Google+ is the newest social media network and it offers so much more than than just the ability to incorporate a +1 button on your blog.
Google+ first introduced what I call a personal page sometime last summer based on the concept of networking by adding people to “circles” that you can create and have full control over. It also provides each of us with the ability to host an online meeting or a hangout where we invite specific people or have it open to the public.
Every Friday at 8 am Pacific/11 am Eastern I usually attend the Accountants, Bookkeepers & Business Owners Hangout for an hour (where we discuss QuickBooks, general business, social media, and whatever).
On Wednesday, I participated in #GPCW (Google Plus Circle Wednesday) on Twitter – which allows you add your Twitter followers to your circles. This is done by sending a tweet using a special hashtag of #GPCW and including the link to your Google Plus personal or business page.
All you need to get started with Google+ is a gmail account, so if you don’t have one go to gmail.com and create one. Set up your personal page and then be sure to add a business page as well. Make sure that you add information and photo’s to your profile and then start searching for people you know to add to your circles.
Follow me on Twitter and watch for the Wednesday hashtag of #GPCW to connect with some really interesting folks, if you already have a Google Plus account you can circle either my personal page or my business page – if you are interested in knowing more about the Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Business Owners hangout every Friday morning be sure to let me know and I’ll make sure that I share the hangout information with you.
Free eBook: Have You Built Your Google+ Business Page Yet?
Get yourself a copy of HubSpot’s ebook to learn how you can start using this new platform for your business, you will need to complete a short form in order to download, but it’s worth the effort.
HubSpot’s guide will provide you with information about:
- How to set up a business page
- Marketing best practices
- Circles and the value of segmentation
- How to incorporate the +1 button on your blog or website
I hope you’ve found today’s topic to be interesting – hope to meet up with you here on the web!
Employee education and training is an investment that every business owner should make. As a business owner, your company policies should include employee education and training requirements.
Whether you are a business owner or an employee, education and training is part of your daily life – like it or not. We need it in order to deal with new complexities that we face at work, for career advancement, and to obtain certification.
Being a business owner myself, I find myself learning new things on a daily basis in order to make my job easier and more efficient. For example, right now as I prepare this blog post, I’m working with a new piece of software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. Dragon allows me to dictate my blog post instead of physically having to type it. Needless to say, this is a learning experience. But once I master it, creating a blog post is going to be a much faster and more efficient process. I will also then be able to apply this knowledge to other tasks, such as writing or updating our software manuals.
My own background is bookkeeping. Over the years I’ve transitioned from being just a bookkeeper to becoming a software developer. I’ve learned a whole bunch in this job! Performing bookkeeping tasks or providing QuickBooks training to clients did not prepare me for becoming a software developer, writing manuals, creating and maintaining a website, or any of the thousands of other things that I do on a daily basis.
Let’s take support for an example. I find that there is a very, very fine line between how people view support and training. In general, support is defined as helping a user solve a specific problem with the product, perhaps resolving an error message. However, I find that most people define or expect that support includes (or is also) training – not only for our software but for QuickBooks, Microsoft Office, and basic computer tasks such as how to create a new folder or add an attachment to an email.
Whether you are a contractor, a bookkeeper working for contractor, or certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor you need to make a commitment to yourself, to your employees, to your business, and to your clients to obtain the training necessary to perform daily tasks quickly and efficiently and then take what you have learned an apply it. This requires a commitment of your time and sometimes money as well
Training can be obtained in multiple ways. The internet provides some great training opportunities, you can Google something specific and find an overwhelming amount of information for free. Many companies, our own included, provide great training videos for learning their software – free of charge. You can take a class on-line or go to your local community college.
The possibilities are endless for learning, if you just make the commitment.
I hope you found this article to be helpful, if so, please take a moment to leave a comment or share it on your favorite social media site.
Protecting your business from fraud and theft is a tough job these days – are you doing enough as a business owner to ensure that your assets are safe?
Did you know that according to a 2010 report from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, incidents of occupational fraud are 31% more likely to occur at small business as opposed to larger companies? And, to add insult to injury, as many as 40% of small business owners are embezzlement victims and that a staggering one-third of all bankruptcies are the direct result of internal theft!
To be hones, I had no idea of these statistics – until I read a very interesting article yesterday called Five steps to prevent small business fraud, in the Hartford Business Journal Online.
The article discussed:
- Managing finances using secure online banking
- Protecting computer systems and practicing online awareness
- Safely handling sensitive documents and financial statements
- Obtaining fidelity insurance {which protects your business against criminal acts such as robbery, embezzlement, forgery, and credit card fraud}, and
- Incorporating appropriate checks and balances
The author, Michael LaBella, offered some excellent advice about incorporating appropriate checks and balances;
Every small business owner should perform an internal review and assessment of company finances on a monthly basis. Make sure payment amounts match all invoices and check for any missing documents. Running random audits or having a third party audit your books once a year will show your employees you are serious about fraud and deter them from committing deceptive acts.
While that’s very good advice, I don’t think it’s quite enough, below are some additional tips for protecting your business from fraud.
- As a business owner you should be signing all of the checks written on your company checking account – throw out the signature stamp and don’t use the QuickBooks option that allows checks to be printed with your signature already in place! That’s just asking for trouble…..
- Balance your checking account and credit card statements each month – that way you can “see” those transactions and verify where the company’s money has gone.
Yes, this means more for you to do as a business owner – and I’m sure that you already have a full plate – but isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?
What safeguards do you have in place to protect your business from fraud?
I hope you’ve found this article to be helpful and thought provoking, if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share it with others on your favorite social media platform using the buttons below.
Many business owners feel that they can pay their employes “whenever” they want and that is true to a point. Business owners can pay their employees whenever they want as long as the “whenever” meets the laws of the state their business resides in.
As a business owner you probably feel “in control” when it comes to setting a payroll schedule for the people you hire. Certainly you have options, you can issue payroll on a:
- weekly
- bi-weekly {every other week}
- semi-monthly {twice a month, perhaps on the 1st and the 15th}
- or a monthly basis
While there is no federal laws that require how often you pay your employees, the payroll schedule you choose MUST conform to the requirements of the state that your business is located in.
Most states require that every employer has to pay all of the wages due to an employee on a regular payroll schedule, which is determined by you the business owner – BUT you must notify the employees of how frequently you intend to pay them. A “regular schedule” means that you must consistently pay your employees using whatever frequency you choose, in other words you can’t just randomly issue a payroll check.
Many states also tell a business owner how much of a “holdback” they can take. Meaning that if you decide your workweek starts on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday and that you will pay your employees on the Friday AFTER the end of the work week; you are holding back a week’s worth of pay.
A word of caution – a business can get into trouble if it doesn’t pay it’s employees as often as the law requires – and I’m sure you don’t want or need that additional headache! Believe it or not, but each state has their own set of rules and regulations {imagine that!}, in some states the rules are different depending upon the employees occupation. In other words, setting a payroll schedule that is realistic for your company AND that conforms to state requirements can be a mess!
The U.S. Department of Labor provides a fairly detailed overview of employee payroll schedules by state, you can find State Payday Requirements here, the information provided is ONLY an overview of general information – you should most definitely contact your state department of labor for all of the details!
We hope you’ve found this article to be helpful, if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share it with others on your favorite social network.
Accounting professionals are often considered to be the “trusted adviser”, working in the best interests of their client and helping overcome obstacles to business success. At the very minimum, business owners recognize that they need their accountant to get their taxes done, and that relationship alone requires a level of trust that no typical vendor can boast.
Accounting professionals are also often advocates for certain computer technology and/or software solutions, largely because they are viewed as tools which facilitate a better working relationship between the client and their accountant, and which may improve the quality of information available to both. Recommendations regarding the selection of accounting software packages and solutions to record and report on business activities may be made by the accountant, and those recommendations are often accepted by the business owner based on the belief that the accountant has the necessary understanding of the client business requirements.
Making software and other technology-related recommendations to clients allows the accounting professional to potentially influence the decision of the business owner, the result of which is often that the client ends up using a solution that the accountant is familiar with and can therefore assist with setup, training, and support services. Because the accounting professional simply made a recommendation to the client, there is some safety in the event that the recommendation ends up not working out. If the client purchases the wrong software or equipment, the professional retains a level of distance from the issue because they were not the vendor of the product. Recommendations are made based on the information available, and the accountant’s defense may be that they did not have all the necessary information to make a better recommendation.
But what happens when the accounting professional BECOMES the technology provider to their client? Accounting professionals should strongly consider whether it makes sense for them to be the technology provider to their client, or simply collaborate with the client on a recommended solution. The areas of concern may include operational impacts to the client business and cost, but one main area of concern should be in the client’s perception of their service provider.
As the accountant, the trusted adviser, you benefit from a high level of respect from your client. The client recognizes that you have knowledge that they need and that can help them. You have a high status level with the client.
When the accounting professional becomes the technology provider, however, changes begin to happen with the client’s perception of their once-trusted adviser. Rather than viewing their accountant as the provider of a valuable service, the client may now view their accountant as a technology provider, responsible for the performance and functionality of IT systems. Now relegated to the position of “technician”, the accounting professional must overcome a variety of obstacles, including those specifically and only related to the technology. Difficulties with technology may overshadow the other areas where the professional is involved, and will often become the focus of ongoing discussions. While the accountant may have been trying to improve their overall value proposition with the client, the actual result may be a reduction of confidence and trust. Where once the accountant was a trusted adviser, they are now simply an IT vendor (and a replaceable vendor, at that).
With accountants and their clients now embracing cloud computing models, many accounting professionals are recognizing the potential benefits of private-labeling and reselling cloud-based solutions to their clients. Particularly if a service becomes a key element to the workflow, or is an enabling feature of the accounting service, there are compelling arguments for incorporating the solution into the “package” offered by the accounting professional. Cloud solutions are, however, just another “flavor” of technology, and the same issues regarding reselling should be strongly considered.
Accountants provide a valuable professional service to their clients. While technology and information systems facilitate and enable this relationship, the relationship itself is not fundamentally IT-based. For this reason, professionals should use caution when considering how to involve IT solutions in their service offerings. Delivering a service under the accountant business brand communicates to the client who their service provider is, but it also communicates a level of responsibility that the firm may not be prepared to take on. When the systems are working well, the private-label model may work very well for the firm. But when systems fail, the risk to the professional is not only lost productivity, but a potential loss of faith and trust – and business – from the client.
