Archive for the Business Category
Using Twitter for customer testimonials
When reading customer testimonials on websites I sometimes wonder how genuine the words are. There is often no way of knowing whether the quote even came from a real person, whether it was unsolicited or how old it is. As a business owner you have to keep these testimonials fresh and remember to request new ones from customers and clients. Despite these problems customer testimonials feature on many sites and can really help to reassure people before they purchase.
When we launched Perch, just over a year ago, we used Twitter extensively to get the word out and to respond to our potential and new customers. Drew and I have been using Twitter socially since not long after it launched so it made sense to promote Perch that way. As people started to buy and use Perch, they began to post nice things to Twitter and so we added them as favorites for the Perch account on Twitter, over time building up a large list of nice comments from our users.
When we launched the recent redesign of the Perch website we used the Twitter favorites as a way of putting testimonials on the site. In the footer of the Perch website is one of our Perch birds tweeting a tweet drawn from that list. These display randomly, so as a visitor moves around the site they will see a variety of different testimonials. Each tweet links through to that status on Twitter – so the testimonial is verified as being from an actual person. On Twitter you can see the date it was posted, so it is possible to tell how old this testimonial is. In addition the visitor is able to click through to the grabaperch account or search and see all of the mentions of Perch – not just the ones we really like!
You can get your favorites from the Twitter API. What you should avoid however is having something running on your site that gets the favorites every time someone visits. Instead, use the API to pull back the favorites and store them locally (in MySQL, another database or a text file) and then display your latest or random favorite from that data store. Twitter is often unresponsive or very slow and that will effect your site if you do this in real time.
Using the favorites list to add content to your site gives you a very simple way to add moderated Twitter content to your site. High profile sites have had problems in the past by displaying content based on a hashtag, as then anyone using that hashtag can get their thoughts displayed on your site. By using favorites you keep control and choose what goes into the list. Although you have chosen which Tweets go into your favorites, the visitor can use Twitter to find out more about you and the person providing the testimonial. This is a very open and transparent way to display testimonials and I believe this makes them far more useful to a potential customer or client.
Perch 1.5
Having just recovered from the shock of my daughter becoming a teenager, or more to the point, me being old enough to have a teenage daughter, we had another milestone to celebrate. Perch, the “really little CMS” that we have developed over at edgeofmyseat.com, is now a year old.
To celebrate we rolled out our 1.5 release, a free upgrade to existing licenses, which contains some very exciting new features which we think will change the way many people use and think about Perch.
Since launch, people have really taken to Perch and we get a lot of emails and suggestions on our forum for new features that users would like to see make it into the product. The thing with Perch though, is that we want to keep it really simple. We have never aimed to make it a competitor to some of the big CMS products out there. We want people to be able to be up and running with an editable site in a few minutes, with no fuss and only the most basic of hosting requirements.
One of the biggest features that people have requested is the ability for people to add new pages to their site. However many other users absolutely don’t want the client to be able to add new pages to a carefully thought through site architecture. Adding new pages also adds an additional layer of complexity and server requirements if, for example, you then want to do url rewriting to give friendly page URLs.
Thinking around this issue carefully we came up with the plan of creating a Perch API. The API allows us – or other developers – to create “apps” in PHP that can add new functionality to a Perch site. These just drop in and appear in the Perch admin and could be used for all kinds of functionality that you might need in an otherwise simple site. The Pages app is essentially the first Perch app and allows creation of new pages – for those users that want to use it.
Drew and I recorded a quick podcast last night discussing Perch apps and other new functionality added in this release.
Spec work for web developers
As a company edgeofmyseat.com don’t need to do a lot of responding to tenders. We sometimes help our design agency clients with their pitches but it is fairly rare for us to get a RFP direct to us. However, when we do get sight of these documents – perhaps because we have been approached directly to do development work for a company that already has a designer on board – I am often very surprised at the amount of work they expect us to do at a very early stage. Just to be able to have the “opportunity” of pitching for the work.
The main issue I have with these tenders is that they directly ask, or at least insinuate, that what should be submitted is an entire proposal for the development of the application. They often ask large numbers of very detailed questions about technology, approach and the finer points of how we would recommend certain features be implemented. To fully respond to these documents would take a couple of days of time for a senior developer – if we were to really do our response justice – essentially a couple of days of free consulting for the company putting out the tender.
As far as I am concerned this is as much spec work as asking design agencies to pitch with concepts. So when we are asking to put forward a proposal for these jobs, then our response tends to be a polite “no, thank you”. Even when the work looks interesting and very much the sort of project we could do well.
If an agency is spending a lot of time responding to tenders then they have to recoup that cost somehow, in our case it would mean having to charge a higher hourly rate for all jobs to cover the non-billable time used in responding.
In addition to the amount of non-billable time these proposals will consume, this work is in reality free consultancy for the person or company requesting the tenders. They can start the process with very sketchy ideas as to how their application should work, get 10 companies to present their concepts and suggestions and take all that knowledge, research and understanding with them to the final build – without paying a penny. When your input is ideas and experience it would be very difficult to prove that the information came from you, it isn’t the same as someone stealing a design concept. There are the occasional instances where an agency could cry foul over an idea that was so unique it would have been unlikely to have also come from another source, but these are unusual. This post from Solid State Group makes for interesting reading.
When it comes to clients with whom we have an existing relationship we are always happy to discuss ideas and approaches prior to a project beginning – that is all part of a good business relationship. However I will not give away days of consultancy to every company who turns up with a large document and a distant promise of a profitable job.
We have found that often these vague proposals expecting a lot of work are because the end client does not have a clear idea of what they want to do. With projects we have taken on we have found that a good approach is to suggest an initial stage of consultancy work. We work with the client and their designer to come up with a specification for the work, often producing wireframes of functionality; making suggestions for approaches and technology; essentially bringing our experience as developers to their ideas. At the end of that process that work is handed over to the client – along with a quote for our development services if we were to continue and build the project. However if they decide to then take the work elsewhere, there are no hard feelings, we have been paid for our consultancy work and we would hope that our years of experience will help to get the project off to a good start.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article we are fortunate in that most our our work comes via long-term partnerships with the design agencies we work with, or from people who have already decided that we are the company they would like to work with. I know that many companies do get a lot of their work via responding to tenders and I would be interested in hearing how other people manage responding to RFPs, and balance that with billable work, and not giving away a lot of consultancy time for free in the process.
Moving accounts from Quickbooks to Xero
As I mentioned in my last post, last year we moved the business accounts for edgeofmyseat.com from Quickbooks to Xero. I’ve been asked for my opinions of Xero a few times recently and so thought I’d write this up here and it may be useful to others.
Why move from Quickbooks
Before discovering Xero.com I was already wanting to move our accounts out of Quickbooks. The reasons for this were:
- In the UK Quickbooks only runs on Windows, I run Linux and OS X, Drew runs OS X
- The copy of Quickbooks I had was out of date and I needed to upgrade, I didn’t want to pay a hefty upgrade fee for software that didn’t suit our needs
- Quickbooks was hard to understand if you don’t know accountancy terminology. I knew how to use it as I had been doing so for years but without investing a lot of time Drew didn’t really understand the day to day figures.
Our requirements
The most important thing was that any new software needed to run at least on OS X. So both Drew and I could use it on our Macs, I was less worried about Linux as I need a Mac for work anyway (until the glorious day when a version of Photoshop is available for Linux, but that’s another story) however needing to run a Windows desktop just for the accounting software was a nuisance.
Our day to day bookkeeping requirements are pretty straightforward – I send invoices, receive payments and spend money. We also need to track and reimburse a few expenses incurred by Drew and I – for example travel costs.
Ideally I wanted nice reports so that Drew could get a feel for day to day cashflow and budgets. I still intended to continue dealing with most of the financial side of the business but it was obviously important that both Directors of the company had a good overview on the finances.
I needed to be able to easily see our VAT liability and create the VAT return each quarter without spending days preparing it.
I needed to be able to export the accounts in a way that was satisfactory to our accountant at the end of the year.
Researching our options
The Mac financial software market is pretty limited. At the Mac Expo I saw a demo of MYOB which does run on OS X. It fulfilled most of the above points however was yet another untidy interface and a piece of software that required bookkeeping knowledge to be able to use. The main point in it’s favour over Quickbooks was that it would run on our Macs and so I was resigned to having to use that. As I started trying to set up our accounts in it, I quickly discovered how badly designed the interface was and started to wonder if there was a different way to deal with this.
It might seem odd that as a web development company I hadn’t, until this point, thought to look at web based software. It really hadn’t crossed my mind that there was a web application that could be a fully featured accountancy package. I was aware of online invoicing and time tracking applications but I needed something that would do everything – including the all important VAT returns. It was at this point that I spotted Xero, reading the features list it appeared to tick all of the boxes, had pretty graphs and easy to understand reports and didn’t look like something from the 1990s. I signed up for the trial.
Converting the accounts
Within a couple of hours of playing with the trial I was happy that Xero met all of our basic bookkeeping requirements … and then some! As a well designed web application it worked flawlessly on OS X and on Linux, invoicing and invoice tracking was excellent and VAT returns could be created automatically by the software. I also really liked the dashboard view that you get when first logging in – a quick overview of accounts, sales, unpaid invoices and so on. So I made a pretty quick decision that we would move the accounts to Xero.
To move the accounts I had to get over two hurdles. We were mid year and so I would need to import a lot of invoices and data from the current financial year, and I had to make sure my accountant was happy.
Moving the data ended up being a semi-manual process. I could import our customers contact details from Quickbooks, and then set up the chart of accounts so that it matched what we had in Quickbooks. I then made sure that the starting balances in Xero matched a trial balance taken in Quickbooks for 1 April 2008.
Once I had Xero set up as if it were 1 April 2008 I did a lot of data entry! All in all it took me 3 days to move our entire operations over to Xero – however I did use that time to also check up issues in our accounts, that had been hanging around, so it was a nice ‘fresh start’ leaving behind all the issues that had been hanging around unresolved in Quickbooks. Once all the data was in place I could confirm that everything was correct by checking the trial balance in both Quickbooks and Xero and seeing that everything matched. There were a couple of issues that I had discovered in the process to do with VAT on some very old bad debts, and that were actually a longstanding issue with Quickbooks, so it was time to show my accountant.
I was a little bit worried that our accountant would be unimpressed with our move to Xero, and that I’d need to do a bit more work at the end of year to export accounts in a manner he was happy with. However, I felt that the day to day operations of Xero outweighed that disadvantage. As it turned out though, he was very impressed with Xero, we managed to easily fix the couple of issues in the accounts in a way he felt was satisfactory by adding journal entries and I showed him around the system – he has since recommended Xero to other clients of his!
Benefits to our company
This blog post has become something of a Xero fan post, something I make no apology for. It really has made a huge difference to the admin side of running edgeofmyseat.com. My favourite features, and those that have made the biggest difference include:
- Importing bank data and the one click reconciliation as Xero intelligently matches entries and creates new ones
- The fact that the license is per company – so I can add additional users such as my accountant, Drew and anyone else in future with no extra cost
- The dashboard and at a glance view of our financial situation
- Invoice tracking – being able to quickly see who hasn’t paid us and chase them up, adding notes to the invoice as we do so
The Xero API
This year we launched a product that made our move to Xero even more beneficial. Until we launched Perch we sent out relatively few invoices every month as we were mainly invoicing for fairly large projects. Perch is a downloadable product, paid for via PayPal and costs just £35. Suddenly I had to deal with a massive influx of small payments, and account for VAT correctly for payments from all over the world.
This would have been an absolute nightmare with my old system, making the cost to us of each Perch license far higher – potentially meaning we would have had to increase the cost of Perch. However with Xero two things were possible. Firstly we could import the PayPal data (and a recent upgrade to Xero made that import happen automatically) so all payments and PayPal fees were imported. Secondly Xero has an API that we could use to create a new invoice for each customer – creating a new customer if needed or looking up an existing record. These invoices go in as a draft and once a day I log in, quickly look over them to make sure nothing silly has happened, approve and match them up with the incoming PayPal data. The VAT is all accounted for correctly and it takes a few minutes each day.
Conclusion
So there you have it, our Xero experience. Hopefully this is useful to someone and if anyone has any questions I’d be happy to answer them if I can.
Keeping an eye on cashflow – accounts and bookkeeping for web businesses
It seems obvious that cashflow and accounts are important elements of running a business. However when you first start your business, bookkeeping and accounts isn’t something you easily get excited about – unless perhaps you are starting a business as an accountant. If you watch the television programme ‘Dragons’ Den’ you can see how many would be business owners and current business owners have a very poor grasp on basic accounting principles. This post describes how I, as a business owner, have dealt with bookkeeping over the years and finishes with some ‘top tips’ based on my experiences. I run a business in the UK so some of the references in this article are UK specific, however if you replace VAT with ‘local tax’, I’m sure a lot of these tips hold true everywhere.
I was very fortunate when starting edgeofmyseat.com because I was helped by The Prince’s Trust and one of the things they do is set new businesses up with a business mentor. The monthly meetings with my mentor ensured that at least once a month, I got my accounts up to date and could talk about my cashflow, where I expected money to be coming from and where I was spending it. This was one of the most valuable things that The Prince’s Trust did for me as a new business owner. The mentor sat me down and made sure I realised that while I might be great at doing the work, if I also didn’t keep my eye on cashflow, the business wouldn’t succeed.
In my first year running the business I operated as a sole trader, I did all my own bookkeeping and end of year tax return. As the business grew we become a UK Limited Company and registered for VAT and at this point I took on an accountant. By the time he had been through our accounts he had saved me more than his fee, as there were various things I wasn’t claiming for that I could do. However I still continued to do the day to day bookkeeping, using my accountant for occasional advice, and also the end of year returns. Almost eight years on, I still do all of our bookkeeping and despite it being something that could be easily outsourced, I would rather devote some time to this and know exactly what is happening financially on a daily basis.
I am often asked what software we use for our accounts. Up until very recently I used Quickbooks, while Quickbooks is a very capable small business accounting package it doesn’t run on the Mac or Linux, and also takes some experience to understand how to use it. When Drew McLellan became a Director of edgeofmyseat.com it became clear to me that we needed to explore alternatives to Quickbooks that would enable him to become more involved with the finances of the company. In the time between me setting up the original accounts in Quickbooks in 2001 and Drew joining the company in 2007, several online accounting and invoicing applications had been launched and we eventually selected Xero as the application that fulfilled our requirements best. I could (and probably will) write an entire post about that transition but it has made life far easier for me as the person who does the bookkeeping and for Drew who just needs a quick overview. I would very much recommend Xero from our experiences so far.
Business cashflow tips
Know your financial position
If you run a business the financials are your responsibility. Get help when you need it but don’t outsource to the extent that you don’t know your financial position. If you don’t understand something that your accountant or bookkeeper is doing, ask them. Make it your responsibility to have a decent working knowledge of the books.
Have up to date details of your position available, in an easy to understand format
When I was using Quickbooks, it was very difficult for Drew to understand our financial position. I had spent years learning Quickbooks as the business had grown and I understood what was happening, however without that knowledge it was hard for Drew to just get a quick overview. With our move to Xero, Drew can now login and see the overview and reports so both Directors of edgeofmyseat.com are up to date with our position at any time. If you do outsource this side of your business make sure you are getting frequent management reports, and that you understand them.
Get professional advice
I do my own bookkeeping, but I wouldn’t dream of doing my end of year accounts on my own – I know my limitations! A good accountant should save you money as they will be up to date with current legislation. They should also be able to help you set up your accounting software to make day to day bookkeeping easy, and in a format that will make their job at the end of the year straightforward.
There are other places where you can obtain advice, business organizations such as the Federation of Small Businesses and Business Link in the UK offer lots of helpful advice on financial issues. If you have a good relationship with your bank they can be a port of call – but a lot does depend on the individual bank and branch.
Set aside your personal/company tax and VAT as you receive it
Ideally you should have a separate account to transfer the portion of every payment that is VAT (if you are registered) and the percentage of profit that will be tax to as you receive payments. Most business bank account providers can also give you a linked instant access savings account. I find that having the money in a different account stops me seeing it as available cash! If you don’t have a separate account make sure that you always know what amount of the money sat in your account is earmarked.
Chase unpaid invoices
An organized system for creating and tracking invoices means that you know when invoices become overdue. Don’t be shy in chasing invoices – if you have done the work then you should be paid for it. It is a sad fact that many businesses purposely avoid paying until they are chased for the money, and will delay as long as possible. Have a set procedure that you use to chase and enforce your invoice terms. In the UK the Better Payment Practice campaign site has lots of practical advice for chasing payments.
Don’t leave things to the last minute
Leaving end of year accounts or VAT returns to the last minute causes two issues. Firstly, you are more likely to make mistakes or forget to include things if you are running up to the deadline. Secondly, if you have made a mistake somewhere and find your VAT or tax bill is a lot more than you were expecting, you have no time to find the extra cash. I try and keep our books up to date each month, so I have as long as possible to sort out any issues before the accounts have to be finalized and outstanding tax paid.
Conclusion
The above are some of the suggestions that I have for keeping up to date with the figures in your business. If you have any other tips please ad them in the comments. Also, I’m planning to write a few articles on business related issues based on my own experiences, so if there is anything you think would be interesting to know – let me know and I’ll see if I have any ideas on the subject.
