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I can’t believe this is the last day of September. It came and went really fast. I hope you had a chance to get outside to enjoy the weather and to get reenergized within your business. This month I shared tips and tools that can help to restore focus in your life. I also shared how you can zap those energy vampires that are taking up your precious time. I wish you peace and harmony in your business.
Keep IT Sunny!
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I am so busy these days and I am sure you are too. I am always looking for apps and life hacks to make things more manageable. Here are a few that I stumbled upon that I use:
The Calm App - I use this app faithfully at night to help wind down my mind and body. It really works.
Teamwork PM - This is my go-to project management tool for running my business in the cloud.
Chill Background Music - I love listening to Aura Relax on Youtube and Hawaiian Cafe. It keeps me calm and focused on the task at hand.
I hope these tools help you to create more balance in your business and life.
Keep IT Sunny!
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Halloween is just around the corner and is a fun time of the year to get dressed up in costumes to take on an alternate persona. The ghosts, goblins and vampire trick or treaters will be out to see how much candy they can grab to put into their baskets. In our business there are so many things to distract us from doing what we love with excellence like busy messaging systems like Slack pinging all the time to incessant Zoom meetings that seem to come one after another. The tools we use to do business like Gmail or online apps can be the source of draining our energy little by little.
What Can We Do?
I don’t have all the answers to that question but I do have a few tips below that I have implemented that seem to be working:
Email - I respond to emails within 24 hours at a set time three times per day at 8 am, 12 pm & 3 pm. This system keeps me organized and focused on the work at hand.
Cell Phone Distractions - I disabled the email notifications and all work-related notifications on my phone so that when I am done working for the day I can truly be done. I also move my phone away from my work desk during the day when I am working and make a point to check it during a set time so that I don’t miss any important phone calls.
Social Media - I check my social media during the same timeframe that I check my email so that I can stay on top of what is going on.
Meetings - I am not a fan of meetings just to have a meeting. I make a point to schedule all meetings in advance and to create a meeting agenda to stay organized.
Quitting Time - I do my best to stick to a set time every day that I stop working and put it on my calendar as a reminder.
These are a few of my daily activities that I do to keep those pesky energy vampires away from me so that I can remain refreshed and energized to take care of my clients. What are some tips that you can share to keep the energy vampires at bay?
Keep IT Sunny
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Growing up we probably all were told by our parents to go to our room if we disobeyed them or to just be quiet if we were talking too much. The ultimate punishment was to have all your toys taken away for a period of time and to be grounded. What might seem like a form of punishment in those childhood years now appears to be just the thing we need to do as grown-ups and more so as entrepreneurs to get reenergized. Today I was listening to a sermon by Pastor Charles Stanley about how to be quiet and still. He made a lot of good points and observations that resonated with me. He described the different methods we use to try to get quiet which I think are very useful to implement as we seek to regain our energy and focus toward being successful entrepreneurs. Here are a few ideas:
Go for a walk
Go to the woods and be still
Go to the beach
These are not new ideas but gentle reminders that it is necessary to seek out quiet time daily to calm our minds down, slow our breathing, and to take capture any thoughts that are negative. When we do this a burst of renewed energy and enthusiasm for life will appear. This will filter down into our businesses and help us to get back to doing what we love with a new purpose.
Keep IT Sunny!
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Welcome to the month of September. I can’t believe that summer will be winding down soon and fall is on the horizon. This month we will take a look at how we can get reenergized within our business and fall in love with it again. We will look at tips and tools to help us to stay focused and motivated. We will also look at one app that we can use to help us to stay organized and give us time back to focus on doing what we love.
Keep It Sunny!
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The life of an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. The word busy is something that just comes with the territory. Nothing is more frustrating than working yourself to the bone but not having the information you need to make important business decisions. Here are a few more reasons why using an accounting software program like QuickBooks Online to track your hard-earned finances makes financial sense:
It will arm you with information to determine if you can pay yourself
It will help you to determine if you can start bringing on team members
It will help you to pull reports to see if you are on the right track for your annual revenue goals
It will help you to stay compliant with the taxman
If you have a special spreadsheet that you like to use to track your finances keep on using it BUT also use a professional accounting software system to track your finances so that you can pull reports to help you to make important business decisions. One day you might just decide it is time to ditch the spreadsheet.
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Have you ever said this to yourself?
It is a common mantra among entrepreneurs who are so busy doing the daily work in their business that managing the financial performance of it gets lost in the sauce. This month we are taking a look at why it is important to track your business bookkeeping inside of an accounting software. One of the main reasons is to have the ability to answer the question: How Much Did I Make In My Business?
The best way to get this answer is to keep your books reconciled on a monthly basis. The art of reconciling the books just means grabbing your bank statement and literally matching it line by line item to what is showing in the accounting software. Once everything has been accounted for then you know that your books have been reconciled and can close the month and start fresh in the next month. Now bookkeeping and accounting is way more complex than pulling out a statement to match transactions but doing this aspect of it is necessary to pull reports that answer questions like the one above.
So if you have no idea how much money you made last month then head over to the reports section in your accounting software and find the profit and loss statement or what it is known as in the accounting world, income statement. The income statement or profit & loss will tell you the story of how much you made by selling your services or products, what you spent on expenses and what was left over. The “what is left over” part will tell you how much you made in your business last month.
Keep It Sunny!
I can’t believe it is August. Where did the time go??? I love this month that is filled with a change in season (depending on where you live) and a start to new beginnings like taking classes or taking a fresh look at your business.
This month I want to take a practical look at why it is important to have your books in order and tracked within an accounting software like QuickBooks Online. There are many reasons why it is crucial that your business finances are managed in an organized manner outside of just using an Excel spreadsheet that can help you to be more successful within your business. I think that sometimes we just need to be reminded of the reasons why we are going through all the effort to manage the business bookkeeping in the first place.
It’s August & my birthday month - It is time to get busy!!
Keep IT Sunny~
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Summer is in full swing. I hope you are taking some time to get out and enjoy it along with some friends. I am trying to get into the season but I might need to work a bit harder. I recently met a friend for lunch at a local eatery that has a pool and she showed up ready to take a dip. I showed up in shorts and a t-shirt with no pool attire in sight.
:)
Such is life!
So, I hope in the midst of the summer fun you are taking time out to work on your business operations. This month I focused on sharing information that can help you to run your business better. The first blog was about workflows and why it is a good idea to have a good system in place to run your business. The benefits of having a seamless process in place to ramp your business up to the next level are so important. Next, I talked about specific tools that you can put into place right now to help run your business better. There are so many shiny objects out there that could help you run your business more efficiently. The key is to not go chase the next new thing but to select tools that solve a specific problem you have in your business and implement the tool.
Summer fun in Las Vegas is here. I hope that implementing some of the information shared in the posts above will help you to get outside and play without worrying if your business is running on all cylinders.
Keep IT Sunny!
How do you feel about the idea of getting your business operations organized? Do you feel enthusiastic or overwhelmed? I find the task of getting organized and staying organized is a delicate dance that I do within my business and life every day. I found a quote that is helping me to see how getting organized within my business can have a direct impact.
“For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” – Anonymous
I can relate to that because it is so true. Ask yourself how much time did you spend today looking for an important email in your inbox or an electronic document on your computer? I am sure it was at least 5 minutes. Now add up all the 5-minute experiences like this for a week or a month and you will begin to see how much time can be wasted and money lost by not being organized. Here are a few tools that can help you get more organized and spend your time on money-making activities.
Receptionist & CRM - It is important to have a tool in place to take care of potential and current customers that will leave them with a professional feeling but won’t break the bank. I recently wrote a post about the CRM tool Zoho and the phone tools Grasshopper and Google voice. Check it out here.
Project Management - There are so many reasons why using a good project management tool is an important piece of running your business. Simply put it saves you time and that will save you money. Check out this post I wrote describing what to look for and a few tools that might be useful for you to check out.
Professional Employer Organization - Well this isn’t really a tool but more of a resource that will help you to manage your team (if you are in a growth stage) in a cost-effective way. According to Investopedia, a PEO is an external company that handles your business’s administrative, financial, and human resources (HR) needs.” Check out their list of the top 7 best PEO Services for 2021 to start your research.
Not having a systemized way to run your business can create a lot of headaches. I hope that you will check out some of the tools above to move you toward success on your workflow journey.
Keep IT Sunny!
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Having a good system to run your business operations can make or break you. Picture this: Your business is busy and customers are coming out of the woodwork to buy your services. This is great. It is time for them to pay and you offer a variety of methods for your customers to pay including cash. Your customer pays you in cash and you put the money in your pocket and wave goodbye.
What is wrong with this picture you might ask?
It is great that you sold a service to a customer that wanted to buy it. What isn’t great is that you put the money in your pocket and didn’t have a system to record the payment in your accounting software or track the sale by giving your customer a sales receipt.
Why do I need to have a system in place you might ask?
If you want to know how many customers bought your services, what is a hot seller vs. a dud, how much money you made, and also make sure you keep the taxman happy then a system for capturing all this information is paramount.
In my post last week, I discussed that a workflow is an organized system that is created to handle your business operations. Most people know this as S.O.Ps or standard operating procedures. Creating procedures to handle each area of your business will ensure that nothing falls through the cracks and that you are able to measure and track information that is important to you. Next week we will look at tools that will help you to systemize different areas within your business.
Keep IT Sunny!
I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July holiday with your friends & family. The month of July is here and we are going to take a deep dive into all things related to workflows. What is a workflow? According to Kissflow, “A workflow process is a series of sequential tasks that are carried out based on user-defined rules or conditions, to execute a business process. It is a collection of data, rules, and tasks that need to be completed to achieve a certain business outcome.”
That was a mouthful!
Do you have an organized system in place to handle your business operations? If not now is a good time to start thinking about what that system will look like under the following areas:
Accounting
HR
Marketing
Business Development
Daily Business Operations
This month we will take a look at the reason why having a workflow in place is so important, easy steps we can take to get us on the right track and what the ending resulting will feel like. Buckle up and let’s go on a workflow journey.
Keep IT Sunny!
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I can’t believe the end of the month is here. It really did go by fast. I hope you had a chance to crush some of your business goals this month. This month we took a look at how to build a great financial foundation within your business using the chart of accounts, how to get the most out of QuickBooks Online by following their predetermined workflows. I also shared how it is important to just breathe and take stock of your business goals journey and if you are having success reaching them.
The year is officially halfway over and as business owners, we have a lot to be grateful for as we reflect on what it means to be an American this 4th of July. We have the opportunity to build something out of nothing in the greatest country on the planet. Are you taking advantage of all the opportunities before you? Now is a good time to take stock, pause and enjoy time with your family this 4th of July!
Keep IT Sunny!
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As we roll into summer and close out the first half of the year it is a great time to pause and take stock of your business goals.
Are you on track to reaching them?
If not then take a look at a blog post I wrote on 3 practical steps to help you reach your goals. I hope this helps to get you back on track.
Keep IT Sunny~
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The key to building a solid foundation for your business finances is to follow the rules of the road. In the blog post last week we took a look at the chart of accounts in relation to building a solid foundation for your business finances. This week we will take a look at workflows in QBO. First, I need to ask the question:
Are you a rule breaker or rule follower?
I know that I am equal parts rulebreaker & part rule follower:)
When it comes to using QuickBooks Online I am definitely a rule follower. In order to ensure that you are getting the most out of the software, it is important to follow their predetermined workflows. One area that I see a lot of “rule-breaking” around is not using the workflow for receiving payments. The scenario can go something like this: your customers pay you and then you receive the payment and deposit the funds into your checking account within QuickBooks Online.
This Is Great:)
You provided the service and your customer paid you. It sounds like everything is working okay UNTIL you try to reconcile your account and the money you deposited to your bank in real life isn’t matching what is showing in QuickBooks Online.
What Is Going On Here?
The problem is that the predetermined workflow was skipped and as a result confusion and frustration have taken hold. The proper workflow is to receive payments against the invoice and select the “deposit to” account undeposited funds. Next, the deposit that you made at your bank will show up in the bank feed and there will be a match that shows that you are good to go. In contrast, when the workflow is skipped then the funds you deposited into the checking account will not match what is shown in the bank feed because they are not grouped together which is how you made the deposit at your bank in real life.
I am a free-spirit and rule-breaker on something like eating more sweets than I need to. :)
But when it comes to QuickBooks Online following the rules is best because it can help you to build a solid foundation for your business finances and avoid frustration.
Keep IT Sunny!
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As business owners we all want to make money and have the information we need to see if we are not doing so well. The ability to pull reports to make financial decisions about your business is one of the most important resources you have at your disposal. The information is only as good as the data that is in your accounting software. I am sure you are familiar with the terms “garbage in & garbage out.” This can happen if you don’t have the correct foundation set up in your QuickBooks Online software.
I like to look at it this way
When you want to make a delicious sandwich what is the most important thing you must have first?
Good Bread!!
If you have wimpy bread or cheap bread that doesn’t match the type of sandwich you are trying to make then it will be an epic fail and you will probably go to your favorite sandwich shop to buy the sandwich you want. But if you start with a delicious baguette or a good focaccia roll then you are on your way to building something quite yummy. Much in the same way this is how it works with building a solid foundation for your books in QuickBooks Online. The first step to building a solid foundation is to set up the chart of accounts correctly according to:
Your entity type
Your particular industry
Your tax return (which goes back to your entity type:)
If you set up the chart of accounts according to the items above and use best practices then you are on your way to creating a solid accounting foundation for your business that will allow you to run reports and make sound financial decisions. It all starts with the “bread” for your books which is the chart of accounts.
Keep IT Sunny!
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June is here and summer is around the corner. I love this time of year filled with cookouts and outdoor fun. The summer season here in Vegas is always a good time to discover a new adventure and has something for everyone.
It is a time to have fun and create lasting memories.
This month I want to take a look at the lasting memory you are creating in your business as it relates to your finances. Are you achieving your revenue goals? Do you know how much you're making? Are your books telling you the information you need to run your business better?
As entrepreneurs we all started our business based on a dream of living “The Dream” which is a life filled with doing what we love, creating fun memories with our family & friends and of course making money. You can have all of these things IF the right foundation is in place. This month we will take a deeper look at what this means.
Keep IT Sunny!
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The month of May is almost over and it was filled with festive events like Mother’s Day (which I hope was enjoyable for you:) and one of my favorite holidays that is coming up; Memorial Day.
I hope you are making time to go outside and enjoy the nice weather wherever you live in the world. This month I started taking a deep dive into marketing and different facets of it. I talked about how to market your business which took a stab at defining marketing along with various steps to take to deliver your marketing message. Finally, I discussed how to identify your target market.
Marketing is the secret sauce to keeping a business in business. If your revenues are starting to decrease in your business you can bet that there is a lack of marketing that is taking place. As you relax and fire up the BBQ pit this weekend for Memorial Day take a few minutes to read over the two blog posts that I created just for you. I hope they help you along your marketing journey.
Keep IT Sunny!
When the topic of marketing comes up the next thing that follows is people telling you that you have to identify your target market. We have all heard the old adage by Meredith Hill and countless others, “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.” So how do you identify your target market? The best way to answer that question is to start with defining what is a target market? It sounds complex and highly technical but it boils down to selecting who is the ideal customer that you want to sell your service or product to.
Investopedia states that “A target market refers to a group of customers to whom a company wants to sell its products or services, and to whom it directs its marketing efforts.” In addition, “Consumers who make up a target market share similar characteristics including geography, buying power, demographics, and incomes.” The process of identifying your target market is a critical step in developing your marketing strategy for your business. Marketing campaign efforts can get expensive if you don’t have a clear understanding of who your services or products will appeal to and where those folks might congregate online.
How To Identify Your Target Market
Here are a few steps that will help you to identify your target market:
Determine what problem you are trying to solve with your product or service
Brainstorm what type of people would be most attracted to what your selling
Choose who you would most like to work with
Do Market Research
Check out the competition to see who they are targeting to get some ideas flowing
Create your marketing message
Test it out
This list could go on forever but the main idea is to get started on the journey. I hope that these tips will help you to identify your target market and to start sharing your product or services with those who value it.
Keep IT Sunny!
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The idea of marketing for your business can be confusing and overwhelming. If you are busy with the day-to-day operations of running your business but your revenue is not reflecting your efforts then the most likely culprit is lack of marketing.
According to the American Marketing Association, “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Well, that is a mouth full. The key thing to take away from that definition is that marketing includes creating a process to communicate the benefits of your services or products to your customers that provide value to them. The next question is how do you carry out your marketing?
There are a variety of steps that you can take to deliver your marketing message. Over the course of the next few weeks I will take a look at the following areas as suggested by Small Business.WA.Gov.AU:
Do Market Research
Identify Your Target Market
Identify your USP
Create your business brand
Select your marketing strategies
Create your goals & budget
Take care of your loyal customers
Monitor and look at your effectiveness
Marketing is essential for any business to survive. The day-to-day operations of running a small business can take precedence over drilling into the intricacies of how to apply marketing techniques to your business. Although it can be time-consuming it is essential for growing your business. I hope the steps above are a starting point for you on your marketing journey.
Keep IT Sunny!
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Who Are Experiencing Growth And Need To Gain Clarity Around Their Finances So They Can Serve Their Customers Excellently, Make More Money, And Create The Lifestyle Of Their Dreams!
