Blog

Many complex moving parts are involved in operating a profitable company, but at its core, business success hinges on just one thing: customer relationships. Which is why customer relationship management (CRM) software is vital for entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses. A CRM solution helps your company nurture and improve customer relationships by maintaining centralized data on all your leads and existing clients. With access to a history of customer…  Read more

Business dashboards are a valuable business intelligence tool, offering an “at-a-glance” big picture view of a company’s performance. Some business owners use a dashboard to track KPIs relevant to just one aspect of their business, such as sales growth, marketing, or financial data. Others rely on an executive dashboard for an overview of data from various sources (e.g. their accounting software, CRM tools, and website analytics). The great advantage of…  Read more

Despite only using Smart Payroll for 5 months now, I have personally found it not only easy to use but really useful and efficient to use compared to other online payroll systems. Let’s be honest, no one really likes to worry about payroll and why should you? Using Smart Payroll has been a breeze and has made the worry go away. By cutting down the time spent on processing payments,…  Read more

Xero has introduced payroll functionality into its “standard” and “large” plans. This means that you can now calculate staff pays, PAYE etc and prepare your PAYE returns from within Xero. Find more information on Xero Payroll here. We still like the increased levels of automation from Smartpayroll. We can help with the implementation of either of these options – or else manage your payroll for you. Contact us to discuss…  Read more

We believe that storing a copy of your receipts and invoices electronically in Xero is the best and most efficient way to do the business filing for most organisations. There are many benefits to this – not just that you can do something else with the space where the filing cabinet went! Read more about document storage using Xero Files here. For those organisations who have a lot of invoices or…  Read more

As dedicated teleworkers, we are always interested to try out new ways of communicating without the pain and time cost of a commute. So when Google replaced its “talk” products with “hangouts” for video calling we were keen to take a look. Despite being pretty happy with skype, we thought we would try out using “hangouts” to do the same things. So what did we think? Hangouts is a very…  Read more

There have been some articles in the news media recently dedicated to the rise of “teleworking”. To me the term already seems out of date as it seems to refer to the use of a telephone (invented around 1876) when today it is much more likely that internet technology will be used. According to Wikipedia, the term telework was coined in 1973, which will explain its old fashioned sound. However…  Read more

Recent advances in small business accounting software are changing the way that accountants are able to interact with their clients. Using online or “cloud” based accounting software such as Xero gives accountants the opportunity to work with their clients on a regular basis, rather than just collecting records from businesses and preparing annual accounts after year end (as an aside, Xero is fast becoming a New Zealand success story which…  Read more

For those who need more functionality than a cashbook system, the next step up in the off-the-shelf software market for business is the simple general ledger system. Typically these systems can keep track of accounts receivable (so you can use them for invoicing your customers), accounts payable (so that you can keep track of who you owe money to and when it is due) as well as all transactions that…  Read more