Billzone Blog

3 Reasons to Switch to Online Timesheet Collection

Small business owners often wonder why they should be using an online hours collection system like the one we have here at www.billzone.com. In fact, most owners know they need a system like this but only some take the step.

Opportunity Cost
The biggest reason is simple. If you are spending valuable time collecting hours from contractors and/or employees for billing to your own clients, then you are not spending time either doing billable work for your clients, managing, or selling your product.

Usually the monthly cost of using BillZone to automate a 10 person team is less than a few hours of billing for one of the team's members, compared to one or two days worth of work for that member to do the task manually. For large enterprises, the benefits are even greater.

Accuracy
If you are consolidating a whole bunch of time entries from a variety of sources like paper timesheets or Excel workbooks, then your chances of creating an error during this double-entry process go up. When collection is centralized, data is only entered one time, thus reducing errors.

Timeliness
Speed up payment on your accounts receivable. Want your bills to go out on the first of the month instead of the 10th? Automate your process.

Why is my Microsoft Access database so slow?

So, you've got a Microsoft Access database that you've been using for years. Over the past while, you and your team have noticed that it is slowing you all down. What can you do?

Most people experience this situations when their business grows and more people need to use it. Also, after years of data builds up in the database, performance slows down when using MS Access.

In many cases, the provider of I.T. services wasn't the original programmer, who may recommend re-writing the system into a "newer" technology. The estimate for this kind of rewrite can be very costly.

What many people don't know is that the majority of Access databases can scale up easily, with very few adjustments to the original code. So, if you have an office with 10 people using an Access/VBA system which seems near capacity, it easily scale to handle dozens more.

What you need to do is use a provider who knows how to move the "back-end" database onto a true database server, and then have them reconfigure your application to use it. When the process is done, you won't see any difference when using your application, except that it is much faster and can handle more people. This is good news for your team!

Well, there is more. It can be done without purchasing expensive server software! This is because Microsoft Office ships with a free version of the server which is usually more than adequate to get you started. This server is called MSDE (since Access 2000) or SQL Express (newer versions).

In our experience, performing a conversion like this for a customer resulted in faster performance, fewer errors reported by users, less administration required, and better data security.

Why You Should Use Unambiguous Date Formats

In a world of increasing connectivity it makes no sense for any entity to use or enforce a date display that could be misinterpreted by others.

Ambiguous Dates

An ambiguous date format is one which requires a reader to reference some external source, such as a policy or standard in order to understand what real date the display is actually referring to. For example, if you looked at a report with the date 2/3/08 on it, you would need to find out which country it was written in, which standard was used for dates in the report, or even worse, guess what the author meant when using this format.

Examples

Food and drink producers in many countries are guilty of this practice. Consumers are often confounded by dates on products in formats they cannot decipher. For example, depending on what country you're in or which product you're about to eat, a date of 11 MA 10 on a canned good could mean March 11th, 2010, March 10th, 2011, May 11th, 2010, or May 10th, 2011! Make the wrong choice and you could be in trouble.

Businesses run into problems when dates are ambiguous, as they create scheduling mixups, customer order mixups, and more. The inefficiency caused by this issue can be significant.

Many governments and international bodies enforce their own versions of ambiguous date formats, which causes confusion. Even some international standards promote ambiguous dates such as the ISO 8601 dotted standard that would show February 3rd, 2008 as 03.02.2008 (this could be interpreted as March 2nd, 2008 in areas of North America using m/d/yy). ISO 8601 also uses a more logical format that shows the same date as 2008-02-03, which has less of a chance of misinterpretation since it appears to be in descending orders of magnitude (yyyy-mm-dd).

Use Unambiguous Dates!

What can you do? Well, you can help by changing peoples' attitudes in the workplace by discouraging the use of ambiguous date formats, and by challenging any standards or policies that enforce the use of ambiguous formats, since they are obsolete in a connected world and create organizational inefficiency.

It doesn't mean that everyone has to always use a long format (ex. February 9th, 2011), as there are popular short date formats like dd-mmm-yyyy. This would be my first choice and would show the date as 09-Feb-2011. The day and month elements are known on first glance, and cannot be misinterpreted. My second choice would be for people to use the ISO 8601 standard 2011-02-09, which is logical and has month and day elements that would be guessed correctly by most people.

3 Reasons Why Continued Support for VBA in Microsoft Office is Good for SME Businesses

Microsoft discontinued support and enhancement of its Visual Basic 6 platform years ago, instead moving to its new .Net platform for enterprise applications. However, what many people don't know is that a flavour of VB called Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA as it is known, continued on in the Microsoft Office suite as the primary language for things like Excel and Word macros, and automation of Access database applications. It appears that, in spite of the relentless move toward .Net at Microsoft for many years, this technology will continue on and will be supported in Office 2010 (Office 14), and for SME business owners this is a very good thing.

1. Most businesses over 20 employees have invested in VBA-automated things for people "in the trenches", from simple mail merge applications in Word, to data extractions for analysis in Excel, to multi-user MS Access databases. Continuing support for these means that these companies will be able to extend the life of their investment.

2. Support for VBA also means that related technologies like the Jet database engine and Data Access Objects, or DAO can be supported by providers for years to come, on newer, more advanced platforms like Office 2010. For the large number of businesses who wrote entire systems around the MS Access/DAO/ODBC/SQL Server platform, this means they can stay current and be sure to be supported for years to come.

3. VBA with MS Access is regarded by many as the quickest way to prototype a working application for SME businesses due to a data access technology (DAO) tightly knit with the VBA language, a powerful design environment, and the best integration with other technologies in the office environment, like Word and Excel.

Ongoing VBA support means SME businesses can still get the best bang for their buck for years to come.

Five Tips to Get Your Invoicing Ready for a New Tax

Changing over to a new tax scheme can be daunting for small to medium sized business owners, but there are some things you can do in advance that can help.

Update Your Accounting System

Ensure your accounting system can handle the change. If it can't, make sure to plan a changeover to a new system that can, or design a workaround so you can accommodate the new tax.

Double-Check Invoicing

Check over your invoicing thoroughly at the time of changeover to make sure that you have applied the tax correctly for each product or service.

Get the Team Involved

If you have a larger business, make sure to involve all the different divisions in a discussion about the change. There will often be some expertise unique to different departments that can help your transition.

Prepare Your Suppliers

Prepare your suppliers to expect the change. For example, BillZone allows your subcontractors to generate their own invoice to you, which speeds up Accounts Payable (they get their bills in on time) and Accounts Receivable (you immediately generate invoices immediately from the same data). They might be surprised if the tax rate changed on their invoice and they were not expecting it, or forgot to implement it themselves.

Confirm the Date, and Find Out When You're Affected

Be sure of the changeover date, and check to see if you will be affected in advance. For example, you might be required to self-assess for goods or services sold in advance of the changeover date but delivered after. Also, this could affect the timing of invoicing for certain aspects of your business.

Why Basic Project Management Tools Are Good

Ok, you own a small business with several projects on the go at any one time. Why bother with keeping project records? I mean, you've got it all organized in your head, right? Besides, you looked at project management programs and found that they were overkill and wasted a huge amount of your time. Well, there are some very good reasons to use at least some basic project management tools in your business.

Try answering these questions:

- If your customer calls you and asks how much time you've burned to date on her project items, can you tell her right then and there? Or do you have to compile a bunch of information (and phone people) before you can tell her?

- Is your business relatively free from costly bookkeeping mistakes?

- Do all of your bills go out on time, all the time?

- Can you measure your success over the past few years? Can you see how often you've been on time for delivery of your projects?

If you answered no to any of these, you need some basic project management tools. Forget complex project plans, you just need to set up your project with a good list of deliverables on it. Make sure your people can access it and update it in real time, so that you or your bookkeeper don't have to spend as much time on it. You'll know how much you've burned and what the item completion status is at any one time, for all your projects, across your whole business.

How Mobile Apps Are Changing Small Business

These days everything is mobile, and mobile device technologies are changing small businesses because it enables them to extend their data capture into the field like never before.

Forget about just sending emails or making calls while in the field. Whether it is consultants, home care workers, electricians, or architects, they are entering time, expenses, distance to the job, and product sales on their mobile devices while at the site instead of waiting to use a computer.

Most people have a mobile device, and in many cases they use a mobile device more than they use a computer because they are always in the field. Contractors and installers are receiving workorders and instructions on their mobile devices while sitting in their truck, and no longer have to wait for phone authorizations, printed instructions, or other things that waste time. Technology project managers are running quick reports and receiving automatic notifications while at the airport.

On the other side of things, small business owners or project team leaders are getting the benefit of real-time oversight of their billings and resource usage, when they need it.

Categorize Your Billing

Making a Good Set of Categories

One of the most important things you can do when setting up your business on any kind of project management, expensing, or time-tracking software is to make sure you categorize your billing and expenses.

If you create a good set of categories in the beginning, your small business will really benefit down the road.  You will be able to see important trends on how you ran your business in the past, and these will help you plan for the future.  They will also help to simplify management of your general ledger (GL) and accounts receivable (AR).

Business Items

The first set of categories you create should include a set of items for the overall operation of your small business.  These will not be related to projects you are working on, but generally account for "everything that is not a project".  Usually, these will include some major categories such as Marketing, Finance, or Accounting.  Within these areas, you might split the category into a few more, but generally that is where you would stop.

For example, you might add a few sub-categories like Market Research or Ad Design to the Marketing category.

Project Items

The second set of billing areas you can create will include your projects that you are working on for customers over time.  Each project should have its own set of items and sub-items or categories.  Your billing system should allow for projects to have multiple versions over time.  

For example, you might write a small piece of software one year and then two years later do development to enhance the same software.  If you do many versions over time, it is much easier to see statistics over the long run.

You should determine the kind of billing your project will need before you set it up.  While some projects may have a standard set of items, others may need to have specific defined items created before you put your time and expenses against them.  Make sure your system can do both.

A general contractor might simply put all his time against general items like Carpentry and Electrical, and this may be enough for his reporting purposes.  Another contractor might need to specify exact items to bill against, like Breaker Box F, Switch Setup.  A lawyer might set up project items for each contract or set of meetings they have been asked to do.

Get Advice

It may seem overly cautious to ask advice about which categories to set up, but it is also a good idea to talk with your accountant when setting up categories the first time. They will have good advice on how to set things up the first time, for both Business Items and Project Items.