When does pruning stop and growth begin?

Some wise person once said that a business is a bit like a tree. If you are not growing, then you are dying.

When you think about it, it’s true. It is difficult to stand still in the one spot and keep holding on to what you’ve got. Before long, we will begin to notice competitors passing us by and we may then wonder what we could have done better.
 

For many businesses their life-blood is their customer base. It makes sense to look after your existing customers as there is no substitute for bad customer service. Providing great customer service results in happy customers who in turn are more likely to refer your business to other potential customers. Happy customers also buy more products and services.


In a recent survey by IDC commissioned by Vodafone, “80% of SME’s stated that improving customer relationships was one of the key challenges, with 81% of workers stating that customer service is a top priority”. Now more than ever, SME’s are looking to differentiate their businesses on customer service.


I would highly recommend reading Raving Fans if this topic is of interest to you.

Providing excellent customer service is one great way of growing your business. But the key to providing excellent customer service is having the right systems in-house to manage it.

Let me explain using a simple example:

Let’s just say that you sell food products to supermarkets……

You receive a call from your biggest customer to complain about a problem with a delivery, which never arrived but which was nevertheless invoiced to them. What’s more, the prices on the invoice were all incorrect and not as agreed. This customer has only been with us a few months and this is the second time that there has been a problem with the delivery.



Where do we start? We have a problem with despatch, accounts and sales (pricing). Here are a few quick suggestions…


1. Record the details of the issue so that you can acknowledge receipt of the query back to the customer.


2. Ensure that the call is allocated to the appropriate person/team/people within the company to deal with the customer query.


3. Record and track all communications around this call, so that at any stage, you can see what’s been happening with the query and you can re-assure the customer that their query is being addressed.


4. Have easy access the Sales Order, Despatch, Invoice and Pricing details to see where the problems lie.




In this scenario, there was a lack of “joined up thinking”.
Accounts, Sales & Despatch were not aware of what each other was doing. They may also not have been aware of the issue with a previous delivery.


Using software such as Sage 200 with a fully integrated Customer Care module will help you to log, track and monitor customer service queries, response times, type of queries etc. You will know which accounts are on-hold, what the despatch status is, what prices were quoted, what the balance on the account is and what the query/issue history is for a particular customer. You can also see a full communications history against the customer’s record.


If we find out that our quest to achieve excellence in customer service is being hindered by internal processes, specific departments or people, or communications not being shared throughout the company, then we can address the problem and monitor the results as we continue to strive for excellent customer service and ultimately business growth…..

Month End's made easy, by Brian Doherty

Do you have to produce management accounts quickly and for various stakeholders in various formats? Are you transcribing data from your accounts package to other systems or into excel spreadsheets? How long are you spending doing this task? Are you concerned that that the links in your spreadsheets may not be 100%?

Software systems such as Sage 200 offer a number of options to alleviate the pressure at Month End time. Sage 200 for example, uses a report category, attached to the nominal code, to build the Financial Statements. The Sage 200 Financial statements begin as a blank canvas and through an intelligent use of the report category, various Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet layouts can be produced.
It’s so easy to do and saves lots of time messing about with spreadsheets. You can produce reports such as:

1. month actual versus budget with a variance column.
2. Year actual versus budget with a variance column.
3. month on month analysis and comparisons.
4. prior year month/year to date versus current year month/year to date.
5. quarterly results can also be reported.
6. or any combination of the above.


The flexibility of Sage 200 means that you can either build your multiple financial layouts within Sage 200 or you can use the Business Intelligence module, which comes as standard with the software. This is a great tool which allows you to drag and drop the data into the format you require – similar to using a Pivot Table in Excel ®.

Why add extra pressure at month end time? Your financial software system should be there to make your life easier – not to add to your workload. You may find that the tools are already there, but maybe you haven’t asked “is there a better way?". It is worth looking into as it could save you a lot of valuable time.

The Importance of backing-up your data...

A nightmare scenario for an organisation is to realise in a disaster recovery situation that they have not been backing up their databases or that the data they are backing up is corrupt in some way.


This could lead to re-entering weeks or months of transactions and reconciling the data retrospectively. This is a very time consuming, tedious and costly exercise and I am sure that nobody would like to be in this situation.

Here are a few tips that you may wish to consider…..

1. Ask your Hardware/IT provider to ensure that the relevant databases are being backed up correctly.

2. For Sage 200/CRM, the SQL databases should be backed up using a SQL agent. A SQL agent should back up the data in the correct manner.

3. If you create a new database, ensure that this database is included in the scheduled back-up routine.

4. For software that is not using a SQL database (e.g. Sage 50, Line 100 and earlier versions of Sage MMS), I would recommend that your database files are included in your scheduled back-up routine. For Sage 50 users, I would always recommend that you still run the Sage 50 back-up routine from within the software in addition to the scheduled back-up.

5. In a recovery situation, you will need to revert back to the last valid back-up. I can’t tell you how many times we have come across situations where back-ups are missing or the data is corrupt or incomplete. My best advice is to create a test database and periodically restore a back-up of the database to test that the back-up actually worked.


We can offer this service if you would like us to test your restored data for you.


The important point to consider is how much risk you are putting your business in by not having proper back-up and test restore procedures in place. What would be the cost to your business if you needed to manually back-date transactions for 1 month, 2 months, 6 months etc….

My advice is not to delay – make sure your back-ups are healthy and that you are not leaving your business exposed in any way. A little careful planning can save a lot of headaches.