How to More Easily Manage Cash Flow for Your Business [INFOGRAPHIC]

Every small business has different needs and operations expectations. Managing accounts payable and accounts receivable is a balancing act that accountants perform on a daily basis. Closely monitoring and managing cash flow can help offset payments to venders and overhead expenses and allow you to focus on developing your business.

Business owners should establish habits that allow them to easily track and manage both accounts payable and receivable. Doing so can help reduce the chance of late fees and allow your business to grow more quickly. Read the infographic below from Citizens Bank for 16 different ways to manage cash flow and keep your business in check.…

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Powerful Ways Retailers Can Remain Competitive in Tough Markets

Retailing has significantly changed since the Internet came into the picture. There are new challenges encountered but at the same time new opportunities are cropping up. Also, as more retailers compete for customers, there is an undeniable need to step up strategies and methods to remain competitive.

About.com’s “3 Ways to Thrive in a Retail Slowdown” offer great insights on how to remain competitive, but there are many other useful strategies you can use as discussed below:

Know and Understand Your Competition

It is essential to analyze the competition. Venturing into any business without knowing anything about the competitors is like entering a vast maze without a map or without having a bird’s eye view of the maze.…

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5 Steps for Debt Recovery

Sound collection procedures and processes do not always stop bad debt occurring. The important step is knowing how and when to increase the severity of the action to be taken to recover these bad debts.

Debt recovery

Early communication with the debtor is on one of the key steps to ensure recovery of the debt.

This contact needs to be consistent and measured to determine what action mostly achieves the desired result.

There are various collection processes that can include:-

personal contact with your client either face to face or via the telephone
written demand requesting payment
negotiation
use of a debt collection agency
legal action

Contact

Collection of your overdue accounts should be a daily task not just looked at when cash flow is poor.…

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Modern Retail: Is Location Everything?

The retail industry has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. Stores are no longer gathered in downtown neighborhoods and rather than attracting people to the marketplace, out-of-town shopping malls must offer shopping possibilities and a broad range of eateries, from budget-oriented fast food to upmarket restaurants, as well as movie theaters and fitness centers. More recently, the future of these malls has been threatened, as an increasing number of consumers find it more convenient to shop online.

Berlin mall

What is the future for brick and mortar stores?

The death knell for actual physical stores, or ‘brick and mortar stores,’ has supposedly been sounded for many years now.…

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Complying with Relevant Laws and Legislation as a Business Owner

The economic pendulum has swung again in the last financial quarter, with businesses throughout the Eurozone responding negatively to widespread decline. This has yet to impact on British business owners, however, as they remain optimistic about future growth and the potential for long-term expansion. Whether such sentiment can be sustained indefinitely has yet to be seen, but in the meantime it is important that entrepreneurs look to safeguard their venture and consolidate any success that they have enjoyed in 2014.

Regulation compliance

How to Create a Compliant Business in 3 Easy Steps

Compliance is one the most important factors when maintaining a successful business, so consider the following steps towards achieving this goal within your firm:

1.

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Tips for Small Businesses That Want to Use Automatic Speech Recognition (Infographic)

Automatic speech recognition technology (ASR) and its complementary technology known as IVR (interactive voice response) are both systems you’ve almost certainly used before in a personal or business context.

Apple Siri

These are the technologies that allow machines to interact with humans through audio communication and anybody who’s ever used an automated telephone customer service system, a voice powered text editing program or a smartphone interface like Siri on the iPhone has come into contact with one kind of ASR/IVR software or another.

The possible business applications of these systems are numerous and your company could definitely benefit from using ASR technology in a number of contexts.…

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Is Your Growing Business Secure? 5 Tips for Keeping Your Customers’ Trust

As your small business gains momentum, you’ll undoubtedly juggle countless tasks at once, so when it comes to data security, it’s easy to put it on the back burner. But the fact is that if you suffer a data breach, the costs could include customer erosion, financial losses, and regulatory fines. The reputational fallout alone can continue months beyond the incident and translate into upwards of $5 million in losses.

And don’t think you get a free pass on security simply because your business isn’t large or well known. According to Verizon’s 2013 Data Breach Investigation Report, 72 percent of data breaches affect small businesses, making it clear that cybercriminals and automated attacks don’t discriminate on company size.…

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7 Strategies for Coming Up With Your Best Ideas Yet

With so much emphasis being placed on new technology, it’s easy to forget about the one thing that got you where you are today – and I’m not talking about your innovation, willpower, or proven track record. I’m talking about your brain.

Finding business ideas

Your ability to think on your feet and make informed decisions has helped you become a true expert in your field. But as you move up the corporate ladder, you can become further and further removed from the heart of your business – so much so that it can affect the way you think about it.

In my industry, for example, conventional wisdom told us that people wanted to see a storage unit before renting it.…

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How to Avoid Killing Good Email Design with These Five Campaign Enemies

Email marketing campaigns are a delicate balance of different factors interacting in just the right way to create what is an overall smooth flowing campaign. Because of this, numerous little factors, some of which can even be hard to identify, will influence if your campaign runs smoothly or suddenly fails in some way that causes drops in beneficial metrics.

Good email design tips

In order to minimize this risk, you need a hit list of the most problematic elements that are likely to screw your campaign up, so you can get rid of them in advance.

Luckily, this post is dedicated to giving you a quick and easy to follow “public enemies” list of the worst and most common offenders you’re likely to meet, described as actual characters.…

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The Greatest Leadership Trait? Being Authentic

Do you remember how leaders used to be? They were patriarchal, unquestioned and respected (or feared) by their workforce merely because of their position. As time passed and society changed, the most admired leaders were those deemed to be charismatic. Great leaders needed strong personalities.

More recently, there has been another shift. These days, there’s a call for leaders with strong emotional intelligence. Leaders now need also to be genuine. They need to be authentic. But what does this mean? And how can you, as a leader, be authentic?

Authentic business leader

Listen

If you genuinely listen to your people, three things happen. Firstly, you get important insight into what the key issues (and best ideas) for your business are.…

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