Sponsored by Sage
Small businesses are known for being innovative and customer-focused in a way that their larger competitors cannot. This transforms into a significant advantage. In fact, the ability for smaller businesses to provide a memorable and positive customer experience is central to their prospects of success in steering commerce – online and in person – back toward them.
Sage, developers of the Sage 50cloud application, is a strong supporter of small business. Our team recognizes how tough it can be to survive out in the marketplace, especially now. One of the key best practices that we suggest that small businesses use to do better for themselves is to divide their time along an 80/20 division, also known as the Pareto Principle.
The 80/20 rule is used to signify the relationship between a small amount of something and a large amount to illustrate a dynamic. For small businesses, it applies as an excellent formula of practice management. It states that 80 percent of your time should be spent in your business, but 20 percent should be spent on your business. The term “on your business” refers to strategizing, planning, communicating with customers and with employees, marketing, intelligence gathering, and administration. This 80/20 division allows for innovation and customer service to flourish.
Maximizing the benefits of the 80/20 rule means turning to technologies to oversee those parts of the business that take more time and attention than they should, and one of these is taking care of the books and the money. This does not mean these tasks are less important – they are vital. But another element of business success comes from knowing when to delegate, and accounting should be one of those delegation opportunities.
Sage has been in the business of accounting for small businesses and nonprofits for almost a decade, and their application, Sage 50cloud, speaks to small business by delivering the key essentials of small business financial management – Financial Reporting, Cash Flow, Remote Access, Invoicing, Payments and Bank Reconciliation in easy to access segments that naturally are accessible on mobile devices and which even synchronize with Microsoft office applications.
Some of the biggest challenges that companies face is ensuring stable cash flow and managing costs. This has always been a time-intensive activity for the small business owner. They either had to take on a second job as bookkeeper/accountant, or they had to hire one, with the resultant hourly costs. With Sage 50cloud, small business owners can connect with an intelligent, cloud-based system that frees them up to focus more on solving problems for their customers.
For example, one of the intriguing concepts of the Sage 50cloud application is the ability to upload photographed receipts to Microsoft OneDrive and automatically create an expense record for manager approval. This may seem like a small thing, but it goes a long way to rectifying one of the long-standing stereotypes of small business owners – the act of keeping receipts in a shoebox under the bed. Receipts are tedious. Even if there is no actual “shoebox,” keeping track of them takes time and valuable mental focus away from the business and adds cost and delay to month-end and year-end paperwork and tax filing.
By connecting with Microsoft and also going to the cloud, Sage delivers a leading-edge approach to bookkeeping and accounting that makes every component, from payroll processing to e-filing to privacy issues like CCPA, easy to handle from any device. It allows small business owners, even those with no background in bookkeeping and accounting, to take charge and to capitalize on the intelligence of a cloud-based solution. This promise is backed up by their on-demand learning service, the Sage University online learning curriculum.
Another vital component that small business owners should consider is scalability. As a business ages and grows, the amount of data it produces and consumes grows very large, very fast. It is critical to choose a cloud provider that offers scalability to match current and future needs.
By Steve Prentice
