Earlier this month our PEC newsletter publisher, Anne Johnson, suggested that the theme for this month's newsletter should be Giving Thanks. So I thought about this trying to find a tip or trick that would tie my monthly article to this topic. I finally found that link! My work-related tasks in September led me to the content for this article. That is, giving thanks to my clients for sharing your personal life and interests with me AND for continuing to show an interest in my life

Make using your Act! database easier for your users. The easier it is to use, the more your people will use it. Training can help them build strategies and teach shortcuts, but you should take away the guessing and additional typing as much as possible. Here some things you could do: Ensure that your users can choose most of their standard responses from dropdowns rather than having to type the information each time-especially in the history regarding. Create templates for those often

Lifehacker.com says, “Mind mapping is one of the best ways to capture your thoughts and bring them to life in visual form.” Mind mapping allows you to capture your thoughts or those of a group in a very unstructured way and then tie those thoughts together as you go along. It is great for brainstorming ideas without the structure of outlines and notes. According to Tony Buzan, “A Mind Map is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain.

Over the last few years there phishing incidents have been on the rise, playing havoc with many small business and individual users. Even large businesses can be a target. The only way for a computer user to avoid these threats is to recognize a phishing email/phone call and know what to do (or not do). To understand what these threats are let’s start with the basics: What is Phishing? Phishing is an attempt to get someone to give sensitive information such as username, password, and

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