This summer Harley Grove (as a Draycir Reseller) is highlighting ways to tackle cash flow and credit management and key issues faced by all UK businesses.

We are supporting and promoting a series of guides (10 in all) , developed by the Institute of Credit Management (ICM) for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

This week we are concentrating on Guides 2 & 4: Invoicing & Treating Suppliers fairly.

Download Guide 3 here: Invoicing

Download Guide 4 here: Treating suppliers fairly

To subscribe for FREE to further guides, please complete the details below:

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Of course, if you would like further information on Credit Hound, Credit Guardian or Outsourcing your Credit Management, then get in touch with us at Harley Grove.

We have all heard about famous movie stars or musicians using a different name to the names they were born with (eg. Camille Javal, Allen Konigsberg, Reginald Dwight or Gary Webb) but we have all heard of the names they finally chose as they have stuck with them after changing.

Ok, so the answers were Brigitte Bardot, Woody Allen, Elton John and Gary Numan.

Working with Sage UK software is great but can sometimes be a tad confusing for clients and business partners alike because of the changes in names of their software packages. It would be great if the names once changed stayed the same (like the famous movie stars and musicians). Sage UK software would continue to be great business software but confusion over their names would be removed.

There is obviously some sense to Sage UK's "name-changing" decisions but really not easy to see by many, so thought it might be a good idea to provide a list of the different names that Sage UK have given to their various versions. The most recent "names" are those shown in bold.

Sage Line 50 Accountant is now Sage 50 Accounts

Sage Line 50 Accountant Plus is now Sage 50 Accounts Plus

Sage Line 50 Financial Controller is now Sage 50 Accounts Professional

Sage Line 100 was updated to Sage MMS then again to Sage 200

Sage 100 was a recently shelved "extended" Sage 50

The Sage Line 200 is a "cut-down" Sage 500

Sage Line 500 is now Sage 500

Sage 1000 is an extended Sage 500 (with Web front end)

Sage Personnel is now Sage 50HR

Then, we get to Sage UK's ACT! Range, which is even more confusing (and this is by starting at ACT! 2005 and not before) :

ACT! 2005, then went to ACT! 2006, then to ACT! by Sage 2007, then Sage 50 ACT! 2008, then ACT! by Sage 2009, then ACT! by Sage 2010 and is now, deep breath needed (!)

Sage ACT! 2011 Pro (ta da !!!) – but can be confused with ACT! Professional earlier naming convention (see below)

ACT! Professional 2005 and ACT! Professional for Workgroups 2005, then to ACT! 2006 Professional and ACT! 2006 Professional for Workgroups, then to ACT! by Sage 2007 Premium (EX Edition) OR ACT! by Sage 2007 Premium (ST Edition), then Sage 50 ACT! 2008 Premium (EX Edition) OR Sage 50 ACT! 2008 Premium (ST Edition), then ACT! by Sage 2009 Premium (EX Edition) OR ACT! by Sage 2009 Premium (ST Edition), then ACT! by Sage Premium 2010 and is now, even deeper breath needed (!)

Sage ACT! Premium 2011 (hurrah !)

So, hopefully, Sage UK will now leave the names of their software alone but there will more than likely be more changes in the future (just remember the different "upgraded" names that Microsoft have given to their operating systems alone and you sort of get the idea).

Harley Grove are able to help you decide which is the correct software for your business (not just Sage UK software). If you would like to have an informal chat to discuss your business needs, please do not hesitate in contacting us.

1. Recycle – every town has a local recycling point and almost anything can be recycled. Keep a separate bin in the kitchen for tins and milk bottles. Keep and recycle all non-confidential paper. If you don’t know where your local recycling sites are then contact your local council – many will offer to come and collect your recycling on a weekly basis.

2. Turn off your PCs – sounds simple but I bet not everyone in your office is doing it. Switch them off and shut them down at night, don’t leave them on standby as this still uses electricity.

3. Only switch the printer on when you need it – you don’t need the printer all day every day so keep it switched off and only power it up when you need to. It’s the little things like this that keep your electric bills down.

4. Switch the fax machine off (do you still have one?!) – If you are still retro enough to have a fax machine, then keep it off – how many faxes do you receive in a week? One or two? More than likely – you know when they’re going to come through – last minute changes that can’t be described over the phone or a purchase order being sent through. Or just simply ask the clients that like to send you info via fax to drop you an email or a call first to let you know, so you can pop it on, could save you a hoard of cash over a period of time.

5. Use a paperless filing system – stop keeping records on paper, use a paperless filing system to store information on your computer. This is more secure, tidier and a million times more economical than keeping realms of paper stacked around the office. Ask your clients if they still want to receive purchase orders or invoices via post – many of them may be operating paperlessly and are happy to receive a PDF version of the document – this is quicker as well – no need to wait for Royal Snail to get it to your front door!!

6. Wear a jumper!! – Don’t feel tempted just to put the heaters on because you got an Autumnal chill, you wouldn’t do it in your house would you? Just because your employer is footing the bill, don’t exploit it – take a jumper with you to work and help him save some money. After all, if he saves enough – some of the benefits may be coming your way!

7. Play the radio from a PC – one less thing plugged into the wall leads to lower electricity bills.

It's sometimes the little things that count, and going green needn't take all that much effort! How do you make your office 'green'?

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photo credit: Paul Keller

Are you getting totally fed up with the uncertainty of when the next postal strike will be happening ? It's only a matter of time, surely ?

Worried that your important documents won't reach your customers, suppliers and other business contacts ?

Not getting paid because your invoices to your customers have been lost in the post or caught in the backlog ?

Well, don't fear, Spindle Professional software  is here to Save the Day !!! Spindle Professional enables all of your documents, be they invoices, statements, sales information, mail merges etc… to be emailed, faxed, printed, electronically archived into a location of your choice, automatically attached to your CRM software*, pre-indexed and uploaded to Microsoft Sharepoint etc…….. The best part of all this is that not only can all of the above actions be completed by just clicking to print ONCE but also, all of your documents can be easily branded with your company image, thus saving you the cost of buying loads of pre-printed stationery. All of your documents then look professional but also very consistent across the whole business. Spindle Professional saves you lots of time and, in many cases, storage space, and therefore saves you what could amount to lots of money. We at Harley Grove have not found any software that Spindle Professional will not work with and these include every Sage software package (from any of the accounts packages to manufacturing and CRM etc …), all of the Microsoft software packages (including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Accounting software etc…), Sun Accounts, SAP Business One, together with many lesser known software packages. We at Harley Grove are 95% sure that if you use software that currently prints to a Microsoft Windows printer, then that software will work with Spindle Professional. We have loads of examples of software that we have personally implemented with Spindle Professional.

Don't just take our word for it ; Spindle Professional has just been awarded the prestigious WINNER prize in the Paperless Office Software Category of The Software Satisfaction Awards 2009. So…. if you want to beat the postal strike and save even more money for your business, get in contact with us at Harley Grove on 0845 8800767 or visit our website at www.harleygrove.co.uk  for more information.

* Currently automatically attaches to the following CRM software: ACT! , Sales Logix, Sage CRM; more to come !!!

Since the last Tips for …. blog, we have found and started to use a few further Twitter tools and applications that further enhance the Twitter experience.

Recently, Harley Grove attended a local meeting of other Twitter users (“tweeple”). The meeting was very useful in that it meant that the users met face-to-face and exchanged ideas and tips of how they use Twitter. Harley Grove have been looking into finding and setting up similar meetings (“tweetups”) and events and came across Twtvite, which is a great event management tool to use with Twitter. You are able to locate tweetups or create your own, show a map of its location, add to your calendar, manage waiting lists if event full etc…

Twitter is great and one of the great things about it is that you are restricted to 140 characters so you have to get your message across in a clear and concise way. However, there are times when you would like to send longer messages and don’t want to be tied down to the 140 characters such as when you need to provide customer support. This is where twtlong comes into its own as it allows longer tweets and creates a “bridge” between the normal tweets and a blog; sort of a “midi-blog”. You are also able to add photos, videos etc…

Need to let everyone know about Special Offers that you are currently running ? Give twtQpon a try as it enables you to produce money-off coupons to distribute via Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. We are about to use it to promote special discounts against some of our services.

When Harley Grove was having its website re-designed, we thought we would ask other tweeple for their feedback on how they thought it was looking. So… we used twtpoll to ask them and we collated the answers using this very useful Twitter application that allows you to create simple online polls to use with Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

Harley Grove have now updated their status quite a bit and, although we haven’t got loads of Followers and don’t Follow many other tweeple, it would be a real pain to have to set it all up again and impossible to remember what we tweeted about some time ago. So…we looked into being able to take a backup of all of our Followers, people that we Follow and all of the tweets that we have created. Tweetake covers all of this and makes sure that you have this backup of your Twitter experience. However, it only currently takes care of those users with less than 1000 followers so use Twittersafe if you have more than 1000 followers.

Twitter is great for direct messaging (DM) to and from your Twitter Followers and that your DMs are sent to you by email. Yes, this is great, but when you want to reply to these DMs when you have been notified by email messages, it’s a real pain because you then have to go into your Twitter client and then reply from there. Well, not any more as you can now use Topify to reply via email. This saves loads of time and although you need to sign up for a free Topify email address, we have found this very useful.

Anyway, we hope that we have given you some more useful ideas and we hope that these tips  will help you gain more from Twitter. We are novices but if you really want some expert Twitter information then we would strongly recommend @NikkiPilkington ‘s TweetMentor Twitter training.

Finally, the most IMPORTANT point (if you are not already) :

Well, Harley Grove are looking to help your business to make the most of what it already has and to, where applicable, advise about specific software that will pay for itself very quickly and help you to be more efficient both now and in the future.

One of the first areas that you could improve upon is to make sure that you are gaining as much as is possible from your existing acounting and CRM software. Many companies only utilise a small percentage of the software’s features and it stands to reason that they will therefore only gain a small percentage of the benefits that could be achieved.

Harley Grove are able to provide dedicated on-to-one training for many business software packages (if there is a package that we don’t know about we’ll tell you directly but the chances are that we will have a contact that does know). Where time and cost is an issue, you could consider online training videos.

Many businesses send out loads of documents every day by “snailmail”. Even when they do send documents by email, it is sometimes a long-winded process (ie. separate those to email from those to post or fax, then actually post, email or fax them, separately scan each of them to .pdf, manually attach each of them to CRM or document storage etc….; the list of timewasting and menial operations could go on and on).

Harley Grove are able to help make these processes be completed with minimal effort and cost and all at the same time thus saving you loads of MONEY and TIME. The amount of wasted paper that you would normally print would be drastically reduced and therefore you would be doing your bit to save a little bit of the ENVIRONMENT. It’s a WIN WIN situation and a “no-brainer”.

Many businesses are working smarter and Harley Grove are able to help YOU do that.

For more information of how Harley Grove can help YOU save TIME, SPACE, MONEY and the ENVIRONMENT, contact us here.

However, we found it pretty useless just using the main Twitter interface as we were unable to group the incoming tweets into "that looks interesting" or "what a load of rubbish" categories.  So, once we got the hang of using Twitter itself, we started looking around for some alternative desktop client applications. Well, we only have one Twitter account so we decided upon TweetDeck (if we had had more than one user account, perhaps we would have looked further into other desktop client applications such as Seesmic). We find TweetDeck to be the most user-friendly desktop Twitter client application and it makes it easy to monitor tweets and to group them in a meaningful and useful way. It also has a built in web address shortener which we have found invaluable as in Twitter you are restricted to tweets of up to 140 characters and no more !!! By the time you have added perhaps a long web address to a tweet, you soon run out of characters.

One of the reasons that some people give for not using Twitter is that it "takes too much time" or "I'm always out of the office". Well, these were the scenarios that, to be honest, we were particularly bothered about. We then found SocialOomph and this solved the problem (and then some !) as it allows you to schedule tweets to be sent out on a regular basis as and when you want (every hour if you want). The beauty of it is that you are able to create a subject to tweet about and then create several different ways in which to say anything about the subject; this is then randomised as the tweet "hits" its scheduled time.

The next "problem" to resolve was that of being able to access Twitter whilst away from the office on our mobiles. Well, the iPhone mobile clients seem great to us but we don't have iPhones; we have Blackberry Storms. So, first of all we downloaded and used TwitterBerry for a while, until ÜberTwitter was released and this is the mobile client that we now use as, in our opinion, it is so much better and has some really great extra features over those found in Twitterberry. We take photos with our Blackberry Storms and upload from within Ubertwitter and this works a treat. We also decided to try and save ourselves some time by using an add-on to auto-follow those twitter users that followed us and to send an automatic message to them. Some readers might think that this is maybe too impersonal but if you don't have enough hours in the day but still want to send a message to new followers then we consider this to be the best next thing to writing individual messages of thanks. Also, because we use SocialOomph for this as well, the "Thanks for following me" message changes each time automatically and therefore the messages can be really polite each time.

We have found it great to gain more Twitter followers but to be honest we would rather have a few quality followers than thousands of followers who are not really interested in what we have to say; some Twitter users just want to gain as many followers as they can themselves without really caring about the person they might temporarily follow. For this reason, we periodically go through all of the Twitter Users that we are following and also those that are following us and complete a block unfollow of those that we are not interested in following any longer. We currently use TwitterKarma to do this and this seems quite effective. We also use UnTweeps which seems to work a little different than TwitterKarma in that it monitors those Twitter users that you are following that have not created any tweets for some time and are most likely to have left Twitter entirely.

We have also recently come across TwitterForBusyPeople and this is great for looking at all of the people you are following and just seeing their most recent tweets; you can always then look at their other tweets if you have time.

If you are out of the office quite a lot as we are, then it is probably very important that you don't miss out on potential opportunities that might appear within Twitter users (tweeple) tweets. We particularly want to know if anyone mentions any of the software packages that we supply, implement, train and support so that we could offer our help and, if completely honest, hope to make a later sale to them of our services. Well, that is where TweetBeep has helped as if any of the keywords that we specify is tweeted anywhere in the world, we get an email alert to let us know that it has been mentioned and we then choose whether to start the dialogue with that Twitter user and perhaps to start following them.

Anyway, we hope that we have given you some basic ideas and we hope that these tips (many more to come in the future) will help you gain more from Twitter. We are novices but if you really want some expert Twitter information then we would strongly recommend @NikkiPilkington 's TweetMentor Twitter training.

Finally, the most IMPORTANT point (if you are not already) :