Teamwork for Small Business Is Way To Success

Aug 22, ’07 7:43 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Business Ideas, Contractor, Development, Employment, Entrepreneur, Exporting, Freelancer, Globalization 3.0, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Key Account Management, Marketing/PR, Mobile Technology, Outsourcing, Relationships, Small Business / SOHO, Start-Up, Virtual Assistants, Web Technology, Work/Life Balance, avoid growing pain, bootstrap, do bookkeeping., do credit control, grow your business, handle problems, lower overheads, market and sell, motivate your staff, outsource effectively, plan cash-flow, plan your business, recruit the right people, start-up in business, use online IT

If you have a group of people working with you – in your office or from home, employed or outsourced – does that mean you have a team? Well that depends how you work together.

Small Businesses need to be build a team, a Small Business Team. A team is defined as a group of people who co-operate in such a manner that it achieves more than the sum total of the individuals achieve each, they are united around a common goal and are accountable to the team for their actions.

Examples of teams are:

Work Teams
Sales Teams
Customer Service Teams
Virtual Teams

I would suggest that small business owners need to form teams around their small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses, too. This will achieve scalability, higher efficiency, more professionalism, in other words to grow your business with less growing pains, like struggling cash-flow, excessive financial and administrative overheads and much more.

In fact keeping business failure at bay, may very well depend on your ability to form these teams, in your office or virtually.

In a modern business context we also call these teams Small Business Communities or Small Business Networks. Even a small business may have different types of networks – as indicated above – you can have your office team, while your small office team member for sales may also belong to a external sales network (team).

As you can see we live not only technologically in a networked world – we live in a world of teams, communities and people networks. The benefits especially for small business and even more business start-up, can not be over emphasized – teams perform functions so important for small business success:

achieve better work results than individuals,
are ultimately more scalable and flexible than larger organisations,
offer a wider range of services and products than individuals,
offer the opportunity of “brain-storming”,
motivate each other,
develop more skills and confidence
show more commitment to each other.

Whatever you do, employ new staff, hire a consultant, work with an accountant, think my-team, think my-community and think my-network – because you are building your Small Business Team. Do it even before you open your door for business, during the business start-up phase.

So, back to my question for you: Do you work with a Group of people or do you have your own Small Business Team?

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Accounting and Accountants for Business Start-Ups and Small Business

Aug 21, ’07 2:04 PM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Accounting, Outsourcing, Software as a Service, Start-Up, Web Technology, WinWeb, deal with taxes, do a SWOT plan, do a reality check, do bookkeeping., grow your business, not to do it!, outsource effectively, plan cash-flow, plan your business, recruit the right people, start-up in business, use online IT

I get many questions about bookkeeping and accounting for small business and start-ups, here are a couple of things you should consider before making your decision:

What do you want to achieve? Do you want to:

Do you just want to collect your receipts and other documents and than hand it over to someone else?
Are you happy to fill in a simple online forms and have the double entry done by an bookkeeper or accountant?
Or do you want to do the accounting yourself and have the accountant prepare your tax-returns for you?

Each of these options is OK, as long as you do not relinquish all your responsibility to the other party when you outsource. You need to keep your books up-to-date, so you know where you small business is going and so you can make good and informed decisions.

If you are considering option 2. then their are products on the market that can help you, one of them is our AccountsOffice- Lite Edition ( currently still called CashBook), for a full tri-ledger accounting system you can use our AccountsOffice Standard Edition, both of the single user versions are free BTW.

For small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal business, the only way to go is online – I’m sure you think I would say that – but consider this.

You will need to get information fast – to make an urgent decision – how is anyone going to give you advice without up-to-date numbers on your business. There are other benefits to consider, but this one to me is the most crucial. Remember most small businesses fail because of bad financial decisions being taken, often based on false or out of date data.

What if your accountant or bookkeeper wants you to use an offline accounting system – do your business a favor find a new accountant, fast. Accountants are sometimes slow to change, they are also very often very busy people, but you should not worry about that, you need to worry about your business.

I wrote in the past about many accountants wanting to live in the past – that they are not interested in helping you plan your future. Michael Gerber in his book “The E-Myth Revisited” calls these type of business people “technicians” – I agree most of them are and very few have an entrepreneurial outlook in live.

So remember – no planning or no online accounting/bookkeeping for your small business – leave NOW! You owe it to your business.

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Online Accounting for Small business and Start-Ups

Aug 16, ’07 9:25 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Accounting, WinWeb, do bookkeeping.

A survey by the business accounting firm Tallia reported that 90% of accountants said that their clients want to be able to manage accounting through the internet by 2008.

Online accounting has many advantages and these include the fact that accountants are able to view the cash books in real time and provide crucial advice to the business owners. Also it simplifies things for entrepreneurs as they donít have to spend so much of time saving and updating their accounting books.

Specialized accounting and cash flow solutions for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses, allow the employers and employees time to focus on core productive activities rather than spend it maintaining accounts and on financial management.

The Tallia research also indicated that a third of small businesses think that they invest too much of time on cash flow, credit control and other activities related to financial management.

Another crucial point that the study revealed was that online accounting would eliminate the export and import of data to the accountant, a process that many small businesses find baffling.

“The fact that data is offsite, safe and secure is one of the main benefits of managing your accounts online, but it also means that you can work from anywhere or at any time,” commented Michael Turner, general manager Tallia on the advantage of online accounting for small firms.

They must have been reading my blog or been on our website …. sorry could not stop myself! I wish more accountants would act on this, rather then be sitting on the proverbial fence.

Hat-tip to GrowingBusiness.co.uk

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Why businesses fail and go bust!

Aug 2, ’07 6:59 AM

Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Accounting, Failure, How to ..., Outsourcing, Small Business / SOHO, bootstrap, do bookkeeping.

In one word cash-flow – not because of their balance sheet or P&L – no plain and simple they run out of money. With basic cash-flow planning you can see this coming a mile of, one example.

One of the most frustrating parts about being an entrepreneur is getting clients to pay up their bills. While the government passed the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 to protect the rights of businesses, not many businesses actually use it.

Small business, like home-, micro-, lifestyle-, mobile-, SME-, SMB-, SOHO-businesses are losing out due to the chaos created in their cash-flow but also on precious funds that they could have charged clients for late payment.

In a recent survey by Gravdon U.K. it was revealed that as few as 4% of businesses charge interest on late payments. 44% reported adding interest to outstanding invoices and 50% did not charge any interest.

There are several reasons why small businesses choose not to charge interest and these include adding more administrative work to follow through on and losing clients.

While this trend of late payments is not expected to change anytime soon, small business need to protect their cash-flow and there are several ways to do so. To ensure that the business owners always have access to crucial information, they ned to do cash-flow planning and some bookkeeping, in order to get cash-flow plan and actual comparison.

It is not unusual that personal business, like contractor, freelancer, free-agent, self-employed and virtual assistants is owed more money than the overdraft on their bank accounts. They are effectively financing their clients business and should charge interest on money owed in excess to what their bank charges the business.

You can always outsource your bookkeeping and credit control function, use a virtual assistant and WinWeb’s On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure approach to solve this problem – you want to stay in business (?) make sure your cash-flow is good.

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Not all accountants are created equal (how do you choose an accountant)

May 8, ’06 9:54 AM

Author jason holden Categories Accountants/CPAs, Accounting, Development, Entrepreneur, Finance, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Outsourcing, Red-Tape, Software as a Service, Start-Up, Virtual Assistants, Web Technology, avoid growing pain, bootstrap, deal with taxes, do a reality check, do bookkeeping., find funding, grow your business, handle problems, lower overheads, outsource effectively, plan cash-flow, plan your business, start-up in business, use online IT

My first contribution to this blog has resulted from a recent experience had by a new client of my practice with someone who also used the title ‘accountant’.

Firstly, you need to understand in the UK there is no requirement to have any formal training or qualifications before calling yourself an accountant. This does not for one minute mean that someone without formal qualifications is going to be bad, not for one minute, so how do you chose your accountant?

As with anything, I would always say choose an accountant on the recommendations of a friend/colleague. If you know someone who uses an accountant, and they are happy with them, then this is a good starting point. Next, does the accountant have relevant experience in the industry you are in, or an allied industry, after all, it’s going to make life a lot easier if he actually knows a bit about the industry you’re in when offering advice.

But what if you don’t know anyone who can make a recommendation, what next? This is where I would definitely look for an accountant who belongs to a professional body, and holds a current and up to date practicing certificate, at least this way I would know this ‘stranger’ has gone through a certain standard of training and will have had to achieve a minimum level of experience before being admitted to membership.

The decisions don’t stop there though, unlike other countries where there is either one or a very small number of professional accounting bodies, the UK has many, as shown at the end of this post.

In summary, if you know someone who uses an accountant they are happy with meet them first, next find an accountant who understands your industry and finally if you have to make a selection on your own, then meet and interview at least three accountants before making your choice, remembering their membership of a professional body affords you some protection. Good luck!

Here is the list of accounting bodies:

The Association of Certified Accountants (ACCA)
The Association of International Accountants (AIA)
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Englandand Wales (ICAEW)
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS)
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (ICAI)
Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA)

Professional bodies whose members cannot act as company auditors:

Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA)
Certified Public Accountants (Ireland) (CPA)
Institute of Financial Accountants (IFA)
Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT)

AAT, ACCA, Accounting, AIA, Bookkeeping, Business Development, Business Start Up, CIMA, CIPFA, CPA, CPAs, ICAEW, ICAI, ICAS, IFA, sme-blog

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