Invoicing That Gets More Than Money - Plus That Too!
Posted: Monday, July 16, 2012 at 3:00:40 PM EST by  |
| Donna Stone is the founder of the multi award winning Consulting & Bookkeeping business Stone Consulting which provides solutions on MYOB, QuickBooks,Xero and Cashflow Manager. Donna is also the author of Stepping Stones to Business Success – a book of over 200 tips on how to succeed in business, borne of over 25 years experience working with businesses. Learn more at www.stoneconsulting.com.au or www.donna-stone.com.au. |
Many business owners think invoicing is just a means of communicating an amount of money owed. Invoicing done well will do so much more – here’s how:
Basics.
Of course an invoice should have the basics – your name, address, ABN, words “tax invoice”, client name, client address or ABN (if invoice is over $1K) and the GST amount listed separately; that’s standard. Ensure all this is included in a neat and clear matter. Bold or make the amount due larger – so there is no confusion.
Branding.
Ensure your invoice is branded the same as your sales and marketing material. Use the same corporate colours, logos and style. This piece of paper is representing you – what message does it send?
Communication.
This might seem basic, but some businesses do not include a contact phone or email, or illogically, only include their sales office number and not the accounts number. Include an email too. Maybe you only want to communicate via one way – but in business it is not all about you.
Education.
Use your invoice to educate your clients. As a bookkeeping business, if I can give my clients tips to improve their business, that’s sure to mean a client with more transactions and business strength – which will need more bookkeeping. Selfish? Well none of my clients have complained about me helping them to be successful!
Marketing.
Use your invoice to market your businessInclude specials or product of the month, advice on your other services, promos or run a generation competition. Know your high margin products or services and give them extra coverage.
Make it easy for people to pay you.
Have your contact details on the invoice, have a full enough description on the invoice, ensure your terms are shown clearly, or better, also have the due payment date in bold. Give clients lots of payment options – direct deposit, where to mail a cheque, BPay or credit card. Include your BSB and account number for a direct deposit. Streamline any payment method. If clients have to ring to get your bank details, you’ve just added an extra step, which might be the difference between payment today … or not.
Now you are probably wondering how you can possibly fit all the above onto one piece of paper – I assure you that you can – I do. If you need any help with customising your invoice or statement templates in your accounting programs, we service MYOB, Quickbooks, Cashflow Manager & Xero. And my final tip – invoice as soon as possible. Cash flow is critical to every business and the sooner you invoice, the sooner you can be paid, and certainly the sooner you can begin chasing payment. Leave invoicing to end of month or end of project and don’t be surprised if you have massive cash flow challenges. Happy invoicing!
How to do a SiteZero Business Mail Performance Improvement
Posted: Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 2:25:37 PM EST by Rachel MuzhariWhat is a Performance Improvement?
This is a process in which the software used with SiteZero business Mail is updated to improve performance.
Who needs to do a Performance Improvement?
If you are a SiteZero Business Mail client and you use Microsoft outlook to sync your mailbox, you would need to do the performance improvement just like you need to update any apps on your smart phone.
What is involved with doing a Performance Improvement?
The good news is this is all done in the background and once the background processes are complete, you will receive a prompt as shown below. If you are not using Microsoft Outlook no action is required.
When this prompt appears, click “Yes”.
It’s that simple.
This process will have to be repeated on each computer that has SiteZero Business mail installed.
There will be minimal disruption through this process and always please contact support on 1300 9376 10 or email support@sitezero.com.au if you have any issues.
Blogging - Generate Buzz
Posted: Friday, March 1, 2013 at 2:47:08 PM EST by Richard Norris
Without people reading your blog all your preparation, profiling and scheduling has been a waste.
You need readers. It is the most obvious thing for blogs to have but also the most common reason that blog’s fail. ‘Buzz’ is not like interest but more like hype. ‘Buzz’ gives you blog momentum. It builds anticipation. Start generating buzz even before your first blog goes live. Every contact you make that leads to a conversation about what you do mention that you have a blog coming on this date, then mention it again in that conversation. Don’t go overboard by mentioning your blog every time you open your mouth but enough that those people in that conversation know you have a blog coming out on this date.
Your website is a great tool for advertising what is going on in your business. Build a button that says ‘Blog Coming Soon’ in contrasting colours to your website (please seek a web designers advice in selecting colours). There are two more resources that you can use to generate buzz
Email Marketing
This is a great way to mass communicate with your database. You can organise your database into different groups and market to those different groups. This helps you generate buzz by sending an email campaign surrounding your blog. For instance, you can send out an email outlining what subjects your blog is going to cover; because you have planned for it.
There are some great tools for email marketing available such as Write Monkey or depending on your website features you can run an email marketing campaign from there. As far as the content for that email goes simplicity can do the job just fine. Something as simple as,
“Our business has a blog coming soon that will discuss these subjects. Register you interest today.”
This generates enough buzz and it gives a call to action for your readers to follow. Like anything written, be sure to get your emails proof read. Obviously don’t have all emails to your clients proof read, but just those that go to more than five people.
Whether you are using social media or email marketing be sure to monitor your activity and follow up any enquiries promptly. You can listen but if you don’t respond you have lost credibility with your readers. Your actions don’t just affect the person who commented, but everyone who reads that comment.
The second resource will be discussed shortly so be sure to stay tuned.
Written By
Blogging - On Time, All The Time
Posted: Friday, March 1, 2013 at 2:51:13 PM EST by Richard Norris
It is an absolute priority that a blog goes out on the exact same day every single week. With all the updating the search engines are doing for your blogging got be effective it needs to be consistent.
A main key in keeping your blogging consistent is to set a frequency to whcih you will blog.
To set the frequency in which you are going to blog you need to understand your capabilities. You are a bad writer. That is the thought that you need to have to set an achievable, consistent frequency of blogging. Exaggerate your blogging incompetence. No matter how good of a writer you are. When you are just starting off, the last thing that you want to happen is you get burnt out and stop blogging only a couple of months in.
If you feel that blogging once a month will be too easy, that is how often you ought to blog. You can always increase your blogging frequency at a later date. It is best to start slowly and gradually build up your frequency.
Blog once a month, three months later if you’re confident increase your blogging to twice a month. Then increase to three times a month a further three months later if you’re confident.
Confidence in blogging refers to not just how many blog posts you can turn out in a set period of time. However, it does refer to the quality of your blog posts. Anyone can write a blog post a day; a few can write a good blog posts a day.
If you want to have a new blog post up every day you’re not the right person to write it, you need to get it outsourced. I would never expect a business that is new to blogging be able to turn out a blog a day because setting the frequency is the easy bit, sticking to it is where you will…well…get stuck.
Written By
Blogging - Look at Your Ideal Reader
Posted: Monday, April 15, 2013 at 2:38:18 PM EST by Richard Norris
The first post of this series looked at ways to go about being prepared to successfully go about blogging.
In this post we will uncover why you need to look at your ideal reader to make you blogging efforts successful.
You will write better if you have a clear understanding of who you are writing to. Demographics, due to social media, are more blurred than previously. No longer can we profile people on age, gender and ethnicity, though this is a great starting point. We also need to look at the interests themselves. A book-keeping firm’s main client may be builders. Builders enjoy football. So what do people who enjoy football also enjoy? You need to take in consideration all hobbies.
Ask yourself questions like these:
What age and gender is my ideal reader?
What industry is my ideal reader in?
What hobbies do people in that industry have?
Does this reader have a family?
Once you have answered these questions you will be able to construct some sort of profile. This profile will help your writing have more effect towards your readers. Let me demonstrate. Imagine that your ideal reader is male aged between 35 and 45, he is in manufacturing has young kids and enjoys rugby league.
Instead of writing, ‘building a blog is beneficial to your business’, you can use your ideal reader’s hobbies to make the sentence more interesting, such as, ‘ building a blog for your business is like the Bronco’s orchestrating a set piece; done right it’s brilliant, done wrong it can be tragic.
Because the majority of identified target audience (35-45 male), chances are you will be on a winner with a sporting reference. You would have immediately grabbed their attention and helped them in understanding your message.
Share your story of how you have effectively utelised your knowledge about your target market in the comments below.
Written By
