Paper Overload? Steps To Transition To A Paperless Office For Your Financial Records

Computers were meant to cut down on paper but it seems we feel some sense of security by having piles of paper around or can it just be hard to break those old habits of printing everything.





Can a paperless office be in your future? Yes it can and here are a few steps that can help get you on your way.

1.         Switch to online bill pay and receiving paperless billing statements. Using your bank’s online bill pay, you can process your vendor bills online – which will also save on postage costs as well as check stock. What is great about online bill pay, you can schedule your bills in advance, which is a huge time saver, and by scheduling your payments it will save you those late fee penalties. You can also take it one step further and set up automatic payment directly from your checking account through your vendors.

 

2.         Download your monthly bank and credit card statements. At the end of the year, burn the statements onto a CD and file with your tax returns. While you are downloading those statements each month, you can email your virtual bookkeeper the statements for reconciling your accounts.

 

3.         Client invoices. Instead of printing and mailing invoices – pdf and email them. Also in QuickBooks did you know you could email your invoices directly to the client? When creating the invoice in QuickBooks, check mark at the bottom email invoice. Once you are completed with the invoice, go to File – Send Forms, you can edit your message and then click Send. For organizing these invoices, set up monthly folders on your computer and save your client invoices in the respective monthly folder. At the end of the year, burn to a CD and file with your tax returns.

 

4.         Purchase a good shredder. For sensitive files containing credit card information, bank account numbers, old vendor invoices with account information or old client project files – safely toss in the shredder. If you have a scanner, you can scan these files and toss and/or shred the paper copies. Remember though if you are saving these files to your computer to be sure to back up your computer.

 

5.         Stop unwanted junk mail. Register with Contact DirectMail.com to be removed from receiving junk mail.

 

6.         Business receipts. Travel receipts, credit card receipts or vendor invoices received in the mail can be scanned and stored in your monthly financial folder set up on your computer.  If you do not have a scanner, NeatReceipts is a mobile scanner and digital filing system. You can scan receipts, business cards, and also documents. The software included with the scanner identifies and extracts the important information from the receipts and automatically organizes it for you.

 

If you institute just a few of these steps, you will soon gain control of your paper overload plus gain some valuable desk and drawer space.

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10 Steps To Better Manage Your Bookkeeping Records

Do you cringe when you open up your QuickBooks file? You have receipts in the car, crumbled receipts in your purse or briefcase, and vendor invoices buried in the papers on your desk or email inbox. Here are 10 easy steps you can put in place today to better organize your bookkeeping records so the next time you open up QuickBooks, everything will be nicely organized for you.



1. When vendor invoices are received, enter into QuickBooks as soon as you can. Try to set up time on your calendar once a week to handle this task. Don't wait until the end of the month and most likely find yourself scrambling to locate the invoices and fitting it in to your busy schedule. By handling this task frequently, you will pay less late fees and perhaps take advantage of those vendors who offer discount pricing if paid within 10 days.



2. A simple way to manage those vendor invoices, purchase an accordion file A-Z and use this to file your vendor invoices. No need to set up individual file folders that take up valuable file space. As soon as the invoice has been paid, just file the invoice in the appropriate letter slot. If you need to locate a past invoice, all you need to do is go to that letter and you'll soon find what you are looking for. If you are converting to a paperless office, set up a file folder on your computer for Vendor Invoices and store the paid invoice in this file. You can set up a file - Vendors A - L and Vendors - M - Z. At the end of the year, copy these files onto a CD and store with your business tax files.



3. Bookkeeping rule #1: do not co-mingle personal and business expenses. Sign up for a credit card exclusively for business and one for personal expenses and get in the habit of using the correct cards. This will certainly save you a lot of headaches if you are ever audited by the IRS. It will also make it easier when the credit card statements are received and you are only looking at business expenses and not both personal and business and spending more time sifting through the charges.



4. Use online banking for bill paying. With most major banks this is a free service and the beauty of online banking, you just enter the amount of the invoice and schedule the invoice for payment before the due date. Just don't forget to enter the transaction into QuickBooks. The benefits of online bill pay - saves you postage costs and also by scheduling before due dates, saves on those late fees.



5. Reconcile your bank statements monthly. Try setting up time on your calendar the week the statement is received. If you have been disciplined to enter your transactions each week, this should not be a time consuming process.



6. Credit card purchases need to be entered into QuickBooks on either a daily or weekly basis. When your credit card statement is received, you reconcile the statement similar to how you reconcile your bank statement.



7. Keep your chart of accounts simple. If you have multiple income streams you may want to set up income accounts for each product or service. This will allow you to monitor sales each month when you review your Profit & Loss report. For your expense accounts, keep it simple. Remember the more accounts you have, the more time you will spend in deciding which account to use.



8. When hiring new employees or contracting with new subcontractors, make sure they submit a W4 or W9 form. Establish a procedure to receive the forms before their first payment is made. Remember to enter their tax information into QuickBooks when the form is received. This will make preparing W2s and 1099s a less stressful task in January.



9. If you have a PayPal account, you need to create a bank account for PayPal similar to how your checking account is set up. This account will need to be reconciled each month as well. PayPal allows you to download monthly financial reports for reconciling the account.



10. If you find you just do not have the time and you are still stressed with your bookkeeping, contract with a virtual bookkeeper. This will allow you time to do the things you excel at and pass the task on to some who enjoys bookkeeping. If you do not know where to find a virtual bookkeeper, contact your accountant and ask if they can recommend a bookkeeper or ask other business owners who assist's them with their bookkeeping.

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Reducing Time To Close With Accounting For Salesforce

Accounting is a complex, statutory activity for all organizations – small or medium, single or multi-company and local or international. Currency conversion, taxation, regional compliances and legal obligations add to the multitude of accounting tasks, increasing effort and time to close accounting activities and year-end operations.


Using a cloud accounting system that works seamlessly with your CRM, such as Salesforce, can help manage the differences between local and international statutory requirements. Conversion of currency, taxes, and duties are a breeze, helping faster global roll-outs. This distinctive and powerful application helps organizations gain unparalleled visibility of their businesses across global locations. All the business data is accessible in real time with all the necessary financial reports.


Your cloud accounting app can work as a perfect complement to Salesforce CRM and together they offer end-to-end CRM to accounting solutions leading to excellent efficiency and economies of scale.


What to expect

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  Real-time global visibility:Access to global business data in real-time gives top management visibility and control.


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  Streamlined processes: Smooth and easy flow of all processes accelerates cash flow.


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  Financial automation:Automation in accounting considerably reduces account closure time.


• 
  Control over multiple currencies: Support of multiple currencies and their management maintains currency exchange rates to arrive at sales roll-ups.


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  Improved cash flow:Tracks financial data through the entire business lifecycle.


• 
  Full-accrual accounting in the cloud: Enables 100% native, full-accrual accounting in the cloud.


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  End-to-end accounting: General ledger, billing & cash receipts, accounts payable & cash disbursements, and project accounting done.


• 
  Savings in cost: All back-end operations can be consolidated in one location using cost-efficient resources with the help of real-time access to global business data.


• 
  Personalization:Role based user dashboards allow personalization and design of resource planning, time and expense, and financial reports by the user.


• 
  Instant access to operations:Drill-down feature allows instant access to transactions.


• 
  Bridge accounts and sales: Connect sales and accounts through automated billing.


• 
  Business metrics: Leverage analytics to measure and monitor business activities and transactions.

Start working smarter, not harder – minimize backend efforts and increase efficiency with cloud accounting for Salesforce.


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FinancialForce Accounting is a comprehensive and innovative financial management system that takes a fresh approach to a traditional business function. This online accounting application combines the power of the Force.com cloud with a groundbreaking accounting system design. FinancialForce Accounting is native to Salesforce CRM.

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How An Affiliate Feed Can Help Begin A Internet Shop

Starting a web store is easy if you have the right internet marketing strategies and have garnered and online presence to gain online consumers. For beginners in the online businesses, a great way to get your online business working is by having an affiliate feed. Having one makes it easier to market your products or services online because your products and services, even your website is being promoted by an affiliate feed.


Most online businesses entrepreneurs do not know about data feeds, which is why they have a hard time gaining consumers and online presence. These can be used by anyone; these are online merchants that will sell your products to contacts and consumers that are within their sphere of influence. An affiliate feed is important to help make an online business work. Most buyers or consumers who are looking to purchase online products search data feeds. These affiliate data feeds help people find the products that they are looking for and the merchant who is selling these products and or services.


A good thing about an affiliate feed is that it can build its data feed into individual pages. So for entrepreneurs, your products and services are well promoted because people who want to view your and purchase your products can simply check the pages or the data feed of an affiliate feed and simply view the specifications of the product prices and even reviews-if the dealer allows reviews to be posted about the product. This is why an affiliate feed is important to most online merchants.


Gaining online presence in the cyber world with millions of users and entrepreneurs is a hard business. There are online social networking sites that may aid you in selling your business to people online but with all the competition, your worst competitor is anonymity. Businesses that are well-known that start online selling won't have that much problem inquiring and starting their own internet marketing strategy-for one thing they have made a name in the business and it is easier to engage people that are well aware of your company than for those who will start out anew. This is why there are affiliate sites to help beginners. Most data feeds have the capability of promoting your products and services to millions of consumers. Another good thing about an affiliate feed is that consumers trust these feeds.


For new online businesses, online internet marketing may cost. Businesses that decide on purchasing their own domain name for their website shells out money for the rights of their website and more likely a web programmer to make the site interactive. Good thing an affiliate feed can cost nothing. Most affiliate feeds are free and do not cost anything for entrepreneurs who do not want to spend too much on the marketing of their products. It is wise to choose free affiliate feeds because these free affiliate data feeds since work the same way as a paid affiliate data feed the only difference is free affiliate sites have millions of products, which makes it a little harder for users to come across your product from the other choices available.

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3 Tactics Every Affiliate Need To Survive Online

Every affiliate is constantly looking for easy and fast ways to earn more commissions. However, the magic formula they are being told by gurus to be able to make good money online is really years of hard work, trial and error and not some get rick quick loophole or glitch as they claimed in their salesletters.

But then again if they tell you the truth, will you or every prospect out there want to buy their courses? 

The answer is absolutely no.

Though the truth may not be what you and most marketers are willing to accept, it is still actual fact. But then again, hard work, trial and error are still not enough. They are simply the initial stages you may have to go through if you want to start internet marketing entirely on your own or buying courses that fail to deliver to your expectations. 

However if you want to avoid those, you ought to consider these 3 tactics should you start out as an affiliate.

They are:

1. Market Each Product With 1 Unique Site

Unless you promote various products within a common niche like weight loss ebooks, videos, pills and equipment, do not mix everything just to save costs on domain names. It is best to have different niche sites and domain names each focusing on a certain product.

If you are not good or comfortable with html, you could get a free Blogger or Weebly account. If you are, you can either download Kompozer, NVU or Wordpress via your hosting account. 

Whichever the case, they have a variety of niche templates and themes for you to pick. You just need to do a Google search for those. For Blogger, Weebly and Wordpress, they do have some default themes for you to choose.

Always come up with product reviews so that visitors will have an initial understanding on how this product can benefit them. If you can, get testimonies from users who have already used the product. This is a great way to presell if you are promoting as an affiliate.

You can also create a series of articles on the problems and  how this product can solve them as additional pages for your site. Like your main headline, make your sub headlines compelling as well. The same goes for your content with relevant images and videos in order to get your targeted audience to take action. 

If you can come up with demo or testimony videos, that will be best as it increases your chances of getting your readers into accepting your offer.

2. Give Away Free Reports To Your Readers

If possible, place those reports with an optin box at the top of your page to make them easy noticeable. To create an optin box, you need to get an autoresponder. 

For this, I highly recommend Aweber where you can get a greater variety of optin box templates,  compose and send emails to your subscribers. Your subscribers are those giving you their names and emails in exchange for your free reports. 

According to research, a sale is closed usually on the fourth to seventh offer you made to them.

2 things can happen in affiliate marketing. Either you closed sales or lose the prospects who left your site and never return again. 

By providing useful and relevant content on what they want to see, you are actually building rapport and relatonships with your subscribers. These are the keys to be a successful affiliate. Never try to make them an offer when they do not know you yet.

Focus on important points like how your product can make a positive and significant difference to their lives. Make your email subject lines and content attentive and unique. 

As much as possible, avoid using the word Free too much because there are still older spam filters that dumps those emails into the junk before your subscribers can even read them. 

3. Get Targeted Traffic To Your Product.

Consider this for a second. If your visitor has no interest in whatever you promote, they will simply move on and never come back. Apart from posting articles to article directories, you might want to consider ezines and press releases. 

Write at least 5 to 20 articles with at least 400 words for each product you promote. Besides individual articles, you can use them as content for your sites, free report and even emails as well. 

The same goes for your free or PPC ads, social bookmarks and videos. Doing these consistently will definitely help you to achieve as many targeted readers to your site as possible. 

Please note that out of every 100 people visiting your site, only 1 are likely to purchase your product or your services. And even if they buy, there is a possibility of them asking for a refund if they are not happy for whatever reason. But this is all part and parcel of running businesses be they online or offline. 

Whichever the case, the customers are always right and the only thing you can do is to keep working and improving to generate more traffic and sales. 

These 3 tactics given above are practical yet easy to follow. All you need is to put in a little time and take action on your part.

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How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing Online

With internet programs, it certainly pays to perform well web-sites. Also called referral programs, associate programs are normally commission based sales. You'll recommend a site for your visitors then grab a share of little sale that your visitors make. You'll like the commission along with the merchant advantages to the sales.

If you already have a website arrange, you could run a joint venture partner program from it, and you can simply generate a site to enhance a particular products or services. Provided that it brings in more cash than required to build or run it, you're going to be fine.

With any marketing program, you will have to be careful if you select a joint venture partner program. The advantage of a joint venture partner program will give you otherwise for making money out of your users. In contrast to selling them a product, you simply get them to some partner then give yourself the best cut of the profits.

Even though it may seem want to at the same time target your programs with all the highest commissions, those programs won't provide you anything if the visitors do not buy them.

Below, you'll find some methods that will help you select an affiliate program that's right for you personally:
1. Do not accept any lower than 25% with commission. You can find many programs with great payment structures and high percentages of pay within just about any field.
2. Find statistic pages that list numerous click throughs, sales, and earnings so you will observe how you're doing.
3. Look for programs that provide a single large choice of tools to build your web site, including banners, text links, and also graphics.
4. Understand how often you'll be paid in addition to be sure that the payment schedule meets with your own expectations. Some programs will make payment monthly, and some will make payment quarterly.
5. Be sure that top level support has become included. In the event that they can't answer your questions inside of a quick and timely manner, you don't want to serve them.

After you learn what you're doing with affiliate marketing programs, you can make a lot of money. In case you are just starting out, you could always use wisdom and not rush into anything. Because you become more familiar with how things work, you'll be well  on your way to creating a heap of money - in addition to enjoying making it. If you must hard work, you're going to be glad you surely did.

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Begin A Webstore Without Difficulty With The Use Of An Affiliate Feed

An affiliate feed is one of the rising ways in which companies go and get themselves exposed on the internet. Knowing the incredible power of the internet, being able to harness it to the fullest is going to have such a massive effect on any activity that you are thinking of doing. Regardless if you are a new business or an established one, employing this method is going to give a massive shot to the arm. This is especially true if you have a new business and aiming to start a webstore. With that said, how can affiliate feed help your webstore become a successful one?

First of all, we have to define what an affiliate feed is all about and how it is actually used. An affiliate data feed is defined as a large file wherein a lot of information is stored. The content placed in this feed may vary, but for businesses, what is usually inscribed in these feeds are all of their products, including all the information that can be said about the product. Each product that is inscribed in the data feed is called a record, and the number of records that can be placed range from tens to thousands. In addition, an affiliate data feed can also be used to enhance or promote traffic into an already existing site. A properly executed affiliate feed is going to enhance a site's search engine ranking and is going to bring a lot of exposure to your business online.

Now that you know how the system works, you might ask yourself this question: how the use of affiliate data feeds going to make starting a webstore that much easier? Using feeds allow for direct sending to subscribers. In addition, subscribers can subscribe or unsubscribe from the service at will, which prevents you from competing with spam filters that could deny you access. Also, the use of feeds is free for the most part. Not only that, you are not just going to be able to provide advertisements, but rather, you are providing information. This information is something that prospective customers are looking for, and it is exactly the thing that they are going to get. When you are able to educate clients with constantly updated information, you are going to make them want you more. In addition, it is the perfect alternative to banners and other forms of advertisements that you see online. Whereas banners and pop ups are going to make you look like you are distributing junk and scams, using an affiliate feed is going to even make you look smart and sensible.

Most importantly, you got to remember that online strength can be seen from traffic. If you are able to generate a lot of traffic, that is almost always going to equate to more popularity, and consequently, more sales for your webstore. When you look at it, the use of an affiliate feed can be everything that you will ever need in order to be able to harness the immense power of the internet. Supply your webstore with that much needed shot in the arm with the use of affiliate data feeds.

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