I recently worked with a client who had a CRM at their organization but they were using it as a glorified rolodex.  When I asked them why they had not taken the product to the next level, they asked me why should they? They wanted to know the benefits. Keeping track of your customers is one way to guarantee more sales. It's such a simple thing. Understand what they want, advise them on what's available, offer them good pricing and support, and you make sales. However that assumes you've

For those of us in service-based businesses it is important to track the time we spend on various projects. A contact manager like Act! is great for tracking appointments and to-dos, but as our lives get busier and more complicated, we find we need a more fluid system. That is why I went searching for an application to track my hours in real time. I began with a simple Excel spreadsheet – as I imagine a lot of people do. Once I started using this spreadsheet I realized a couple of limitations

Recently during a staff meeting, we had a discussion about QuickBooks data security features and how they compared to those in a competitive product. Specifically, a client did not like that a QuickBooks user could change a transaction from a prior year. Data integrity and accuracy is important to all business owners, but especially to small business owners. Misinformation in a business accounting file can result in inaccurate tax filings, re-direct business owner to miss fraudulent

As a small business owner, you just spent a lot of money to purchase new business-critical software and the hardware to run it. How much of that investment may be wasted because it is not used it to its potential? Did you just load the software on workstations and say, “Just figure it out. How hard can it be? - Oh, and by the way, get all your regular work done too.” Have you given your staff members the tools they need to use the new technology more effectively? Do your business processes

Recently we've been hearing about several customers getting hit with ransomware software. This has prompted me to put together a quick blog post warning about this growing trend. First off, here's a definition. Ransomware is software that infects a computer and then locks files making them unreadable. The software then asks for money to unlock the files - hense the name Ransomware. An encryption key is sent back which makes the files available again. The big problem is most antivirus software

Recently I got back from a much needed vacation and was lamenting about how much work and emails had piled up in my absence.  Yes, I have an amazing crew who handled the majority of the calls, but they too were very grateful we were back because we as the owners were the ones with some of the answers or who several of our clients insisted were the only ones to talk with. Sigh. That’s when you start asking yourself is it worth it as a small business owner to take a vacation because of

Got Windows 10?  Act! Not Starting?  Try this! We have been getting quite a few calls lately from clients who are finding out the hard way that their operating system just got upgraded to Windows 10. Well isn’t that nice? Microsoft is now making it happen automatically and many are getting caught of guard.   What to do?  Turn off automatic updates in Windows for one.  If Windows 10 is here, then time to upgrade Act!.  The latest version of Act! is designed to

You may have heard about SSL, and you may even have SSL implemented on your website already. If your customers enter sensitive credit card information or other private data on your website then SSL is a must. If you haven’t heard of SSL, we’ll answer basic questions in this article and provide resources for you to learn even more. What is SSL Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) [the precursor to Secure Sockets Layer] are both