I thought I share with you some technical information in another little series of posts called “TechTIP”. Anything to do with IT and related issues in a non-geeky way.

First up I give you some links to software download sites where you can look at software from commercial vendors, and from free or shareware vendors. The only quality difference is often the lack of marketing skills of the free and shareware vendors, but the software can be surprisingly good. So before you spend you hard earned cash, look at these sites.

If you know of any more sites please leave a comment for me and my readers.

www.download.com, is one of them, you can find software in all kinds of categories and for Macs and Windows, even your palm computer. On the web site you can find out which software is free, sharware or commercial software. It gives you a good overview of what is available and you can easily compare features. If you focus on the features you need, you can safe yourself some money.

www.tocows.com, is my personal favorite download site. Again you can find software for Mac, Linux and Windows. It does basically the same as download.com, I just prefer the presentation of the software and the navigation of the website is easier.

These sites are very good for special utilities like anti-spy software, etc., but most of all allot of the software is FREE!

Tags: Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Mentoring, Business Start Up, download.com, E-Commerce, Entrepreneur, Home Business, IT, Linux, Mac OS X, Micro Business, MS Windows, Open Source Software, SOHO, Selfemployed, Small Business, smb, sme, tucows.com, Unix, Very Small Business, VSB

Had enough in your current job? Want to go it alone? Do you have a great idea? We all dream about breaking free from our 9 to 5 jobs and find joy and self-fulfillment by being our own boss. But is that really enough? I don’t think so.

Unlimited working hours, NO holidays and even less money than before is a real prospect for start ups.

Are you motivated? Run your own business and 9 to 5 is not an option, certainly not in the beginning. It is not enough just to want to escape that boring job or unfair boss, you need to be committed to your business and to earning enough money to support yourself and your family.

Can you work hard enough? You think your boss was hard on you, then know this, you will have to be even harder on yourself. You can not switch of from work, you will need to network 24/7. In fact sometimes I cannot sleep, I am so deep in planning mode. Which brings me to…..

Do you have your families support? They need to understand that their security depends on your success. Going it alone is a big step, going it without your families support or your friends would be too big a step, trust me.

Are you focused and self-reliant? You will work alone, you will have to make all the decisions yourself. And believe me when I say, that a bigger company does not make it easier, the buck always stops with you. Don’t think being a CEO is the greatest job in the world, no you get to do all the stuff nobody else did or messed up. It can get very lonely at times. With all these problems and decisions you have to stay focused on your goal.

If you are still reading this, then what the hell are you waiting for? Here is a couple of things you need to think about before committing yourself:

• You need to get enough money to last for minimum double the time you think, without income.
• Make a plan for yourself and read it on a monthly basis, you’ll be surprised.
• Find a suitable business structure, limited company, partnership, sole trader, etc.
• Most importantly find an good accountant, and get him / her to play with you.
• Think about your product or service, talk to potential customers and test the water.

Then go and have some fun living your life by the rules of your new boss - YOUR CLIENTS!

Tags: Accountants, Accounting, Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Mentoring, Business Start Up, Entrepreneur, Home Business, Micro Business, Selfemployed, Small Business, smb, sme, Very Small Business, VSB

In this forth part of my SaaS - Software as a Service mini series, I am looking at one of the most important aspects of this technology. BTW, you can find a link to the previous posts in this series at the end of this post.

Benefit Number 4:

You can access all your data and your applications worldwide, or in other words Anywhere @ Anytime.

This enables very small business to stay in contact with their “office” almost all the time. This Online Office has a profound impact on the mobility of very small business. Often the owner of the business fulfills all, or many key functions in the business, mobility is not only a nice to have, but a must have. While the owner is out selling, working, traveling, etc., it is still possible to stay in touch with the business.

It does not matter if you have an office or work from home, nor does it matter if you have your own staff or outsource. Because not only you can access your office from anywhere @ anytime, your staff or virtual assistants can too. This in turn allows you to grow your business, while controlling your overheads. Not to mention your accountant, who can give you real time, on-demand advice.

Not to mention, that if you have an office, it is nice to be able to go home see the family and maybe later when the kids are in bed put a couple of hours extra work in, for that meeting tomorrow. This helps you to feel less guilty about the little time you spend with your family, but you gain the vital support from your family for your business.

I am sure there are more good points to me made here, but I guess you get the picture. If you are interested to discuss this topic in more detail please visit www.sbqaforum.com, or leave a comment.

Links to the other posts in this series:

SaaS Benefit Number 1: No Software Installation
SaaS Benefit Number 2: Software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows
SaaS Benefit Number 3: Free Software Upgrade
SaaS Benefit Number 4: Anywhere @ Anytime.

Tags: Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Mentoring, Business Start Up, Entrepreneur, Home Business, IT, Micro Business, On-demand, Outsourcing, SaaS, Selfemployed, Small Business, smb, sme, sme-blog, Software as a Service, Very Small Business, Virtual Assitants, VSB, Web Technology, WinWeb

Recently, in SME / SMB Have Become Obsolete Acronyms I discussed how now, that business software and services have become affordably available to small businesses, the SME term has become inadequate to describe this market, especially from the software industry's point of view. Simply because the needs of a $100M company, which SAP and Oracle consider a "small" business are not even comparable to a 6-10 person company - traditionally referred to as SOHO, while recently a new term is popping up: VSB - very small business, the absolute "S" part of SMB.

Innovators in the software business are increasingly focusing on this segment. The result of this change is that "Enterprise Software" is no longer the luxury of large corporations. This might sound like a shocking statement, since "Enterprise Software" typically means the world of SAP and Oracle, and the traditional heavyweight, expensive, pay-huge-license-fees-upfront, then try-to-implement-forever model that does not work anymore.

But there is another definition that is largely being overlooked:
Software that allows a company to conduct it’s everyday business, supporting most of the core, fairly standard business processes any company performs repeatedly.

With this definition, Enterprise Software has a whole new, largely unpenetrated market to enter: that of small businesses. Such business functionality has traditionally been beyond reach for a typical small business, for two major reasons:

• Cost (license, hardware, implementation, maintenance ..etc)
• Lack of IT resources (integrating applications, designing processes, dealing with multiple vendors ..etc)

SaaS is the right answer for both, since it allows the SME user to start using the functionality without an upfront investment, does not require implementation, upgrades, maintenance, worrying about backups and security ..etc.

Of course several Open Source packages are available completely free, which is a perfect solution for the cost problem, but frankly most of these packages are by geeks for geeks; i.e. you really have to be quite IT-savy to implement, integrate, upgrade them, and as we stated most small businesses simply do not have that type of resource.

Stefan, Winweb's Founder and CEO started an excellent mini-series on Saas Benefits detailing a lot of technical, delivery, usage aspects - now I am going to look at the changed economics from the other side, the software vendors' point of view.

If SME’s could not in the past afford Enterprise Software, the same held true for the Software Industry: they could not afford SME’s, since there was just no way to profitable reach millions of small businesses. The cost of customer acquisition vs. the very low license fees made it an uneconomical model, whether via direct or channel sales. A common "dirty secret" of the industry is that about 80% of a an enterprise software company's cost is Sales and Marketing. There's a lot of "fat" in that sales process that needs to be cut out.

Once again, technology comes to the rescue: the Internet, and largely Search Engine Marketing changes everything. Joe Kraus, Founder of JotSpot and previously Excite sums it up:
“ Ten years ago to reach the market, we had to do expensive distribution deals. We advertised on television and radio and print. We spent a crap-load of money. There’s an old adage in television advertising “I know half my money is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know what half”. That was us. It’s an obvious statement to say that search engine marketing changes everything. But the real revolution is the ability to affordably reach small markets. You can know what works and what doesn’t. And, search not only allows niche marketing, it’s global popularity allows mass marketing as well (if you can buy enough keywords). “

Another benefit of SEM (search engine marketing) is that while traditional advertising can pick the right demographic groups, it cannot pick the right time, only a fraction of the target audience is in “change mode”, looking for a solution. That’s the beauty of Search Engine Marketing: obviously if you are searching, you have a problem and are looking for a solution, which is half a win from the vendor’s point of view.

Small Business Trends published a survey on “Selling to Small Businesses”, which supports the increasing importance of SEM: “A full 73% of vendors attract small business customers through search engine results”

Joe has another excellent article worth reading; especially the last two bulletpoints are relevant to our discussion here.

What we're seeing is that the SaaS model changes not only the technology and the delivery of software to customers, but the marketing and sales process, too, which is perhaps where most of the excess "fat" can be cut from. Software companies can now directly and affordably reach millions of small customers. The entire marketing, sales, delivery, implementation, support, upgrade process is seamless, highly standardized, conducted via the Net, teleconferencing, Webex-like sharing in new low-cost ways.

So how do software companies make money on small businesses? Ziff Davis has the answer: “Products for the long tail and SMB market, where 72 million businesses spend $5k or less each year, are a much easier play” Wow, I don’t know where those numbers come from, but if I were a SME-focused software vendor, I’d certainly like them … there’s a goldmine out there.

AMI Partners confirm: U.S. SMBs to Spend $2.2 Billion on Software in 2006

(This article, with minor changes is cross-posted on my personal blog)

Tags: Enterprise Software, Sales, Enterprise Sales, Demand Generation, SAP, Oracle, Jotspot, web20enterprise, business model, Open Source, SEM, Search Engine Marketing, SMB, SME, VSB, Small Business, Winweb

We are proud to announce our sponsorship of the “Accountancy Age - Best Use of Internet: Practice” award. As internet technology advances, accounting practices embrace this technology to provide better and more proactive services to their clients. We would like you to join us in honouring the achievements of those innovative accounting practices.

Many of these services have been around for some time for the medium and large clients of accounting practices. With the advent of the internet, broadband and SaaS - Software as a Service technology, to name but a few, these services are now available to micro and small business.

The challenge is to deliver not only the technology, but also knowledge and services to clients. We believe the accountant in todays networked business world has a much larger role to play, by providing business advice and financial controller services to their clients on an ad hoc basis.

This provides micro and small business with real time and on-demand expertise on a scale not seen before. Because of cost constraints, this client sector has always been the most demanding and difficult area to work in. By use of technology and practice expertise it is possible to provide a small business infrastructure not seen before, and with that a decline in small business mortality.

We are here to celebrate those practices, large or small, who have shown the foresight and innovative spirit to enhance client success by internal and external client based internet technology use in practice.

We are delighted to sponsor practices who share our vision and determination to make use of technology for a healthier and more vibrant entrepreneurial business infrastructure.

Tags: AAT, ACCA, Accountants, AIA, Bookkeeping, Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Mentoring, Business Start Up, CIMA, CIPFA, CPA, CPAs, Entrepreneur, Home Business, ICAEW, ICAI, ICAS, IFA, IT, Micro Business, Office/IT, On-demand, Outsourcing, Accountancy Age, SaaS, Selfemployed, Small Business, smb, sme, Software as a Service, Web Technology, WinWeb

As a reminder, overnight between the hours 20:00 hrs on 31st May 2006 and 06:00 hrs of the 1st June 2006 we are adding new connections to increase the bandwidth and resilience to our network and a second live router.

Reason: The second core router is added to enhance data thru-put and network resilience, by distributing our connections to our current four upstream providers onto two core routers. So if one goes down, we will not loose our service. At the same time we are adding another upstream to further enhance our network performance.

Effect: In the early morning hours of the 1st of June, our connectivity will go up and down for about two hours and due to the changes in our routing you may experience slow service or even “host unreachable” messages for up to eight hours (routing update time) after that. The improved service will be fully operational by 09:00 on the June 1st.

Note: This will affect all clients, including white label services.

We apologize for any inconvenience to you, and should you have any further questions please contact customer care (live support).

Any updates to this ticket will be available on our forum –> WinWeb Forum –> Announcements –> Ticket 22152.

Tags: sme-blog, WinWeb

Jason Holden is a qualified accountant in the UK and Australia. His first career choice was surfing “bum” in Australia, but luckily his wife Nicola saw the potential in him, so he became an business advisor accountant. That is lucky for us, …..may not be so lucky for him.

He is based in Lancashire and has been one of the early adopters of SaaS - Software as a Service technology. This allows him to help clients all over the UK. His motto is:

‘We advise a lot of new businesses, this is something I personally enjoy immensely, although it’s not the easiest of advice to give. There is so much to know, from what structure you take, are you better as a limited company or sole trader, what about a bank account, which bank should you use, what records do you need to keep and for whom are they being kept, what insurances do you need, the list of questions goes on, but the best part for me is new start-ups are like a sponge they soak up new ideas and I find more often than not they teach me new things!”

And I must say from what I can see he is very successful with what he does. Jason also is a guest author here on my blog so you can find more advise from him here on my blog, here are some of the posts:

• Business advisor facts (not fiction)
• Not all accountants are created equal (how do you choose an accountant)
• Blogging for small business, not convinced, read on …

It is good to see that more and more accountants are ready to offer a much needed service to their clients, business advice. This breed of accountant can add real value to the client by getting involved with small business and help them to survive. That is one reason why we made Jason in one of our Gold Partners.

Tags: AAT, ACCA, Accountants, Accounting, AIA, Bookkeeping, Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Mentoring, Business Start Up, CIMA, CIPFA, CPA, CPAs, Entrepreneur, Home Business, ICAEW, ICAI, ICAS, IFA, Micro Business, Outsourcing, SaaS, Selfemployed, Small Business, smb, sme, sme-blog, Software as a Service, Web Technology, WinWeb

I am one of over 200 business advisers around the UK that on a monthly basis contributes to the UK Business Barometer which is an online business survey conducted by The University of Nottingham.

It’s hard for a new business to get going, and there is always conflicting information out there, from a mate down the pub to the accountants/business advisor that wants paying, so I thought I would share a few of the most recent finding of the barometer with you.

Only 11.3% of advisers are not advising clients to take advantage of the various Government incentives such as online filing for year end payroll returns for small employers, which for the tax year to 5 April 2006 was worth £250 tax free! Just make sure your advisor isn’t one of the 11.3%!

In the 3 months ended March 2006, 47.4% of advisers had seen an increase in clients seeking their advice, this is good news, people running their own business seeking advice rather than listen to their mate in the pub!

Even better news, 31.1% of advisers have seen an increase in the number of people wanting to start their own business, just remember if you are starting a new venture get professional advice!

And for those thinking about starting up for the first time, a whopping 85.9% of adviser expect client business failure rates to be 10% or less, maybe this has something to do with the increase in clients seeking professional advice?

For all those ladies looking to start in business go for it, you are certainly not alone, there has been a 27.5% increase in women seeking advice. There is now more support than ever for women starting in business, if there is enough interest I will in a future blog cover women starting in business more with some useful links, if anyone wants me to?

Business advisers like everyone else are also faced with the increased use of technology and as such we also find ourselves being inundated with information.

What is good to see is that only 15.9% of advisers don’t feel familiar with the requirements necessary to upgrade a client’s website to allow trading online. Online trading, correct me if I’m wrong Stefan, but can’t Winweb help out with this?

With such sites as ebay becoming more and more popular not only to buy from, but also to trade on, advisers have seen a massive 57.7% increase in clients seeking advice on online trading in the last 2 years.

Sadly, a whopping 40.7% of advisers agree the main obstacle faced by any business when looking to trade online is a lack of familiarity with the technology. If you are thinking about trading online, talk to the guys at winweb, it’s what they do!

What ever you do, take advice, not only from your mate in the pub, but have a chat with a professional, most will give you a free initial meeting.

Good luck.

Tags: Accountants, Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Mentoring, Business Start Up, Entrepreneur, Home Business, Micro Business, SaaS, Selfemployed, Small Business, smb, sme, sme-blog, Software as a Service, The Prince’s Trust, WinWeb

Nigel Harris of AccountingWeb has reviewed our AccountsOffice, his review was based on version 3-1-11.

While Nigel found the our AccountsOffice easy to use he had found some niggles:

There’s a glitch in the drop-down menu system – blue drop down data entry boxes in, eg, ‘Suppliers: pay a bill’, interfere with the main drop down menu – they just block it out - which could be a problem on screens with lots of these, such as the itemised sales invoice creation screen. The demo company came ready set up for VAT, but I couldn’t find an option to delete the VAT registration or to set up a non-VAT registered business. And for an online system, I was disappointed at the lack of drill down facilities, not just from the initial summary page, but also from reports – would it really have been that difficult to create a hot link from, say, the aged debtor report to the underlying debtor account and invoice details?

We have taken some of these niggles on board and are changing these as I write this. Some of these issues will be addressed in the version 3-2 release later this week or early next week. While some are more involved, and will be addressed in future releases, but latest for our release 4-0 in the later part of the year.

Please keep your ideas and suggestions coming to help us improve our product. Thank you Nigel for your time.

Tags: Accountants, Business Development, Business Infrastructure, Business Start Up, Home Business, Micro Business, SaaS, Selfemployed, Small Business, smb, sme, sme-blog, Software as a Service, Web Technology, WinWeb

Here’s an interesting story from the US:

"At Cobb County school system in Georgia a spam filter is causing a political dust-up.

Officials say a bid to provide telephone services to the system was gobbled up by the filter, and the bidder was subsequently disqualified, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The term "long distance" was apparently what triggered the block.

The school system had requested an e-mail as a follow-up to the formal bid, which had previously been submitted on paper. When they didn’t see the reply, officials dismissed the bidder and awarded the contract to another–more expensive–contractor. Now the bidder and the school system are arguing over whose fault it was." (source: Blogma)

Here’s a wonderful showcase that calls for a wiki.  What’s a wiki? Well, basically it’s very simply editable web-pages that facilitate collaboration - but instead of me explaining, why don’t you watch this  excellent short video .

So what could the school district have done?  Set up separate wiki pages for each participating vendor where they directly upload all relevant documentation.  If they make changes, the wiki keeps track of versions and shows what the changes are.  School district officials who have a role in the decision-making process have access to all vendor pages, so they can compare the bids, plus they can set up their own internal workpages where the create notes, discussions, tables .. i.e. collaborate easily.

At the end of the process they have one compact site, the wiki that includes the official bids as well as all supporting documentation instead of hundreds of emails, cc’s, untrackable attachments.

Wikis are one of the many extra "goodies" that will become available to Winweb customers in the near future.

(Parts of this article have been posted on my personal blog)

Tags: wiki, collaboration, bidding, bidprocess, versioncontrol, winweb