essential that you limit your business communication to between just five and nine key points.Equally, if you want your key action points to be remembered five weeks later, ensure that your communication is amongst the five to nine most memorable messages your audience has attended to in the last five weeks.The human brain ‘chunks’ information together, so if you have a long document or communication that you want to deliver, especially on paper, then structure your document so that you have:

7±2 ‘chapters’ or sections

7±2 sub-sections in each section

If you find that you end up with 10 or 11 sub-headings in a chapter, or sub-sections in a section, see if you are able to either consolidate two or three sub-sections in to, or create a new main section out of them.CONCLUSION… There are seven essential elements to successful business communication:

Structure

Clarity

Consistency

Medium

Relevancy

Primacy/Recency

Rule of 7±2

If you are going to communicate effectively in business it is essential that you have a solid grasp of these seven elements.