These days, any small business can fail for a number of reasons. Problems related to finances are often an area of concern. Regardless if a business sells quality services or products to its consumers, success will be difficult to attain if there’s a lack of consistent cash flow to cover for business-related expenses.

For today’s SMBs, financial management is key to a healthy business. Here are four essential tips that every business owner should consider:

 

1. Firmly set out targets.

 

One ideal approach is to lay down clear monetary goals for what’s ahead. These goals need to be both short term and the long term. It’ll be challenging to predict the ability of a small business to meet its targets if monetary goals can’t be determined in the early going.

Omono can help meet targets thanks to its simple-yet-informative dashboard. The day, month and year dials represent the sales streaming into the business and products/services that have been shipped/invoiced (Output).

When it comes to setting targets, it’s essential to plan out for both best case and worst-case scenarios. This gauges a clearer picture on how far a business can succeed. It also allows for more time to take necessary actions if a specific income can’t be attained.

 

2. Go for a robust and reliable accounting software.

 

Being on top of business finances can be made easier with good accountancy software. This program often contains a plethora of features. It can assist the business owner to track current financial standings, carry out reports regarding key metrics, and offering real-time updates on daily expenses.

Xero is leading accounts software known for keeping track of payments and cashflow in any business. Omono offers seamless integration with Xero to ensure accurate financial tracking of one’s business. Such mutual harmony is a huge benefit for SMB owners looking to keep tabs on the day-to-day expenses of their business.

The more intuitive accounting software is, the better it will be in preparing financial records or tax forms. In addition, such software makes managing accounts several times faster. That means more time is allocated to concentrate on other core business areas.

 

3. Getting invoices issued.

 

A small business will greatly benefit from an accurate system that organizes and sends out invoices immediately after delivery of a product or service. Keeping up with invoices issued would mean payments are being received regularly for the services/product offered without any kind of delay.

It’s a helpful to utilize a software in speeding up the process as well as getting invoices issued electronically. Furthermore, it’s important to be aware of delayed payments to ensure regular and steady cash flow.

 

4. Keep finances under control.

 

It’s a big help to control spending to prevent finances of a small business from getting out of hand. Spending for costly products or adding more staff than actually needed is really easy to do. A recommended approach is to be meticulous in managing business growth. Ensuring that the business has reached targets before spending on purchases or additional staff.

 

While operating a small business can be something many look forward to, for others, it can be a nerve-wracking experience. Things get even more complex when money is involved. One needs to ensure that the business shouldn’t suffer as a result of poor financial management. SMB owners should always keep these tips in mind to ensure a brighter business venture in the future.

We all love to receive great customer support, fact.
Purchases are often chosen based on how good the customer support is so why do so many companies risk losing valuable customers by providing poor customer support?

Whether your business is wholesale distribution, manufacturing, online or face to face sales it is imperative customers feel they can approach you for help with confidence their problems will be rectified in a speedy and professional manner.

What is the basis of good customer support?

A good understanding of who your customers are

Know how your customers like to communicate with you

Be approachable

Check in with them from time to time

Be prepared

Make sure the entire team have appropriate knowledge of your product

Deliver your support fast

Empower customers to solve their own problems

Continue reading “We simply love Customer Support”

What does agile sales mean?

The word agile means – Ability to move quickly and easily. Let’s apply that to sales, the ability to move quickly and easily when a business opportunity presents itself.

You may have created a niche product and want to get it to market ahead of your competition or a customer may simply require proposals or solutions in a time sensitive manner.

Without a proficient management system in place you will be one step behind. The objective is to reduce wasteful activities and produce faster delivery of quotes, orders and services.

Think of a gymnast, they embody agility. A gymnast can change direction, move quickly and adjust to the environment whilst maintaining balance and control.

Can the same be said of your business?

Provide winning quotes fast

The ability to work anytime anywhere with an online management platform such as Omono means you can visit a customer one minute and provide a quote before you leave them or on the go simply tethering an internet connection from your mobile phone.

Omono allows you not only access to sales but also stock levels on the go and current workflow, allowing accurate lead times, all on one system.

Flexible quote revisions

Requirements change, you must react timely with accurate sales quote revisions.

With most systems, it can be complicated to revise a quote whilst preserving the history. Having agility would mean a system keeping all revisions and allowing you to convert not only the current quote but any quote in the chain of revisions.

Scheduled dispatches

If your business can easily adapt to the needs of your customers you will achieve agile status. Customers my request goods to be called forward or dispatched on multiple shipments. It is important therefore to have a responsive sales orders module that allows ultimate control over order dispatches which can clearly be seen in your workflow module.

Currency and Margin Control

Whether you import in foreign currencies or sell around the globe you should be set up to handle at least EUR and USD. When buying in various currencies it represents a far higher ROI if your management system can handle to conversions seamlessly, showing accurate margins when selling to customers. Handling all the difficult calculations for you, allowing a far greater focus on the customer experience and their needs. But ultimately ensuring you are always achieving the margin you require.

Take a moment to think about Purchasing

Don’t forget you can’t sell what you don’t have. A cornerstone of being agile is responsive purchasing. Maintain minimum stock levels based on accurate forecasts and reporting of your demand by product category or even individual item.

Purchasing triggered by demand alerts prevents oversight of items that are required to fulfil current or future orders.

At Omono we believe in the people that make a business agile. A defined vision for the business with strong communication allows the team to work as a unit and achieve great things.

To help keep track of all your great work we have introduced an intuitive activity feed visible from any screen, feel the buzz of teamwork from all departments with the ability to drill down when something gets your eye.

When all the good work takes your business to new highs be sure to have a live dashboard to track how often you crush your targets!

As your small business grows so too will your required stock levels.

Keeping track of these increasing levels is easier said than done. As an SME in a competitive marketplace its important you have the ability to act fast, therefore forecasting your stock becomes imperative.

Inventory is money, both in potential income but wasted it will become lost income.

Avoid excess stock

Having too much of certain items can lead to lost revenue and reduced profits on the stock previously sold. If the stock is perishable or line close to discontinuation it becomes even more important to avoid excess stock.

Avoid 0 Stock

0 Stock is when you have nothing in stock for a particular item. This is a disaster for the business, missing out on sales and perhaps losing customers to the competition for life. Ensuring a minimum stock level is vital in preventing lost sales.

So we need to find the ‘Just right’ stock level. How do we achieve this? The following best practice ideas will move you closer to your goal of ‘Just right’.

Proper Cataloging

As your required stock volume grows so will your range of products, therefore categorizing your stock items correctly will help track them more efficiently.

A system like Omono will also help report on the various product stock categories in your business helping predict trends and make better strategic decisions going forward.

Maintain Minimum Stock Levels (MSL)

Setting minimum stock levels help safeguard your business, ensuring popular product lines do not fall below a specified quantity of which you feel can meet demand.

It can be difficult to set MSL’s for items, this is where a system like Omono that tracks your 12 month usage with intuitive widgets provides accurate information that simply highlights how popular the item is, in turn what your MSL should be.

In Omono stock items are flagged as insufficient the instant they fall below your chosen minimum stock level (MSL) or an order is placed for a higher quantity than you have in stock.

Re-Ordering must be simple

There will be occasions where you find yourself with not enough stock but the idea is to have a system in place that helps you spot this straight away and place the necessary purchase order. You do NOT want customers looking around for alternative suppliers.

Omono allows you to quickly place purchase orders from approved suppliers and will also predict the unit quantities you need to place for demand, saving your bacon.

First in First out (FIFO)

The FIFO way sells your oldest items first ensuring you aren’t left with old stock on the shelves.

To manage this it is important to organize your stores in a manner that when picking occurs the warehouse staff do not simply take the newest items first.

Using Omono’s document storage, you can track batch or serial number certificates, providing the staff with control over educated picking.

Accurate and effective inventory management is vital to the business’s operation, however it shouldn’t drain your valuable resources to manage.

By implementing a modern all in one solution like Omono you can track stock, place purchase orders and manage your entire workflow with ease.

Streamline your business saving your most valuable resource, time.

Excel inventory management and word sales paperwork and invoices are doing more damage to your business than you realise.

If you are starting out or operating a 1-2 person operation it may seem fine to track your inventory in excel and quote / invoice your customers modifying templates in word. However this will significantly hinder your growth and ability to control it.

If you aspire to grow the business it really is time for an integrated management platform that looks after the CRM, operations, inventory, sales and purchasing. Giving greater control, reduced admin time providing you the ability to focus on the things you love.

5 Problems of Excel and Word for your business

1. Slow Customer response time

As the customer is your livelihood providing great customer service and quick responses is imperative to the success and growth of your business. From providing clear and concise quotations promptly to tracking shipments, your ability to meet their demands is the deciding factor for future orders.

Word may offer the chance to free type any quote or order you like, this may seem flexible but it offers no traceability such as stock control. You also have no idea of available stock when quoting lead times or margin control based on bill of materials.

2. Wasting time on admin

Multiple surveys have shown that SME’s without integrated management software are forced to waste time on admin, keeping them from growing the business and developing products.

Word and Excel require far greater human input to ensure they are kept up to date and accurate, this not only wastes time but relies heavily on attention to detail in preventing errors and often will not highlight an error until its too late – leading to an unhappy customer.

3. Scalability issues

You have a good product and established demand that it is growing, now is the time to react quickly and fulfil. Outdated procedures are inflexible to scale and tie you down like an anchor. As the demands grow and failure to fulfil occurs the demand will fall as quicker than it grew.

4. Lack of live reporting

In the fast paced environment of an SME, stock is being purchased, received, sold and shipped and your Excel spreadsheet hasn’t been updated in time.

Quickly you fall out of sync with what you actually have in stores and what’s required for outstanding orders.

Even if you update inventory every day it will never be as accurate or instant as a purpose built online inventory system.

5. Poor visibility

With your whole business hidden in documents stored on varies machines or servers it proves near impossible for good overall vision of how the business is performing.

Finding orders, checking stock levels producing reports. These actions should be easily accessible but the disjointed nature of word and excel simply won’t allow.

So what’s the alternative?

A system that collects data through standard operation and allows the creation of actionable reports.

Online, live tracking of your inventory which offers quick and powerful search of items.

Reduce time spent re-keying invoices and bills into your accounts system.

Improve your workflow vision and process to prevent any bottlenecks.

Why not try Omono, the online suite of integrated modules that help streamline your business boosting sales and reducing costs.

Try now for free.

Any fast growing SME can quickly get in a muddle with their software systems and how they manage their business. Typically they form, install a basic accounts software, grow steadily until they require a CRM system, grow the business further and add order management software, further growth then requires an inventory control system and purchasing application. By this time they have outgrown the basic accounts software and seek a bigger accounts system which in turn may not link with the spaghetti junction of other products managing the varies business functions! Ahhh!!

Time to rethink this mess and find an integrated management product that will manage all aspects of the business operation which links with an advanced cloud accounts system like Xero.

Integrated software combines key functions such as CRM, sales, purchasing, inventory management, workflow (MRP) and reporting in one application. This offers many advantages to the business. In no particular order, we’ve considered 10 top advantages for you:

1. Cost Saving: In most cases significant cost savings can be achieved. As in our consumer lives we are rewarded for buying from one supplier rather than each item from a different source. The cost saving extends beyond initial purchase or monthly fee when you consider the support, update or license fees that may be charged by one or more of your different systems.
2. Time Saving: Having all of your key data in one system significantly saves time. Reduced staff training, no re-keying, maintenance, upkeep,
3. Increased productivity and efficiencies: Vastly reduce the laborious time spent on admin tasks, freeing the staff up to focus on important tasks that convert more sales and deliver the product quicker.
4. Standards compliance: Every business will face audits Minimize time of external audits
5. Unparalleled teamwork
6. Improved reporting
7. Easy access to support
8. Central secure storage
9. Ease of update
10. Significant visibility improvements

Omono offers data in real time, no lag between third party interfaces.

You may think every business works with clearly defined targets, however many small businesses don’t! But how do they implement growth strategies you ask.. If you run a small business you understand it doesn’t work like that! Every day is different and presents its own unique challenges keeping you from planning progressive futures.

A large enterprise would never dream of operating without measurable performance indicators (KPIs) for individuals, teams and the company as a whole so why should you as a small business.

You need measurable targets when:

1. There is uncertainty over how well your business is performing
2. You feel the business moving in a different direction to originally planned
3. You have introduced new products or services
4. The current business plan is out of date
5. The growth you anticipated isn’t being achieved

The core benefits of measurable targets are;

1. Gain instant feedback of how the business is performing
2. Allows for improved strategic decisions, building sustainable growth
3. Improved understanding of product lines, e.g. re the recent changes or introductions really working
4. The whole company can see their hard work paying off, increasing morale and motivation

As a minimum, every small business should have a sales target. This should be a figure that achieves a profit after all costs and allows for year on year growth.

Often small businesses operate without measurable targets because they are using outdated management systems or products that simply do not manage enough of the business to produce accurate informative feedback. A modern SaaS product like Omono manages all aspect of the day to day operations, sales and purchasing therefore important KPIs can be reported on in an instant.

Omono’s online platform centers around a Dashboard module that instantly feeds back to the user performance against target for sales of the day, month and year. Omono takes this a step further by showing output performance for the same periods, output is equally as important as sales, these are the jobs you are actually invoicing and getting paid for.

Having access to this information regularly and easily allows you to quickly spot trends and prevent downturns by making strategic changes enabling sustainable growth the business desires and can control.

If you are not measuring your business performance or find it tough to find this information on your current system why not try Omono now for free.

If you are reading this for the first time you’re most likely new to Omono and undoubtedly will be asking what on earth is Omono?

Omono is the simple online business management system that has been designed to enable small business to operate in the cloud. Omono manages CRM, sales, purchasing, inventory, reporting and importantly the workflow knitting the entire business together!

The on demand nature of modern life and business has put increasing pressure on productivity.

Our vision has been to create an integrated SaaS solution for small business. The team have outdone themselves with a product we are delighted to introduce you to.

Omono loves small business and as a result the system has been designed with SME’s in mind. From conception it has been our mission to provide a viable management software solution to small business that removes administrative struggles which are often the barriers to growth.

Benefits of a cloud SaaS system like Omono are;

1. Low entry cost, set up fees and implementation charges
2. Improved security – think online banking!
3. An internet connection is all the infrastructure required
4. Ease of access to support, e.g. Omono’s in app live chat
5. Increased productivity, access your business anytime anywhere
6. No more paying for system updates

Once the right SaaS product has been found for your SME business the ROI can be immeasurable. As Omono is an integrated solution you will see a boost in sales, optimised purchasing, streamlined operations and great control of your inventory.

Omono launched with simplicity in mind not only throughout the powerful functions of the app but also the set up and payment. We’ve deliberately chosen one price structure from launch, no hidden fees, no paying for limited features – one amount per user per month for the entire app including all integrations!

Think the power of large scale ERP systems packaged in something simple that’s a joy to use anywhere anytime via the cloud and you have Omono. Please have a browse of our site, try a 30 day free trial or contact us if you would like to find out how Omono can help your business.