Businesses need efficient process, the focus of leadership and structure that can stretch to enable the company to grow safely as a massive 55% of businesses don’t make it to their fifth birthday. The experts offer banal opinions as to why this happens. I consistently see three key reasons why this tragedy occurs so often and to so many people with different backgrounds, education and knowledge.
The first reason is lack of market comprehension.
Refusal to look at the water ahead. For example Individuals dream up the concept, build the product and then expect the market to appear and purchase. In information age there is no excuse for lack of research prior to wasting any time and money on creating a product until you have firm evidence there is a market.
The second reason is lack of comprehension of the basics of business.
The majority of folks starting a business know their trade, how to offer a service or build a product, but not how to run a business. Having the ability to read and follow the numbers in the P&L or the balance sheet is a vital. The basic knowledge of accounting is not very often imparted coherently by the business manuals, internet resources and experts with the knowledge such as accountants and bookkeepers. The problem is maginfied by greedy and short sighted technology companies such as Sage software misleading the market by selling only a portion of the functionality actually needed by small businesses.
Large corporations way back worked out that all of their Information systems should be joined together to give them a total view of the business and then along came ERP software solutions and packages. One vendor NetSuite had the foresight to see the opening in the market and began selling its small business ERP software. NetSuite pricing has since increased and put their solution out of the economic reach of small businesses.
The third reason businesses don’t make it is a because of the absence of good management processes and policies to enable a sustainable fabric of disciplines and behaviours.
You have probably heard of SAP software. It’s a software application used by thousands of medium sized and large enterprises all over the world. The purpose of the system is to join the whole organisation together and let hundreds and often thousands of workers to record, share and view information concerning the physical and financial activities of the company. Large firms are lead by savvy individuals who know the strategic benefits of this type of software, such as how it can give them a picture of why problems are occurring inside their company or where there might be opportunity for improvements.
This category of system is often known as ERP. It is very complicated, very expensive and can take months and often years to deploy. A deployment of ERP software is a significant investment but this doesn’t stop major firms investing in these applications.
Until recently software like this was not available or affordable for small firms. As a result tiny companies have not been aware of the significant benefits that ERP systems can deliver. Tiny organisations have been misled by predatory manufacturers such as Sage Software and Intuit that small business accounting software is what they need. These applications most often have no capacity to permit their owners to connect the entire firm or undertake basic tasks such as customer relationship management.
It is for this reason that small business ERP businesses like Salesorder.com have started to make great strides in the market. They provide software as a service containing all of the major features a small company requires at very low cost. What is even more fascinating is these systems are simple to use and can be implemented rapidly.
At last ERP platforms are no longer the privilege of big enterprises.
Accounting used to completely perplex me and as a result I had to find a simpler way which I want to share with you. Everyone who starts or runs their own business has ’higher priority’ tasks to perform than spend time on their bookkeeping. All companies have to pay special attention to their accounting if they want to avoid issues.
I asked my accountant for advice and he persuaded me to use Sage Software which turned out to be a small business accounting software package. Without even testing software I naively went ahead and purchased the lowest cost package I could find. This was arguably one of the biggest mistakes I made as the software turned out to be really difficult to comprehend and use. To be straight with you whenever I see the word accounting next to the word software I am immediately reminded of the first wisdom I want to share with you and that is just about all small business accounting software makes the assumption the user possesses good practical knowledge of bookkeeping.
Like me I know this simply isn’t the case for most small business people and this drove me to put aside time that I couldn’t spare to discover a solution to make my life simpler. The great news is I found a really excellent solution, it’s an internet system known as salesorder.com.
This is possibly the simplest software I have ever found and what’s more it is web based and therefore I can use it from anywhere I want to work. Better still and the third piece of wisdom I want to share with you is that the people who work at salesorder.com are not just very knowledgeable of their system but they know a tremendous amount about the problems of running a small enterprise and have taught me the bookkeeping I need to know.
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