Go digital
Business Tips
Great features in Saasu.com
Aug 29th
Accounting can be a tedious and time consuming task but we just discovered that Saasu.com can eliminate some of the most boring and repetative tasks. One of them is the bank feed feature. This allows the system to connect to your bank to download all the transactions. This means you don’t have to export or import your transactions manually. Once you import the transactions all you have to do is allocate it to a transaction.
But that’s not all, the system also has another feature called Rules. The system can automatically allocate each transaction to a particular account based on a certain criteria.
To do this login in and click the Automate tab:
Click More and then select Fast Coding View:
Once you’re in the Fast Coding View select the transaction you want to create a rule on and click the wheel:
Enter the account the rule will allocate the account to:
And that’s it. You’ve created a rule. So basically, the rule will check to see if the transaction contains certain text and then it will allocate to the account. To check existing rule you will need to click Bank Feed Rules:
How awesome is that!!! This is a well deserved Accounting application for any type of businesses. Well done.
Attached Files:
digitalsignageblog.com – best investment we ever made
Mar 14th
A few years ago when we purchased the domain name – digitalsignageblog.com we didn’t really realise that we purchased a gold mine. It is probably one of the best investment we ever made for the company. When we first started the business in the digital signage industry we didn’t have a clue as to what this new technology was called. It was just by sheer luck that one day we searched for what domains were available relating to digital signage and it so happened that the digitalsignageblog.com domain name was available – someone probably forgot to renew it. So luck was on our side and we immediately purchased the domain. Now we believe it’s worth something – not in terms of money value but in terms of content and leads. I strongly believe that the site has generate leads for the company, especially by being sponsors for each of the articles.
What we learnt from this is that if you have a website you’re thinking of buying, just buy it before someone else does.
Fastest growing advertising mediums
Jan 22nd
It has been brought to our attention that online digital advertising (this includes mobile phone, iPad, Internet websites) and digital signage are the fastest growing mediums compared to the traditional TV, Radio, Newspaper and Magazines – digital content is being displayed everywhere. Why? Because it’s easy to just distribute digital content.
Technology has dramatically changed our lives and if you’re in the marketing industry you would have also noticed the shift in the way a business realigns itself with technology. More businesses are now building an online presence and have realised that even though they have a website, they may not have the exposure on search engines to increase the visitor hits to their websites.
For advertise me, most of our clients and leads are from the website and we rely on search engines for our marketing strategy. May be we’ve been lucky… or maybe not. From the beginning, it was one of our main goals to be at the top of the search engines for quite a number of search terms such as digital signage, digital advertising etc.
So we’ve leveraged our online Internet presence to market another great advertising medium called “digital signage”. Digital Screens are appearing everywhere and I can’t stress how important it is to use this medium to advertise your products, sales or even to engage customers to walk into your store.
Yes, some people are skeptical about the ROI but there’s many case studies out there that proves otherwise. The question you should be thinking is “Why fall behind your competitors when everyone else is doing it?”.
At Advertise Me, we’re all about finding innovative ways to advertise YOUR business. One of the products we’ve built is a website called squeak.com.au – you basically list your sales online and people searching for sales will find it.
Lodge your ATO BAS statements online
Nov 1st
I’m not sure why we didn’t do this years ago but just recently we registered for an AUSkey so we can lodge the ATO BAS statements online. Coming from an IT background this is pretty embarrassing especially when we tell our clients to use technology to save paper and the environment. NOTE: that one of the benefits if you lodge your BAS statements online you also receive a 14 day extension from the due date.
So today we took the plunge and requested for an AUSkey – we requested one before but after reinstalling our main PC, the AUSkey was no longer available. The process of requesting an AUSkey is pretty straight forward, you register online and then you call up the Customer Support centre to verify your details (that’s what happened to us). Once your request is approved you receive an email to download the AUSkey software. For some reason, it says that it doesn’t seem to be compatible with some version of Firefox but using version 3.6.11 worked fine for me.
Once you install the software on the PC and visit the ATO website and click Login under the portal section, click on business portal and select the AUSkey certificate. You need to make sure you have Javascript enabled. You will also need to make sure you download the actual AUSkey – you can request this from your administrator.
After installing the AUSkey you can then attempt to login to the portal and you will see a screen like below. Select your AUSkey and then enter your password. When you login to the ATO site you can lodge your BAS statement.
Attached Files:
ATO Business portalATO Business portal
Advertise Me Business Card
Oct 27th
In one of our previous posts we gave our readers some pointers about company business cards – read the post here. Today, we’ve decided to show you our current business card design. Keep in mind we’ve been through about 3-4 revisions and it’s still not perfect.
- advertise me Business Card Front
- Advertise Me Business Card Back
As you can see, our design is professional and clean. On the back you’ll notice a QR code – if your phone supports it scan it and see where it will take you.
The only thing that we’ll probably change next time round, is the black text on the back. When printed, you can hardly read the black text because of the blue background.
Attached Files:
- advertise me business card front
advertise me business card front
- advertise me business card back
Comparing Top Online Accounting Software Packages
Oct 25th
Accounting and bookkeeping are two important aspects of running any type of business, whether its a small retail store or a large corporation. Any business owner knows that these tasks can become a painful experience and if not managed correctly the tax man may end up knocking on your door.
We recently were advised by our accountant that we should invest in an accounting software tool so we can better track our expenses and project future financial growth of the company. There are many off the shelf accounting software products on the market. If you walk down to Office Works or search online, you will find software packages that could either be affordable or just too expensive. Some are easy to use whilst others are just too complex but to be honest with you, there isn’t a perfect product out there that does exactly what you want. Every user and business has different processes so a one size fits all approach to accounting software cannot be used here, but what I can say is that if you have basic accounting requirements then you may be in luck. What I’ve done is compared and detailed some of these software packages so we could make a suitable decision of which product we should be using and hopefully at the same time we can also help our readers find a solution that meets their needs. We decided that using a SaaS (Software as a Service) online package would be the most cost effective solution since you are not required to pay extra for software upgrades – everything is done online. Here’s our list, it’s not the most comprehensive but it’s a start (keep in mind we compared product versions that had similar benefits and costed roughly the same):
| Software Package | 
|
|
|
|
Zoho Invoicing (premium) |
|
| Price | AU$25 per month (includes GST) +11c for each bank transaction over 100 | US$29 | AU$25 per month (min 3 months) 12 months gets 1 month free | US$29.95 per month | US$25 per month | US$20 per month |
| Number of accounts | Unlimited | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Number of users | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | N/A – 1 for each additional account | 3 + US$5 per additional users | Unlimited |
| Contacts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Number of Invoices and expenses | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | 500 | Unlimited |
| Link Bank accounts | Yes – unlimited | 20 reconciled bank statements per month | Yes – beta test | Don’t think so | No | No |
| Support | Yes – unlimited | Yes – unlimited | Email only | Customer Support Mon-Fri / 9am-6pm ET | Yes | Yes – unlimited |
| Backup | Yes – data is safe and backed up | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free Trial | Yes – 30 days | Yes – lets you raise a maximum of five new invoices and reconcile 50 bank statement lines. The trial is also limited to a maximum period of 180 days. | Yes – 20 Transactions per month | No – 30 day money back guarantee | Yes – 5 invoices per month, 2 users | Yes – 30 days |
| Mobile access | Not sure | iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile | Not sure | Yes, iphone | Not sure | No |
| Payroll | No | No | 25 employees | No | No | No |
| Other Features | accept credit card payment, invoice workflow status, resend invoices, API support, multi-currency | multi-currency, point of sale hardware + software, items and inventory, connectors, CRM/Activities, time based timesheet, inventory, ebay connector | access online payments, Timesheets, Document Sharing, Support Ticketing | Remove Zoho logo from outgoing emails | UK Based company (not ideal for Australia), timesheet, |
| Number of accounts | Unlimited |
Now based on the above comparison we decided to trial the SaaSu (pro) package.
Attached Files:
Advertise Me Shirts – advertising on the go
Oct 23rd
One of the best and most affordable ways to promote and advertise your business whilst in public areas is to wear a company business shirt. No matter where you go, you will be exposing your business so why not do it.
What’s interesting is that one guy in the US is making a living just by wearing other people’s t-shirts and promoting their business – in fact he makes roughly US$84,000. That’s a pretty good figure. For our company, we have a blue polo shirt that has our company logo at the front and back (the back being bigger). We are also looking at using shirts with small screens for digital advertising but for now here is a photo of our current company shirt:
Attached Files:
Australian Dollar Hits Parity – great time to import goods
Oct 16th
Yes it’s true, the Australian dollar hit parity overnight and it is the first time to do so since 1983. What does this mean for businesses? We’ll it’s a great time to import your products from overseas – this includes the Asian countries that use the US dollar. Importing goods when the AU dollar is high basically means more profit for your business unless you pass the savings to your client.
There are predictions that the Australia dollar might even go higher than the US but there is some speculation this will impact on our export industry especially since the cost of the import goods are a lot cheaper.
For us, we’re looking at stocking more digital signage equipment from overseas – the only downside is whether there’s the demand. How are you taking advantage of this situation? Let us know.
Attached Files:
- australian money
australian money
DHL freight company for importing from overseas
Oct 9th
I was really impressed with the DHL service when importing several parcels from Taiwan to Australia. The express door to door service was timely – it only took approx 3 days and DHL took care of all the importing and custom clearance paperwork. We have also used other freight companies in the past but DHL stood out because of the cost and service factor. Once you open up an account with DHL all you have to do is include the account number in the DHL pickup and then everything else is taken care for you. What’s most impressive is the tracking – you can basically receive email or SMS alerts at different stages of the delivery. Great work DHL, we’ll use you again.
Attached Files:
- DHL website
DHL website
