The most important thing for a small business – or indeed any business – is to be able to track regularly and accurately the state of the cash flow.  This means knowing how much work has been invoiced, controlling credit, closely monitoring costs and managing client accounts.

However, if it’s the most important thing, it is probably also the routine task that can get overlooked, forgotten or that gives way to more urgent daily issues.

When I joined Simpleweb as office manager a few months ago, I was introduced to Freeagent, the accounting software designed to help small businesses do all this.

Great, I thought.  All good stuff that is going to make life easier.  Providing the information goes in methodically and accurately,  the current situation can be monitored daily.

So, what do we like most about Freeagent?

Well it’ s free! (well almost.  There is a small monthly license fee of about £22).

The dashboard on our home page gives a great point of quick reference. It is graphic and clear and shows at a glance the state of the bank account, how much has been invoiced out, payments received and a debtors list so I can see immediately who needs to be chased for overdue invoices.  It also shows a tax timeline with key payment dates for PAYE/NI, VAT and Corporation Tax and a quick reference profit and loss summary.

The contacts database means you can keep all your contacts up to date and the work flow section allows you to project manage work for key clients, generating estimates, time sheets and invoices.  We use the invoicing function as it links into the payment details and bank reconciliation – but for project management we prefer Basecamp

To manage the cashflow, providing you upload your latest bank statement regularly to Freeagent, you can easily reconcile and account for money in and money out. The information you put in here is categorised into cost centres and feeds into the accounting section and profit and loss making costs monitoring and  end of year accounting much easier.

The My Money section can be used for PAYE & NI, generating payslips, keeping records of  expenses and more.

What do we not like so much?

Well, three months on, you can imagine my disappointment with one very important, you could say vital, aspect of Freeagent that has turned out to be seriously lacking: the PAYE and National Insurance calculator.

By their own admission, Freeagent say on their website:   “. . . this is a simple payslip calculator” and that “if your payroll needs are more complex than the simple calculator supports, you can always use another payroll calculator and edit Freeagent to match”

We were nearly caught out by this simplicity and had been putting blind faith in the payroll figures generated by Freeagent. However,  it turned out that there were some discrepancies in the NI payments, albeit small differences. Luckily we realised quite quickly that the system was not  really robust enough to cope with the nuances of our payroll and the complexities of UK tax and NI deductions so we have handed the payroll function to our accountant who runs it all through Sage. Peace of mind.  I do not think we will be duplicating effort by replicating the data in Freeagent.  The net salaries and tax paid will still be accounted for in Freeagent, but not the calculations or payslips which will come from Sage.

Like any system, Freeagent is only as good as the data that is put into it and we have made  a judgement call about which parts are really useful to us and then to make absolutely sure that we keep those sections routinely and accurately up to date – then it really does make life easier!

Is our attitude to the environment in danger of becoming vuvuzela background noise – a constant drone that we filter out?  Reducing the environmental impact of business and industry has been on the agenda for decades.  Ten years ago, it was still quite easy to ignore and it has taken the big stick of legislation to make businesses respond.

The need to demonstrate sound environmental practices is being pushed further and further down the supply chain by larger organisations and by the public sector. As we have clients in both those categories, making sure we have an environmental management policy place is crucial.

But we are small company in the services sector, so do we have an environmental impact?

Maybe not the kind of impact that a chemicals giant or a metal bashing business would have, but we use energy, computer and office consumables and we travel to work – so yes, we do.  And we would like to see if we can save on the bottom line – and be more competitive by qualifying for extra brownie points when bidding for new business.

Does this mean we need full ISO14000 accreditation?

Well no, at least not at this stage.  ISO14000 is the international quality standard for environmental practice.  Accreditation requires external assessment on an ongoing basis and is expensive. For the time being, this is a  bridge too far.  We have opted for putting an environmental policy in place that is monitored, reviewed and updated internally.

So what does our policy say?

In outline, we “copied with pride” by looking at other people’s environmental policies and following the guidance on the Business Link website and the Envirowise website

But of course the policy has to be ours to live up to.  We assessed the areas in which the company has an impact and where we thought we could improve, for example by looking at what we buy as office consumables and what we do with office waste. The result is a straightforward policy statement with the undertaking to monitor for continuous improvement.

As far as the impact of our  travel to work goes, we are fortunate that most of us can and do cycle to work.  However, for many companies this is not the case.  Carrying our a travel to work survey and reviewing ways of  reducing commuting and business miles can really make a difference.  For example, using video conferencing can save huge amounts of time and travel costs for a business. Encouraging car sharing and  putting in cycle racks and shower facilities can help individuals to save on fuel and reduce congestion.  Check out the Bike2Work Scheme.  This can be a good incentive for employers and employees to encourage cycling to work.

And why is it important?

Skeptics might view setting up an environmental policy as merely  a “box ticking” exercise carried out to support the bidding process. That would be an injustice. It led us to think constructively about our business consumerism and any waste products. It has also raised awareness amongst staff, both at work and on a domestic level. Most importantly, it will help us to stay competitive and win lucrative business.

Thanks to V-2 for use of their image

When Tom and I first started Simpleweb our mission was to create “process driven websites” that retained quality, accessibility and value. We feel that we succeeded. Our own CMS was easy to use for users and simple to administer.

Three years later and things have moved on; a lot. Wordpress is almost the universal CMS for small websites. With more and more business’s seeing the need for keeping their users up to-date. Wordpress is making big inroads into SME websites as well, even the government is getting in on the action.

Smaller business’s though have had a notoriously hard time since the beginning of the web boom. They usually can’t afford a “proper” web designer/developer or digital agency, so either settle for a site through a student web designer; which can be great aesthetically, but usually there’s no support or updates and they become hugely frustrating. Even worse than this is the dreaded “site in a box”. Usually £199 for everything that you need for your online business or for giving you a migraine… Arrrggghh!

Is their a solution? We think so. Pretty much everybody knows how to use Facebook. Over half a billion users and growing, with anyone being able to set a up a “fan page”; a website inside of Facebook.

Setting up a fan page is easy and it gives you a way to post articles, events, quick updates, photo’s and videos. More importantly it lets you tap into an existing audience and grow a community around you and your business. It’s an online “neighborhood” if you like!

The downside to a fan page is that it’s inside Facebook. What we really need is visibility of this content outside of Facebook while keeping all of the benefits of a familiar system. No more learning bespoke or clunky technology. We already know how to use Facebook.

What’s needed then is a website that sits outside of Facebook, somehow connected to the one inside of Facebook. Recently Facebook has released an API called Open Graph. It lets web developers connect directly into the inner workings of Facebook so that we can pull and push information and data. All of which means building a website outside of Facebook populated with all of your daily content such as news and photos is now a viable option. You don’t ever need to worry about keeping your website up to date again.

By creating the best of both worlds, we have a website that has a nice web address, looks good, is easy to find by Google and a piece of cake to update.

For a single product or service based business we can’t think of a better alternative for providing businesses with a professional way to advertise online and create traffic, community and sales. Larger business’s are already tapping into this by creating microsites, small spinoffs from their larger websites.

These “connected” websites can also have Youtube, Flickr, Google maps and other existing services, creating a true socially connected website that can do so much more than traditional websites.

We’ve recently built some of our own:

• British Military Fitness
• Go Ape’s new product G-Trax

There are so many tools out there targeted at small businesses it is sometimes hard to know where to start. Coming from a very large corporate myself, and having only been with Simpleweb for three months, I was very new to all of the tools on offer and to having the flexibility to change what you used if something better came along!  I was also new to the concept that there are tools out there that can actually help you achieve your goals!  A lot of the tools I had come across previously, sadly formed part of a box ticking exercise and were seen by the majority as more of a hindrance than a helping hand.

Basecamp was one of the first tools I was introduced to when I started. “Have a look around and then start a new project” Mark said.  What?! No 3 hour webex and an exam to pass before I am let loose? (I wish I was exaggerating!) What kind of project management tool is this?! Within about 10 minutes I had the answer to my question.  It is the project management tool for everybody.

What Does it Do?

Over the past 3 months I am not ashamed to say that I have become completely addicted to Basecamp, and it is now very much a part of my daily routine. It is simple, yet effective and tells me everything I need to know at the start of a day.

Instead of emailing different people and having discrepancies over what was said/when/who knew etc (which we all know happens FAR too often across projects), you message people through Basecamp and everything is saved in one place. When you send a message you choose who you want to see it, attach any files and it will automatically be emailed to the relevant people with everything then saved in Basecamp.  It keeps all of the project notes and attachments centralized so everyone is always kept in the loop and any new people to the project/managers wanting a high level view, can quickly catch up.

You can do all the normal things you should be able to do with a Project Management tool – to-do lists with owners and timelines, milestones, track time, but they are done publicly on Basecamp and therefore agreed at that specific time. Everyone knows the timelines, milestones and owners and therefore there is no room for “miscommunication.”

At Simpleweb we work with a number of different clients, from the Government to Sole Traders and therefore we need to use a tool that everyone can use from day one without wasting precious time on training.

Multiple Projects

One of the key features we love about Basecamp is the way it handles multiple projects.  We can often be working on a number of projects at once and therefore it is important for Mark and Tom to be able to quickly see an overview of all projects. What is going on with each project, when the next milestone is, and who is involved so they can manage our resources efficiently. Basecamp enables them to do this.

Extra Features

There are a large number of extra features that you can add in to tailor Basecamp to your specific business requirements. These range from iPhone apps to more detailed reporting tools, invoicing and billing tools and even chat (through Campfire). Most of which are costed individually but give you a free trial and can be integrated into Basecamp. This is great because it makes it harder for you to “Grow out of.”  As you grow as a business, so can your project management tool.

Is it for me?

As much as I have unknowingly become a Basecamp evangelist, I am in no way suggesting this tool alone will solve all project management needs for all businesses.  We use Basecamp in conjunction with Omniplan which enables us to visualise projects with Gantt charts, and we find that this works best for us and our clients.  Each company will obviously be different depending on your clientele, the nature and number of projects you are involved in at any one time and the service/product you offer. I also appreciate that I may be slightly biased because I have gone from one extreme to the other, missing out the tools in the “middle” which maybe add some real value to the world of project management in a way that I am yet to appreciate.  I cannot help but think however, that for what we, as a small business, need it for, nothing could be any simpler and why would we want to make it any more complicated?

“Tough but fair” and “unavoidable”  are the Chancellor’s labels on this particular bottle of medicine. Ominous words maybe, but what are the active ingredients that will affect small businesses?  We have been trying to evaluate the impact of the measures and have come to the conclusion that, as a small business,  we will be relatively unscathed if not actually helped.

Tax & VAT – main points

• VAT -The standard rate of VAT will increase by 2.5% from 17.5% to 20% from 4 January 2011. The zero rate for food and books remains in place while the lower rate for other items, such as fuel and power, remains at 5%.  As long as the flat rate scheme for small businesses is still available,  we can swallow that pill.  The flat rate  VAT scheme allows small businesses to apply a single percentage to turnover in a VAT period, therefore saving work recording VAT on sales and purchases.
• Corporation tax – The rate for small companies will reduce from 21% to 20% next year.
• Capital expenditure – The Chancellor has put the threshold for the Annual Investment Allowance for qualifying capital expenditure on plant and machinery back down to £25,000 – but not until April 2012. Until then the threshold will remain at £100,000.

There are also plans to increase the personal income tax allowance from April 2011, scrap the proposed 50p levy on landlines and  review the IR35 and small business tax that relates to contractors and intermediaries.

Other measures

small business rates relief scheme

Plans to increase the level of small business rates relief from October 2010. Rate relief will apply to premises valued at up to £6,000 and then tapering to £12,000. Take a look at the Business Link website to estimate your business rates.  You can find the rateable value of a property on the Valuation Office Agency website.

Government backed funding schemes

There will be an increase in the funds available under the Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme.  This scheme is aimed at encouraging banks to lend to small businesses that are poised to grow but lack the funding to do so.  However, the health warning here is that,  although the lending is backed by government funds, the banks will still apply their own commercial lending criteria and will not lend if they do not think the loan will be repaid. You can check your eligibility for government backed funding by using the interactive tool on the Business Link website.

The creation of an Enterprise Capital Fund to facilitate equity finance for small businesses. The government will fund 25% and private investors (Angels) the rest.

Thanks to Anitakhart for image

We haven’t blogged about Zubworld yet… It’s a location based community site, you buy a Zub and create a community around it, with conversations, videos and events.

There’s nothing like a £600,000 car arriving at your office covered in decals of a product that you’ve built to get the motivation synapses firing.

Here’s a few pictures of a beautiful piece of machinery and Tom looking exceptionally happy with himself.

More to come on Zubworld from us soon, case study and new features…

Following on from the blog about Facebook pages for businesses, we thought it might be useful to tell you about Facebook ads. This is something that has become more and more prevalent recently amongst businesses because of the fact that so many people are on Facebook. Businesses can now instantly reach a massive audience, which they can target very specifically, and they can also test the ads that they are producing and amend costings very quickly and easily.  Facebook ads also enable businesses to direct people straight to the links that they want them to go to. Hence why it is becoming a really effective way of advertising.

3 Steps and you’re away!

The first thing that you need to do is log into your business account on Facebook. Once you have done that, you will see down the left hand side that there is a tab “Ads and pages.”

All you need to do is click onto that and you will see that you can create an advert.  There are now 3 simple steps.

1. Designing your ad

This includes choosing your image, selecting the url you want people to go to and writing the copy.  You are quite limited with the space available so that may require some work beforehand.

2. Targeting

Who do you actual want to target?  What are the demographics?  Is it just for males, is it just for females?  Do you have an age range, do you have a geographic location? That kind of thing.

3. Costings

How much do you want to spend on this campaign?  How much does that work out per day?  Do you want it to be pay per click, or per impression?

Each advert will need to fall into a “campaign” which you label in stage 3.  You can have as many ads in each campaign as you like and as many campaigns as well. This is great for keeping regional campaigns separate or campaigns for different products because it enables you to spread out all the costings and see the statistics for that specific campaign.

More info? Ask the experts!

To be honest, for more information on those 3 steps I think Facebook have the answers! If you go to “learn more” from “ads and pages” you will see “Facebook adverts 101 webinar.” The webinar takes you through all 3 stages; design, targeting, and costings, and is definitely worth watching.

Approval

One thing to mention about the ads is that Facebook have to approve all of them before they can start. So when you have done your ads don’t expect them to start immediately, you will need to wait for Facebook to approve them. Due to time difference, that’s usually about 2-3 o’clock in the afternoon.  The main reasons for Facebook ads being rejected are for things like capitalisation in the wrong places, or incorrect grammar, but most of the time it will tell you if there is something wrong with your ad when you are typing it in in stage 1, in the design.

Once the ad has been approved it will become automatically live so if you want to pause an ad, or even pause a whole campaign, you can do this manually by simply changing the run status.

Graphs & Stats

When your ads become live you will be able to access quite a lot of very valuable data from Facebook. For example, the number of impressions you have had compared to the number of clicks.  Facebook will give you a recommended range for your cost per click bid (i.e. £0.41-£0.52) and it is up to you to decide how much you are prepared to pay for every click generated.  Every ad could have a different recommended range as a number of factors influence this. If you aren’t within Facebook’s  recommended range, you might not get as many impressions as you want.  That being said, if time is on your side, it may be worth bidding lower than Facebook recommends to start off with and making adjustments upwards if the requirement is there. It is easier to go up in cost than down!  The recommended bids and impression numbers will fluctuate depending on who else is trying to bid in that space, so it is worth keeping an eye on.

Testing! Testing! Testing!

From all the data Facebook give you, you will be able to modify your adverts to try and improve them.  So for example, you might want to use the same copy but put different images in to see how much that differs the click rate %.  Or you could leave the image the same and vary the copy a bit, or just the title, to see which attracts the most attention. One thing I would say is that it is really important to have an action at the end of your ad so that people are encouraged to actually click on the ad. If you want people to buy tickets you say “Get your tickets here”, if its free sign up “free sign up here” at the end of it.

Conversions

Facebook do make it really easy for you to not only see how well your ads are doing but also let you follow through on the conversion rates as well.

You can also use a tracking code that Facebook provide you with to measure conversions on the website that you have linked to.  Select “Ads and pages” from the home page and you will see “Tracking.” Click here and you will see a code that you can copy and paste into your website that will enable you to track the conversions. So, for example, if the aim of your ad is to get people to sign up for something, then you can take the tracking code and paste it into the page that people see when they have signed up, and then track it on Facebook.  Once the code is active if you go to “Tracking” it will say “Data received” on the right.  You can then click on “View conversion report” to see a breakdown of results per day.

Reports

You also have “Reports” on the left hand side. If you click on this you can generate a number of reports. You can choose from Advertising performance, responder demographics, conversions, as well as choosing the date range, time summary and format. You can then generate your report and export it.

In summary, businesses across the world are using Facebook ads for a reason. The way you can target specific demographics from an enormous population is second to none. Add that to the fact that they are very easy to set up and edit, and you spend exactly how much you want to by the day, and it seems to be a winning combination. It may not suit every small business and it does require some attention and perseverance, but overall you cannot argue that the likes of Facebook ads, and not forgetting Google Adwords, are adding a new and interesting dimension to the advertising space.

Of course one thing leads to another – so once we had our Health and Safety policy in place, we tackled what we thought would be a bigger hurdle:  How to demonstrate to the world that this company is a quality operation in terms of our services,  our management  and our ethos – without going for ISO9000.

What pushed us into doing it?

Sheer ambition!  We wanted to be able to bid for more work, some in the public sector.  Such contracts, as well as those related to the 2012 Olympics, are perceived as difficult to win and we do not disagree.

However, without being fit, we could not even reach the starting block – let alone the winners podium.

Where to start?

What we really wanted was an example or template to follow that we could use as a check list and make into our own policy.  With a bit of digging, and we found the Chartered Quality Institute’s Small Business Standard

This gave us the basis for our own Quality Management Statement and the systems that we needed to put in place to live up to it.

So what exactly is a QM system?

It is a bird’s eye view of all aspects of our business management, underpinned by corresponding good practice measures.  The broad headings, cover everything from the responsibilities of management, financial processes and HR policies to customer service standards and quality measures for service delivery.  In short, we had to think systematically about all the things we do and how we do them. Our Quality Management Statement sets out the standards and practices by which the company operates and can be measured.

More pain or more gain?

Gain! Now we have done the thinking and writing, there is a clear structure in place on which to build and improve;  All staff have a clear idea of the company’s working practices, ethos as employers and aspirations; Life is easier for new starters with an induction process;   And it means we are already on the starting block when evidence of quality systems is a pre-requisite for bidding for a contract.

But there’s always more!

As we established our QM systems,  the need for other policies emerged.  Next in line were environmental and equal opportunities policies. Both crop up as elements of our QM systems and will always be requested when bidding for public or 2012 Olympic tenders.  But by now, we were on a roll and able to put them in place quite quickly.

Blogging can sometimes be hard. What’s your “Tone of voice”, “who are you talking to?”, “what am I trying to say?”, “opinion or fact”, “formal or informal?”, the list goes on and on.

Blogging is about conversations, but most blog posts (ours included) sometimes don’t feel like it. Somehow an air of formality creeps in and smoothes off the rough edges turning what can be an interesting piece into something a little more preachy or arrogant than perhaps intended.

We see it a lot.

So… Sarah and I are experimenting with recording conversations and transcribing them. We’ll pick a topic each and basically talk to ourselves, recording the ensuing madness.

We’re both going to do a post each next week and we’ll see how we go. It may well be a disaster. It may not…

Will it be obvious which posts we’ve transcribed? I think it will.

{Photo courtesy of Levork}

We have some news to share! For the past few weeks we have been working with BMF (British Military Fitness) on their digital marketing campaign for the summer.  This has involved a number of different projects, but today we wanted to tell you about the local community pages we have launched this week.

BMF London

BMF Manchester

BMF Leeds

BMF Birmingham

The idea behind these pages was to create a local, social page, where people can go and find out about their local BMF.  The pages present feeds from the local Facebook groups, Twitter, and Flickr to show you whats been going on in your area, and also present maps so you can find your nearest park and the timetable of classes. They allow you to share the page and also to quickly and easily sign up for a free trial.

Take a look and let us know what you think!

Thank you to Hikingartist.com for the use of his image