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