Like good Europeans we trade across Europe

Like good Europeans we trade across Europe

Like good Europeans we trade across Europe and like good Britishers we have to protect our clients from price increases due to exchange variations.

We have found a Scottish supplier who has all the strengths that we are looking for, so we will be transferring our clients from our servers in France to our new servers in Scotland and England. The costs for the same level and quality of service are very similar in Sterling terms. We will therefore save the loss on currency exchange and at a national level contribute to an improvement in the Balance of Payments.

The other benefits which will accrue to the business are that of being in the same time zone, with the same public holidays and speaking the same language.

We plan to complete the whole move by the end of February.


On a personal note, I see that French wines are now more costly than Bulgarian wines and I think we’ll be eating less out-of-season imported fruit and vegetables. Is this protectionism, not really.

Yoolaa Special Tasks – Cash Collection

Yoolaa Special Tasks – Cash Collection

No one in your business likes calling and chasing customers to get your outstanding invoice(s) paid.

You know you’re going to get the run-around, and they’ll give you stories like these:

1. We haven’t received your invoice
2. You need the accounts department
3. The amount is wrong
4. The goods were damaged (or someone is unhappy with your services)
5. We lost your invoice
6. We’re waiting for formal approval
7. The person who needs to approve it is on holiday
8. It’s included in the run to be paid at the end of the month
9. It missed the payment run
10. It’s in the post
11. Haven’t you received it? (Then back to excuse 4)

The objective of Yoolaa Special Tasks - Cash Collection is for your customer to prefer to pay you before he pays any others. Yoolaa makes it a simple process, because the computer does the heavy work for you, for example:

- Three days after sending the invoice, it will send an email to check they’ve received the invoice, to check they are happy it’s for the right amount and to remind them it’s due for payment on …………
- It will re-send the email if there’s been no response
- If there’s still no response then telephone your contact to check it has actually been received
- Fifteen days before due date it will automatically send an email to gentle nudge them that your invoice is due for payment on ……..
- Three days before due date it will send a further reminder that your invoice is due for payment on …………
- If their payment has not been received within three days of the due date, it will send the ‘director’s email’, and
- Three days later your director telephones their director to identify with him that something is wrong with their payment systems as you haven’t received payment for your invoice and it is now overdue.
(We can amend any part of this to suit you.)

The essential part of the system is for your customer’s payment team to realise that you have a very slick collection system. That you do follow-up promptly and it’s therefore less effort for them if they give your invoice priority – which is all that you want.

The system can also be applied to all your current outstanding invoices.

A one user Yoolaa licence is all that is needed, including set-up assistance, £89 per month plus Vat, and the system starts as soon as we have received your payment!

Yoolaa IT Update Seminar & Workshop, January 2009

Yoolaa IT Update Seminar & Workshop, January 2009


We’re having fun organising this workshop as it’s stretching our minds. Really stretching our minds because we realise people are giving up their precious time and we therefore have an absolute responsibility to deliver substantive value to them.

Our objective after the seminar is for the participants to achieve a change of behaviour, to do something differently.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that “the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting change to happen.”

Why have we chosen a workshop as the format for the morning? What do we mean by a workshop?

For us a workshop is a seminar where the participants do most of the work, rather than the speakers. We chose this format as people learn best by being active participants, so for three hours they are going to be working. Our objective seems very low as we just want three changes of behaviour per person, from three hours work.

We compare this with three hours of us spouting new facts (no matter how technically brilliant our presentation may be) with no one thinking about the implications of the information or the opportunities it may create, therefore with probably no changes of behaviour. We’ve all come away from seminars and thought “Well, all very interesting but it doesn’t apply to me.”

Our workshop style will be to briefly provide a few new facts and insights about our favourite interest, using IT to its fullest extent to solve business problems, to achieve new profit levels, to achieve better service levels. We want people to really think about the implications of this new information for their business.

What we want to do is to give people time:
To work out – how can I use this most effectively, how can I make money or solve a problem?
To ask additional questions, can it do …., how can I ……, what about….,
To discuss in small groups what elements attract them and what they’ll leave aside

Then to agree for each group the three most important changes they are going to implement and report these to the whole room.

After all they know their businesses far better than we know them.


Click on this link: http://www.yoolaa.co.uk/seminar.htm

Yoolaa Special Tasks – Cash Collection

Yoolaa Special Tasks – Cash Collection

No one in your business likes calling and chasing customers to pay your outstanding invoice(s).

You know you’re going to get the run-around, stories like these:
- We haven’t received your invoice
- You need the accounts department
- The amount is wrong
- The goods were damaged (or someone is unhappy with your services)
- We lost your invoice
- We’re waiting for formal approval
- The person who needs to approve it is on holiday
- It’s included in the run to be paid at the end of the month
- It missed the payment run

Yoolaa Special Tasks - Cash Collection makes it a simple process, because the computer does the heavy work for you, for example:

- Three days after sending the invoice, it will send an email to check they’ve received the invoice, to check they are happy it’s for the right amount and to remind them it’s due for payment on …………
- It will re-send email if there’s been no response
- If there’s still no response then telephone your contact to check it has been received
- Fifteen days before due date it will automaticallysend an email to gentle nudge them that your invoice is due for payment on ……..
- Three days before due date it will send a further reminder that your invoice is due for payment on …………
- If their payment has not been received within three days of the due date, it will send the ‘director’s email’, and
- Three days later your director telephones their director to identify with him that something is wrong with their payment systems as you haven’t received payment for your invoice and it is now overdue.
(We can amend any part of this to suit you.)

The essential part of the system is for your customer’s payment team to realise that you have a very slick collection system. That you do follow-up promptly and it’s therefore less effort for them if they give your invoice priority – which is all that you want.

The system can also be applied to all your current outstanding invoices.

One user licence is all that is needed, including set-up assistance, £89 pm plus Vat, and the system starts as soon as we have received your payment!

Saving the world! Happy Christmas

Seasons greetings!

A little story that might make you smile from a few years back...

Two British traffic patrol officers from North Berwick had a bit of a surprise while checking for speeding motorists on the A1 Great North Road. One of the officers used a hand-held radar device to check the
speed of a vehicle approaching over the crest of a hill, and was surprised when the speed was recorded at over 300 mph. Their radar gun then stopped working and the officers were not able to reset it.

Just then, a deafening roar over the treetops revealed that the radar had in fact locked on to a NATO Tornado fighter jet, which was engaged in a low-flying exercise over the Border district, approaching from the North Sea.

Back at police headquarters the chief constable fired off a typically self-righteous complaint to the RAF Liaison office. ...and back came the reply from the RAF:

'Thank you for your message, which allows us to complete the file on this incident. You may be interested to know that the tactical computer in the Tornado had detected the presence of, and subsequently locked onto, your hostile radar equipment and automatically sent a jamming signal back to it.

Furthermore, an air-to-ground missile aboard the fully-armed aircraft had also automatically locked onto your equipment. Fortunately the pilot flying the Tornado recognized the situation for what it was, quickly responded to the missile systems alert status, and was able to override the automated defence system before the missile was launched and your hostile radar installation was destroyed.

With that thought in mind, have a great Christmas!

All the best,
With thanks to Adam Blair
Founder, BeatTheSpeedTrap

major increase in the volume of telephone calls

More calls make for more business, and you can save telecom costs

We are seeing a major increase in the volume of telephone calls being made by our customers, during this difficult time.

Presumably these calls are to get more customers, to talk to existing customers, to get people to pay earlier, to sell more services, to get more referrals, possibly even to get your accountant to help sort out the bank.

For our part we are of the opinion that Now is the time to get your call costs down and your rental reduced. It's what our customers are doing.

Call costs are calculated by the second, with a minimum charge of 1.5p each. Calls to other users of our VoIP Advantage system are FOC, that is your staff plus calls to us and others.

For example for international businesses we recommend our Business Centrex Package with Unlimited international Landline Calls to 35 Countries (Fair use check at 4000 mins per month) and a choice of free Grandstream GXP-2000, or Grandstream HT-502. International Service package: £45.00 setup fee, £25.00 per month, unlimited minutes to 35 Countries.

Cheers,
Cliff

Call me now on 01273 358000
We work with small businesses, who have a problem with managing their business growth. what we do is provide an expandable phone and data system via the internet which means that they can work together better and can operate more efficiently nationally and internationally. Thus they make more profit so they can achieve their personal goals,
More about our clients.
Cliff's personal blog - allotment, state of the UK, gluten free restaurants etc

Robert Craven triumphs again for Barclays

"Let's talk more profit" at the Hilton Hotel, Portsmouth.

As always there are three balls to keep in the air - one each representing Operations, Marketing and Finance. Yet again everyone's good at Operations - because we all said "I could do that better"

If you score each element out of ten then Finance is always the numeric average of the other two so if Operations is ten and finance is six then marketing can only be scoring TWO.

It always comes down to marketing.

So how do you improve your marketing:
- make sure your cash is coming in
- make sure your systems are effective
- get rid of your worst customers
- get rid of your worst performing products and services
- get rid of under-performing staff

THEN put your effort into where it counts:
- increase your prices
- increase the volume of sales
- increase the number of customers

So what's on my new list to do:
- telephone our customers for more referrals
- develop a new presentation for our poorest performing service
- review our prices
- Be DIFFERENT, get into the mind of the customer
- edit our web site

"We work with small businesses, who have a problem with managing their business growth.

what we do is provide expandable phone and data systems via the internet which means that they can work together better and operate more efficiently. Thus they make more profit so that they can achieve their personal goals.

We are the only company to have taken the eLink team-working software and extended it to suit all the day to day needs of small businesses for the whole office process from developing sales, booking appointments, running the operations, invoicing and credit control, and for those who need it incorporating project cost control.

We have also integrated the eLink system with the VoIP phone system for dialling calls. We have tested the system on all PCs and Notebook PCs and also with using 3G Dongles so that you and your team can utilise it anywhere.

Outlook or Exchange Server are integral so that all the office processes run coherently. We have also added software to automate many office activities and report generation.

Our clients tend to be young businesses who just want the freedom to grow their real business out-sourcing to us the job of looking after the under-lying office systems and protecting their corporate data.

Our customers select what they want anywhere along the spectrum from a one person phone system or a one person contact and appointments system upwards to the whole works."

However I met some ten people all of whom I'd love to do business with, all positive, all looking forward, all driving, all confident in their businesses:
- limousine company
- telecoms company
- structural engineers
- chewing gum cleaners
- sportswear manufacturers
- motor vehicle servicing
- chocolate supplier
- chiropractic clinic
- tearoom and cafe
- management consultant

Lots of ideas from round the room, everyone thinking hard, everyone looking inwards to check what they could be doing better.

Good to meet people, good to review how we work, good to exchange experiences.