Cloud News – 6 December 2011
Paperless business with FreshBooks and Podio
FreshBooks recently interviewed Francois Botha, a successful business owner in Cape Town. This ambitious man completely manages both his companies in the cloud, realizing everybody’s dream of a paperless office.
Francois uses Podio for online collaboration and project management with the combination of FreshBooks to manage his invoicing. Once he started using these cloud application, he was able to severely cut down on costs by eliminating the use of paper and he didn’t have the need to employ someone to manage and make sense of all the paperwork; he is now able to spend more of his time on the essential creative side of his businesses.
South Africans are very entrepreneurial and very true to that notion, Francois says that he “lives by Gandhi and learns by Google”. He has three tips that he enjoyed sharing with other business owners:
• Fake it till you make it
• Pick your clients, don’t wait for them to pick you
• Keep calm & carry on
To learn more about how Francois made this all work, register here to join the webinar that FreshBooks is hosting with Podio and Francois on December 6th @ 8am PST / 5pm CET.
icomplete reviewed – integration with Answer-4U
icomplete integrates telecoms and business applications together in-one-place to help small businesses stay in control and be more productive as a team. You can track your contacts, leads and all the people you do business with by using icomplete’s contacts database without the help of the IT guy.
Andrew Reed at Hugh Spencer has been using icomplete CRM and according to their latest blog, he spent a long time looking for decent cloud based CRM system that integrated all customer communications in one place. After testing and comparing many packages, he found icomplete to be the only one that complied with all his needs, and at a very reasonable price.
Another happy customer is Ian Parry at Trulawn. They created a bespoke sales pipeline report for him to track his sales and revenues in real-time and therefore met his need for a manageable system where his entire sales team could share information. Ian says that the system is simple to use, integrates effectively with our website and helps Trulawn manage our relationships in cost effective and timely manner.
icomplete also announced that they have joined forces with Answer-4U, a 24/7 Call Answering Service as an added feature to their existing range of business support.
Payment Issues
I read an interesting article on the Xero Blog posted by Paul Wallbank, a leading online business expert based in Australia. The topic was on dealing with customers that are bad payers.
Unfortunately payment issues are a fact of life in business as not all clients will pay when their bills are due; some are just deadbeat customers and sometimes there are legitimate reasons and excusable reason for late payment.
In this post Paul talks about all the excuses he has heard during his years as a business owner. It is important to keep track of when bills invoices are due and immediately following up on payments when the due date has passed.
Identify your problem customers as early as possible by monitoring all payments and thereby enabling yourself to keep your company’s exposure to financial problems to a minimum.
Category: News & announcements
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maria jose
