Proposals for your clients

04.13.11 Posted in Hints and Tips by Mathew

I had a great lesson reinforced for me today by one of our suppliers. Central to the theme is how you present the work you propose to your customers, and how easily it can go wrong.

Put simply, you should give your customer a detailed proposal, which explains the work you intend to do for them, and the total cost of that work. I won’t go into detail here, as this isn’t really a business blog, but I’m sure you get the idea.

If you are going to offer your customer options that vary in price, it should be a simple matter to spell each option out, and show the price of each.

Most importantly, the details of what you will provide, how long it will take to complete the work, and what the work will cost, should all be presented to your customer in a SINGLE DOCUMENT.

This is where one of our suppliers fell short this week;

• They listed the price for only one of two options
• The price was not on the same document as the options
• They didn’t clearly explain it would take some days after our order before the work could be done
• They didn’t clearly explain we needed to sign off on the work on their official form.

Most or all of this information WAS provided, but because it was provided in a haphazard way, some in email, some in a document, some by phone, the message was lost in the hustle and bustle of running a business.

The moral of the story; make it easy to do business with you, and you will win more business.

Dangers of Dropbox

04.12.11 Posted in Hints and Tips by Mathew

Recently we had a case where a client phoned us in a panic, as all of their important documents had simply vanished. They had stored all their data within Dropbox, so that they could sync the documents between their home and work computers.

Lots of people take advantage of Dropbox for this reason, it’s a great way to keep your stuff on multiple computers. There are dangers though, and you should be aware of them;

The main danger is putting your own dropbox onto a computer you do not have complete control over, such as a computer where you work. If you don’t completely control that computer, with a password only YOU know, then someone else has the opportunity to delete files from your dropbox. If they do, dropbox will dutifully DELETE THEM FROM YOUR OTHER COMPUTERS, and they are gone.

The second issue, is that if you use the same dropbox account on all your computers, the computers you don’t have control of will include a copy of everything. So if you have a work folder, and a personal folder, for example, then your personal stuff will be on your work computer.

If you don’t want your boss to be able to find your application letters for a new job, for example, the solution is to setup more than one dropbox account. Just setup a dummy account for the work computer, and share your work dropbox folder with that account, but not the rest of them. That way, work is work, and they can’t mess with your personal stuff.

Make sure, whatever you do, that you have a real backup solution as well. Dropbox is NOT a backup, and should never be used as such. Because it will mirror deletions across all your machines, it doesn’t provide protection against accidental deletion. A good backup solution DOES do this, and a whole lot more.

Another mistake is to put files such as your MYOB file into your dropbox. This seems like  great idea, but the problem is that each time you use MYOB, you are making small changes in the file, that Dropbox will then have to update. If you are a regular user of MYOB, this will generate a lot of traffic, and many people have very low bandwidth caps on their internet plan, and this could put you over.

We’d love to hear your comments about your experiences with Dropbox. Let us know in the comments!

MYOB & Emailing Invoices / Statements

04.06.11 Posted in Hints and Tips by Mathew

Today I tweeted in frustration the MYOB Team (@myobteam) that I am still, after a number of years of complaining, finding that MYOB cannot produce a proper PDF copy of Invoice and Statement forms. I was fed up, having complained about this any number of times, and never had any resolution from MYOB.

I have had several clients complain of the same thing. We have a lot of small business clients using MYOB, and so are quick to hear when things aren’t right. This problem has plagued both our own business, and many of our clients, over many versions of MYOB.

Today, my prayers were answered. MYOB were quick to get back to me, and for the first time that I have complained of this issue, they actually offered solutions. To ice the cake, their advice actually worked!

Where you find that your logo or other graphics you’ve included on the form do not come out on the PDF, you need to install Apple Quicktime [Download] (yeah, that baffles me too, but there you go).  I tested it, and sure enough, our logo started appearing on the PDF versions of our documents.

We have also seen issues where specific fields on forms simply don’t appear on the PDF version, but do on the print version. The MYOB team responded that this is usually caused by the text in the field being slightly too big, so you have to make sure your number fields are both wide enough for the biggest number you might see and also tall enough, which turned out the be the problem in our case.

Now that we know what the problem is, at least we can deliver the fix, so if you can’t get your forms to email correctly from MYOB, give us a call!