Aboriginal Buying Group

Self discipline more….

Before I show you my portfolio of my favourite online tools that I promise will help you to work remotely, I wanted to make you aware of one more point connected with self management and specifically to do with keeping your focus and levels of concentration

I’ve uncovered and established a common habit in contacts who work on the Internet and I’ve been in contact with for a substantial period and I call this behavior the fifty minute effect. I uncovered these friends who apply themselves and work for fifty mins. and then kick back for a complete 10 minute rest and are much more efficient and produce a substantially greater quality of work than men and women who don’t have similar working methods.

OK as promised here is my list of preferred remote working online services:

E-Mail

Google Mail has a price tag of zero. For my money the search & label (similar to folders) features are most definitely the best I have so far discovered. The downside is it can be a bit slow on older machines

Phone calls

Skype continually perplexed me as the connection performance was down right horrible, but all credit to the geeks at Skype now as they have considerably refined the quality of the service. For meagre amount of money a month Skype lets me call and conference in any telephone and Skype user on Earth. The latest version of Skype has an abundance of very useful features and there is an ever growing list of valuable add ons.

Organising Content

Evernote has reached more than a million users in a very short space of time – it enables you to store, organise and add notes to any type of digital media in the Cloud. Just go check it out…it’s free.

Invoicing, Time and Expenses capture, Accounting and CRM

You surely know that my desire to work remotely was originally encouraged by Quickbooks Online, a small business accounting software web application. But it is shadowed by the free edition of salesorder.com – a lead to cash system that’s as easy to use as a kettle I looked at NetSuite whose pricing (and people) scared me off. My choice here is salesorder.com – Go check it out.

Ask any seasoned business manager how much time they spend dealing with problems in the business and the answer will almost always be a substantial amount. Problems have a habit of leaping out at you when you least expect them. Being able to identify all of the problems in a business is really difficult. There is no place in a management team for a manager who is not adept at problem resolution.

A business cannot survive without thorough financial controls. Think of financial controls as a sentries that sound the alarm when a financial problem occurs. Financial controls go hand in hand with the reports produced by small business accounting software. Reports that tell you how you your progress against plan by letting you compare performance of actual versus budgeted or the difference between previous and current period sales, expenses and cash flow are generally available in good small business accounting software. The best way to start is to identify a core group of the operating ratios you want to track and monitor and then craft the reports you need to highlight these key numbers in a coherent and easy to read format.

Vigilantly keep an eye on the margin on sales and don’t hesitate to investigate any changes regardless how insignificant they might be. Watch your margins and changes in the number of sales, especially if you are running a business which relies upon volume sales for income as losses multiply at a frightening rate if the causes are not immediately arrested. A key cause of financial distress is fixed expenses deviating from the plan in the early part of the financial year. Tracking the average number of days it takes to collect payment on invoices is key to accurate cash flow forecasting and most small business accounting software reporting systems will help you easily do this.

Experience is the way to learn and over time you will learn which financial controls should be highlighted in your accounting reports, just make sure you have the right small business accounting software that can generate these.

I use videos like the one above (took about an hour to produce) to help people using my low cost alternative to small business accounting software i.e. Quickbooks quickly learn new skills and techniques they can immediately use to improve their business. I think everyone with a skill should have the opportunity to sell their knowledge online, se here I am going to walk you through how to turn what you know into digital content and sell it to a worldwide audience. The great thing about creating your own digital information product is that you make higher margins when you sell it and if you listen to why customers buy it then you can use these reasons too improve on what you have done and as messages to sell it to other customers.

Online video as popularised by YouTube and Podcasting is central to the method I will share with you for delivering your expertise and knowledge to your target audience. I regularly sell and give away videos that end up being played on all of the above platforms and help small business owners (a vast market) learn new skills to help them improve their business or do more with our system (a replacement for small business accounting software).

To do this properly you have to begin with the end in mind so you need to think carefully about what you are going to share with your target audience and for this you need to create what I call a storyboard. If you have ever given a presentation or a talk using slides made by microsoft powerpoint or apple keynote then you are off to a great start to storyboard your video. In case you are wondering how much this is going to cost I should say that you can create your storyboard, produce your video and get it to your target market without spending any money what so ever.

I have been creating my videos in Podcast, YouTube and downloadable video format for over two years now using a really fantastic tool called Camtasia Studio which is developed by TechSmith a US company, whatever you do watch all of the tutorials before downloading the thirty day fully functional trial. I said don’t download Camtasia yet as soon as it is installed the thirty day clock starts ticking and you need as much time as possible to get familiar with it and produce and refine your first video.

OK now you have to do the homework I have set you in learning some of the tools I have mentioned above and in the next couple of days I will be publishing to this blog (owners permitting) a detailed set of instructions on how I create small business accounting software videos.