Bookkeeping Business Advice: Put Value to Your Time with Zero Dollar Checks

By: Laurie O'Neil

In the last bookkeeping business advice article, we agreed that tracking your time with QuickBooks Timesheets or QuickBooks Pro Timer is the first step to becoming successful in your bookkeeping business. When you start tracking all of your daily time – and detailing what you did in the "note" section of the timesheet - it is easier to put value to your time.

In my own QuickBooks file, I set my own business mentoring company up as a customer with sub-accounts. Some of those sub-accounts are Marketing, Paid Time Off, Education, Administration Time, Letters/Contracts and Bookkeeping – to use when I work on my own company's bookkeeping. Breaking it out this way has helped me with my hiring process by calculating the administrative cost to run my company. It has helped me determine how many new clients I can take on, and the value of my unpaid time.

If you are an individual bookkeeper like many of my business mentoring clients, you can enable the timesheets in QuickBooks and use them to keep track of your time and run reports. If you have more than one person in the office, as in my firm, use the QuickBooks Time Tracker, which comes on your QuickBooks Installation CD.

So now what do you do with the information after it is entered? How many of you actually know what your profitability is per client? One of the common practices that I see as a bookkeeping business coach is bookkeeping service owners do not attach a value to their time. Most bookkeeping business owners are 'dba's or 'LLC's. As you know, owners of these types of business do not take paychecks, they take draws. So how do you put the value to your time?

Before we get started setting this up in QuickBooks, you need to think of how much money you want to make this year in your bookkeeping service business and break it down to an hourly rate. Then you want to set yourself up as a vendor in the list and set a rate and code in the item field for each service you provide. Next, link the expense side to a payroll account or an owner's wage account.

From this window in QuickBooks create a check and allow it to pull your time from your timesheets. If you notice that all the details post to the "item" tab, just keep in mind that we are not going to pay this entire amount.

Next click on the "expense" tab and post a negative dollar amount to the payroll account. Save and close the transaction. You have now put value to your time with a zero dollar check.

Now, when you run your 'Job Profitability Summary' you have actual cost for your time and you can see if your margins are within 70% of what you billed. If they are not, your pricing is not high enough. I tell my business mentoring clients to always keep in mind that 1/3 of cost goes to overhead, 1/3 of cost goes toward direct cost and the remainder 1/3 goes to the owner.

By using QuickBooks, bookkeeping service owners can put a value to their time, analyze their pricing and manage their time more efficiently.

Stay tuned. In the next bookkeeping business coaching article we will go over how to streamline your invoicing process by pulling data from your time records.

About The Author--Laurie O'Neil is the co-founder of The Bookkeeper's Referral Network Inc., the place where business meets great bookkeepers. To get your copy of a free special report, The 9 Disastrous Mistakes Most Freelance Bookkeeper's Make in Business (and How You Can Avoid Them!), visit www.bkpr-network.com

Miami annual International Wine Fair

By: Catherine Gliddon

A very popular exhibition in Florida every year, the Annual Miami International Wine Fair is a three-day event which is held at Florida's largest venue, the Miami Beach Convention Centre. Miami Beach Convention Centre has been home to some large exhibitions and fairs and this event is popular both with novice wine lovers as well as connoisseurs of wine.

The Annual Miami International Wine Fair will, in its seventh year this year, showcases a huge variety of wines from around the world featuring some of the finest qualities of wine that are sure to leave guests impressed. Covering almost 65,000 square feet of exhibit space, the International Wine Fair is a grand event which will offer a chance to explore almost 1,200 choices of assorted wines collected from different corners of the world.

The Wine Fair can be easily accessed by its global exhibitors, sommeliers, connoisseurs and novice aficionados via the Miami International Airport (MIA). While the MIA is the United States' third largest International airport catering to over 35 million passengers annually, the Miami regions are also served by airports like the Kendall-Tamiami, Opa-Locka and the Fort Lauderdale- Hollywood International Airports, located in fair proximity to the venue.

With an efficient public transport system including the Metrorail, Tri-Rail, Metromover and local buses which operate throughout Miami with many stops near the Convention Centre, transportation in and around the city is not a matter of concern. Miami is not just a global city known for its rapid growth in various fields like art and commerce but is also a favourite tourist spot offering visitors a huge range of options when it comes to accommodation. For accommodation facilities, you an choose from affordable budget-friendly hotel rooms and guesthouses to luxurious and sophisticated five-star suites, Miami offers a whole range of options playing the perfect host to guests from around the world.

The Miami International Wine Fair provides both exhibitors as well as visitors with a huge platform where wine producers and distributors can promote their best quality drinks and wine lovers can revel in the variety of global tastes brought together only for their pleasure. The Fair gives distributors a chance to explore and build new markets as well as providing them an opportunity to have a direct relationship with customers.

The highlights of the Wine Fair are not just the comparative tastings of legendary wines from Spain and the rest of the world but also its VIP Buyers Program, a matchmaking event which brings together leading wine importers and buyers like Charmer Sunbelt and Southern Wine 8 Spirits with qualified hand-picked wineries from around the world, giving both an opportunity to meet their needs through the best available sources.

Article Source: http://www.new.citynewslive.com

Catherine writes about Exhibition Stands sales and Exhibitions News.

Refusing Clients

By: Tashword

When you run a small business, especially in the early days, you grab every client you can. But is that really the best tactic for your business?

Are there bad clients?

As much as most of us have faith in people, there are customers who will make your life difficult and may even cost you more than you earn.

Jackie asked me for a quote to prepare a product catalogue for her. As my quote was out of her budget I gave her a lower price to just prepare the text so she could do the formatting herself. I spent more time on this project than I had expected because Jackie questioned every little details and kept returning the text in tables.

Finally, the project was finished and Jackie complained that it wasn’t formatted and wouldn’t pay her bill. I later found out that Jackie did similar things with her web designer, only paying an invoice when she wanted something else done to her site.

I would love to say that Jackie is the only bad customer, but the reality is that most businesses will find their own Jackie over time.

Aren’t bad customers the price of doing business?

Bad customers don’t treat with you with respect and are the most likely to pay bills late. They are demanding and therefore take up more of your time than is reasonable of expected in your quote.

They won’t acknowledge any extras you do for them – they will take them for granted, basically, and probably won’t give you any word of mouth referrals later either.

Basically, these customers will use up your time and patience without paying for it.

Compare this to good customers who respect you and your time, and pay you promptly.

Your time and expertise are better spent on the good customers, for the sake of your profits and your enjoyment of doing business.

Choosing your customers

After a while, it is easier to spot those clients who may be difficult to deal with. It may be their tone of voice on the phone, the attention to detail before you even prepare a quote, the look they give you as they enter your shop or that they try to negotiate a special deal.

Once you have spotted a bad customer, what do you do about it?

Obviously it is important to be polite and use good customer service to everyone who contacts your business. But that doesn’t mean you have to accept every client nor accept any rudeness or abuse.

You need to have faith that you will attract other customers so that you don’t have to accept them all to make money. And you need to respect yourself and your staff enough to protect yourselves from clients who make work unpleasant.

How do I say no to a client?

Above all, stay polite and respectful when dealing with unpleasant customers. You can be form and refuse to listen to abuse, but do it politely.

You can just say “no, we can’t help you” or you can choose to give a reason.

Article Source: http://www.therepozitory.com.au

Tash Hughes is a professional writer and co-owner of www.savetimeonline.com.au, a unique showcase of Australian websites. Save Time Online is free to use and includes tips and links on various topics such as health, family, career, education, business, running web sites, house, garden, books and parenting.

Outsourcing in Recent Recession Time

By: Rickie Williams

Some of my ITance friends expressed their fear regarding to the impact of the recent economical recessions over Indian economy and particularly outsourcing industry. They have view of negative impacts but I posses some converse view as I believe that a recession is actually a great time to start a new venture. Take advantage of the lack of froth now, when talent is available, resources are cheap, and you can hear yourself. In fact whenever there's a downturn people outsource more, not less. Organizations want to take costs out wherever they can.

What happens to the host countries where outsourced work is going?

Such countries show the downing trends in growth of salary, cost of living, real estate prices etc. These all make cheaper the outsourcing services for offshore companies for instance from US, UK etc. Additionally Recent currency rate further elevate profit margin for offshore companies.

Fundamentally the outsource market is strong and it will not change due to this financial crisis. Western companies are started viewing India as a strategic place to not only outsource higher-value research work, product design etc, but also to sell their own products and services. In the long-term once the dust settles in the US financial market, Indian IT and BPO companies will be in good position to attract more outsource work from the US businesses.

Recent trends of Indian outsourcing industry suggests a strategic shift from low cost services to higher valued KPO like services. This kind of trend will continue and Indian outsourcing industry will add new dimensions to the outsourcing market.

Now a day Indian offshore software and web development companies shows their smartness in dealing the recent recessions. They kept their expenses as such and higher the working time of their staff, higher the quality of out put and reduce the out put time.

Among such high quality services offering companies Perception System is one. The portfolio of Perception System depicts a reliable out put with reasonable prices.