The Software Revitalist™

Scenario:
Gayle Naftaly, was getting buried in emails and proposals. Owner of access.office inc., a PR and marketing firm that utilizes top talent through outsourcing, she was spending too much time with the administrative tasks on her computer and not enough time on making new sales. She needed a system that would work the way she worked and was quick and easy to use. It was imperative that in 2010 she spent the majority of her time networking and meeting potential clients! The challenge was how to simplify her tasks.

Existing Software:
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Excel

The first step in the process was to understand Gayle’s unique administrative/management needs.

After her needs analysis we arrived at three distinct system requirements:

1. Contractor tracking: She needs to track who is working on which project, and how many projects each person is working on. Since the teams are project-based it is common for Gayle to manage several different teams at once. In addition to current projects, she also wanted to keep a history of which teams worked on completed projects.

2. Easy proposal creation: Opening an Excel template, entering information from scratch, and saving a new file every time she created a proposal took a great deal of time and added to the number of documents she was storing for each project. Plus, this system did not allow her to see total sales, so she had to enter the information in a master spreadsheet that would add it all together. Double data entry was wasting her time.

3. Email organization: Dragging email messages to specific folders was a lesser issue than the actual number of folders she had set up. The subfolder hierarchy was Clients folder, Client Name folder, Project folder, Team Member folder. This resulted in some contractors having 10 or more folders which easily created confusion.

The First Solution:
QuickBooks Pro 2010

We created a list of services that included the contractor who will be participating in the project. For example, if I were one of Gayle’s contractors there may be a service in the list called “Press release creation – Ellen” with my associated fee to Gayle listed as her “cost”. If there are other contractors that she uses for the same service then she adds them, with their name and cost.

When Gayle creates the proposal she simply has to choose from the list of services which service relates to the project and then the one that is associated to the person she wants on the team. The rest of the proposal includes any description she wants to enter, the number of hours, the total cost, and the total price. The printed version that is sent to the prospect only shows what she wants it to show – the description and the total cost. However, when she views the proposal she can see each member of the team. She can also run reports by item or service allowing her to see financial and project information related to each team member.

Once Gayle completed the list of services she was able to create a proposal in a fraction of the time it used to take,  improving her turnaround time to the prospect too!

QuickBooks took care of her first two issues, but we have one more to go! Make sure to read my next post that explains how we organized her emails!

Until then…

Efficiently yours,

Ellen DePasquale – The Software Revitalist™

My clients are a mix of those with very few shortcut icons on their computer screen (desktop) and those that barely have any room for another one. I fall somewhere in the middle. My computer background is a beautiful nature scene and I like to be able to see it.

However, I also want to work efficiently, so I like being able to double-click on an icon that leads me to where I want to be. My newest desktop icon is the log in screen of this blog. With a double-click I launch my web browser and am prompted to enter my user name and password. This totally bypasses my designated “Home” page, since the shortcut icon holds a specific Internet address (URL).

Here is how to make an icon on your desktop that will bring you directly to the website of your choice.

1. Right-click on an empty spot on your desktop. That will pop-up a menu.

2. Highlight New, which opens another menu, then click on Shortcut.

3. In the new window that opens you will be asked to “type the location of the item“. If you know the full URL, such as http://www.linkedin.com, then you can type it in. You can also copy the URL from window you have open, and then paste it into the shortcut window.

4. Click Next. Now you can name the shortcut that will be associated with the icon. To continue with my example, I would name it “Linked In” (without the quotes).

5. Click Finish.

Now you have a new icon. Double-click on it and you are ready to log in, or search, or whatever you want to do at the website you chose.

This is the same procedure for creating a shortcut icon for any program on your computer. Instead of entering a URL you could select the Browse button and then search your computer for a specific application file, usually ending in .exe.

Having a few Internet icons on my desktop is easier for me than opening the web browser and then going through my list of favorites, which is just WAY too long! But that’s another story.

Try a few shortcut icons and let me know how they work out for you.

Efficiently yours,

Ellen DePasquale – The Software Revitalist™

Scenario:
Lush Candy owner, Laurie Pauker, set up her candy kitchen in LIC, NY and spent the past year building a nice clientele consisting of NYC gourmet food stores and individuals looking for something different, and delicious, as event and party favors. Poised for growth in 2010, she needs to get serious about her accounting and is looking for more detailed information about the finances as well as her raw ingredients and finished products.

Software:
Peachtree Premium Accounting 2010

Typical of many small business owners, they do most of the work themselves including sales, marketing, purchasing, negotiating, pricing, and bookkeeping. As a result, there is a lot of information in their heads. Once the business starts to grow it becomes not only difficult to maintain all that information, but it can also be detrimental to the growth of the business. Things WILL be forgotten, and when employees hit the scene, having to wait to talk to the owner to get answers can result in lost sales.

Laurie, however, is in a great frame of mind because she KNOWS she needs to get organized and utilize more of the features in Peachtree. She is filling in the proverbial “cracks” before they appear. Using the software to support her business achieves two things;

1. she can focus more of her energies on business development and

2. all the important information is being tracked so she can retrieve it at any time.

The first step in the process is to start at the END.

I tell all my clients that they need to think about what they want to achieve when we are done. It is vital to understand their goals so we can build the appropriate foundation. (In database terms – we need to know what information is required on the reports to insure the right fields are being created/used.)

Laurie had some thinking to do. I needed to know:

Exactly what information needed to be on the reports?
How she wanted to see the information presented?
How detailed she needed the details to be?
How many ways did she want to “slice and dice” the data in order to paint the clearest picture of her growth so she could accurately forecast?

Her answers resulted in us having to do some modifications to her chart of accounts (financial categories) and a total revamp of her inventory items. In order to track her cost of sales, including the candy ingredients and packaging, she needed to enter all the pieces as separate items and then create the finished product as an “assembly”. This process would allow her to track inventory levels for all these items, enabling her to more accurately purchase the ingredients and limit overage and waste. This is especially important in the food industry where items have expiration dates.

Once she has completed these changes, the next step will be to use the processing in Peachtree to track the information.  Stay tuned…..

Efficiently yours,

Ellen DePasquale – The Software Revitalist™

RESOURCE:
Managing Inventory for Profitability an article I wrote for Inc.com.