How do I use (small business accounting) Organizer LeaderTask in my everyday life?
No commentsBy Alexey Abramovsky
Business. New projects. Creating and developing a new project requires attention and preciseness. There are no trifles in it. Any detail may turn into a drawback and a drawback may be fatal for the project. New trends appearing regularly are a peculiarity of my job. Something is dropped later, something turns into working schemes. Any project starts from creating a scheme. A scheme is a mind map. (I will not dwell on the convenience and techniques of using mind maps in this article, if you get interested, you can always find more information on the Internet.) A ready mind map is easily entered into LT with its tree-like structure of tasks. Then you only have to determine specific deadlines and assign responsible persons. Determine checkpoints. (A checkpoint is a point on a timeline corresponding to the time when the progress is checked in this or that project. The current progress of the project is checked, which makes it possible to track the dynamics and make amendments, if necessary.) After that you can use the obtained information to make a decision what to do next: - continue it; - stop it; - modify the direction of the project.
Development program implementation.
Any enterprise has a program of its strategic development. It includes searching for new partners, enlarging the assortment of products, finding new markets and so on and so forth. Of course, every enterprise has its trends and priorities. However, there is a certain sequence of actions that should be followed by particular people in order to implement this program. That is when an organizer comes in - it is LT in my case, of course. It helps to monitor the market and thus get up-to-date information about it. Not to miss meetings with clients and partners. Plan and monitor the implementation of plans.
Advertising. Advertising a company is a complicated and long process. It already starts when you just decide to create this or that structure. Choosing a name is the starting point. Quite a lot might be said about the name and how it affects business, but we are here for a different thing. It is enough just to understand that advertising starts at the very moment when the business emerges. Then the main advertising formula comes in: AIDA. Those who are in the advertising industry know what I’m saying 
and I recommend that the rest of you who are interested search for more information because I will not explain it better than professionals while the understanding of this formula may dramatically change your view on advertising. Advertising is a complex and multipronged project and this project is quite dynamic. If you delay anything in its implementation, it seriously affects the sales statistics (that is, profit). Organizing and planning an advertising campaign for a company is an eternal and constantly changing project, being one of the most key ones as well. The way LT is used in advertising is not basically different from the way it is used in implementing the development program.
Sales.
Using LT for sales purposes is a bit different from the above. In this case it comes down mainly to monitoring the supply deadlines and the terms of agreements in order to extend or re-sign them in time. Kind of a advanced reminder, BUT do not forget that after I left this issue to LT, I freed my mind and time for something else and at the same time I do not lose clients and keep up with shipment deadlines. Besides, I have an idea to link sales to production, i.e. plan production and supplies for it according to processed orders, but this scheme is in the state of development and testing yet.
Home
Payments. It is one of the primary home tasks for LT - monitor payments. Paying for public utilities, intercom, insurance. All in all, everything that is to be paid for goes through LT. It allows you not to remember what and when you should pay. In fact, it is an indispensable assistant in your everyday routine.
Credit. Credit is actually a payment that is stretched in time. However, it is different from other payments because you will suffer worse consequences if the payment is overdue no matter whether for you personally or for your business. By the way, I do not deal with lease and credit payments myself at work, but I have them all marked and I do not forget to remind the CEO to make sure everything is alright with them. Anyone may have sudden “sclerosis”, someone may fall ill, someone may have force majeure at home, but the business must not suffer from it.
Purchases. Purchases are different. LT allows me to save money! How? Well, as most people out there, after I get my salary, I go shopping in search of essentials, however, “store - money - no shopping list” is a great combination, BUT for the store, not for you. When you come home after this kind of shopping, you find lots of things in your bags, BUT you have forgotten to buy feed for your favorite cat and bought another tie, a “nice” addition to those that are already in your closet. After another situation like this, I used ALEXA’s advice about the dictating machine. I recorded everything that came to my mind about purchases and then I easily added to the list what I actually needed (by the way, I liked the method so much that now I can barely imagine what I would do without the dictating machine and my employees notice that my memory is now much better. Now once I receive my salary, I first start LT and look through what I’m going to buy and the printer prints me this list in 5 seconds. The list with nothing unnecessary in it and nothing essential left out. As a result, I optimize my expenses. (I thought about suppliers while I was writing this… it feels like they are going to get reorganized. 
).
Duties. All those home duties… well, that’s easy. Wash my wife, refuel my son and buy something for my car’s birthday. Oh my God!!! There are always so many of those duties that you are sure to confuse or forget something and what about business, social activities and things to deal with in court… Anyway, I could go on and on about it, but I think you know it all without me. So, it our favorite LT that is to deal with these heaps of duties. As a result, nothing is neglected or forgotten, everything is done quickly and in no rush. The car tank is full, the son is clean and the wife is happy.
Vacation. It is my first vacation planned with the help of such methods. I cannot share my vacation experience with you so far because it’s only ahead, BUT I guess I will not forget anything. We will visit as many beautiful sights as we wish (the list of possible sights is compiled and combined by two parameters. The opinions of those who have been there and the geographical location.) I hope the trip will be just fine.
How does LeaderTask help me?
Never forget
Memory is a wonderful thing, you can remember every detail of what they showed on television 30 years ago because you had just then bought a new color television set (it was a big event back in the days)… and completely forget what was SO IMPORTANT that the director general told you a minute ago. That is why I really appreciate the ability to remember and not to forget anything under any circumstances. I don’t even mention that a timely reminder can be simply invaluable.
Keep everything in order
Order. I do not think I have to explain what order is and how important it is. And I think order in one’s activities leads life to success and the person to self-realization. You have to have a clear idea about your activities in order to effectively control them. WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? Here are three questions that keep our activities in order. But it is not enough to know the answers, you have to combine different activities from different projects throughout the day and that’s when LT becomes an indispensable assistant. A well thought-out sequence of actions allows you to simultaneously manage several projects or trends without losing the quality of control. LT allows you to remember everything and precisely define the priority of this or that action having your finger on the pulse of what is going on.
Closely follow the sequence
There are actions in life that must go one after another. For example, developing a business plan requires a completely precise set of actions performed in a certain sequence. Breaking the sequence often results in having to go back in order to complete something or even revise all actions that follow.
Why is my life better now?
More spare time.Time is the only irreplaceable resource in our lives that is always trying to sneak so that we do not notice it among the routine of everyday activities. Irreplaceable means invaluable for me. That is why I try to complete as much as possible within every single minute. Life is short, but you want to complete, see, try and experience so much. LT helps to save time and spend it sensibly. It serves as a kind of “routine vise” that compresses it, or rather the time spent on them. Of course, you do not have more time, but it allows you to complete more during this short life.
More efficient work
The word EFFICIENCY means a lot for people who value time. It determines a lot in their lives, it regulates lives taking control over them. What is efficiency?
Economic efficiency is a key consideration when you make a decision about production. In simple words, efficiency means that manufacturing is carried out with minimum expenses, effort and losses. Economists use a more precise definition. The term of economic efficiency means such a situation when it is impossible to make a single change that would make one person better off without making another person worse off. Efficiency defined in theses terms is sometimes called Pareto efficiency after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist.
Personal efficacy or self-efficacy means belief in the effect of one’s own actions and the belief that you have the capability to attain your goals. It is one of the key terms in the social cognitive theory of Albert Bandura. The overall self-efficacy consists of particular self-efficacies existing in various fields of human activity. In some of its research Bandura showed that one more cause of changes in behavior may be the absence of belief in the efficacy of one’s own efforts. This discovery of Bandura is often referred to as the self-efficacy theory. Self-efficacy or self-efficacy belief means that a person is sure that he will be able to behave successfully in a complicated situation. That is, efficacy belief means the evaluations of one’s very specifically defined behavioral competence. (There is a very interesting article in Wiki about self-efficacy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy. I took the definitions of efficiency and efficacy from Wiki.)
I think these definitions quite precisely reflect the essence of how my life has improved with LT.
Project implementation time. The increase in efficiency naturally speeds up the implementation of projects and plans. Planning and the precise and objective assessment of the situation allow me to correctly distribute my resources and my staff’s resources to achieve the maximum productivity.
Control over situation. I have never had my activities in such an order and visualization. It is really great that you may forget about anything you have planned until the due time and you do not have to worry about missing the moment at all. Any project is clearly visible by both time and people. It is easy to track personal responsibility. Visualization allows you to optimize the situation and correctly distribute resources. All that allows you to feel confident and persistently pursue your goals.
What have I achieved?
Creating a company. Creating a new company, structure or department is a very tense period of time, but on the other hand it is just the tip of the iceberg of information that you have to process before you come down to taking action. As to actions, they have to follow a clear and ordered plan. All that is quite a tense work and involves several parallel processes. I’m glad that all that is already behind and that my estimates were pretty accurate and now we are where we planned to be.
Organizing the production. I will never forget it. Probably because I had never come across organizing production before that. God, that’ whole lot of thing. The project was growing as an avalanche and sometimes it seemed like this avalanche would bury us under the abundance of what was to be done, but anyway, as they say, “you may fear it, but still do it”. I have to say that the resolute position of the director general was of great help. In case of any doubts he would only say, “I’m sure you will cope with it!” and we did cope. I don’t even know if I’ll ever dare to go through it again. And to be honest, if I had known what it was, I would have gotten myself into it.
Implementing the marketing policy
The decision to change the marketing policy was not an easy one to make. Indeed, why would you change anything that works well? But the request to increase profitability led to enlarging the assortment of products and changes in the target audience, which, in its turn, resulted in rebranding and completely revising the marketing policy of the company. It was the first time I was into rebranding, but since the promotion of a company does not differ much from rebranding, there was almost nothing new for me in it.
Good advertising campaign. Pushing a new product onto the market is always an interesting and important moment. As a rule, a good start is a good advertising campaign. And you can tell how well the campaign is only after you evaluate the decrease in sales after it is over. There is always a decrease, but it varies a lot and everything depends on the success of the advertising campaign and, in my opinion, on how accurately you reached your target audience.
What did LeaderTask change in my life?
Attitude to time
I realized that you can effectively manage your time
I had tried to make plans many times before that. I used to make use of phones with their poor imitation of an organizer, thick diaries and software products of this type. So why hadn’t my attitude to time changed before I started using LT? First, none of the previously used solutions (to make it clear, I have never used Outlook from Microsoft) provided this kind of visual representation of the situation. Of course, visualization makes it much easier to perceive things and, consequently, manage them more effectively. Second, it is through the LT forum that I discovered time management, which resulted in revising a lot of things first at work and then at home. Step by step, I started to realize how much time I had been just wasting on unnecessary things. The pace of work changed, no more rush and it occurs to me that it has been two months already since we forgot anything and had to do it in a hurry. And it is all despite the fact that there has been quite a lot of events in the recent month. Time is no longer our enemy we have to fight against, now at last I am in control of my time.
Business relations
Top management attitude
I don’t think I have to explain anyone the management attitude towards an employee who does not forget anything, does all current work in time and is efficient in all fields he deals with. What I would like to explain is that I’m neither a genius nor a workaholic, I like days off and holidays the same as you. It is just that I realized once that life could be different and LT offered me a great help in this realization by allowing me to turn my ideas into actual activities.
Subordinates’ attitude. We are all PEOPLE, we are all subordinates and chiefs and we all differentiate between good and bad chiefs. A good chief for me is an objective one. He has to understand, help, ask about the results. He has to both award and punish. A chief has to be both an inspirer and an idea accumulator. He stimulates activity, my activity. How? With a good word, useful advice, a penalty or an award. He helps me to grow, he both guards me and makes me go all out changing my self-esteem. I was lucky to have a REALLY GOOD CHIEF so now I have a role model. I try to be a good chief as far as I understand it. I try to stick to one basic principle suggested by a person who I really respect: “You should be kind, but you must not be soft-hearted”. A lot has changed after I realized the difference. I think you have to ask my subordinates about how they feel about me. I can only point out that almost everyone who worked for more than 6 months with me maintain a good relationship with me even after they quit, we call each other and meet. One of my current partners used to be my subordinate and that’s what she said after she got some good luck and received a certain sum of money, “I did not even think what to do, just found your number”.
You just have to remember that a chief who does not know what his subordinates do cannot be a good chief. And here LT comes in again with its perfect list of who is doing what. It turns meetings with subordinates into very constructive communication. In its turn, it leads to personal growth and efficiency.
How more efficient have I become?
More efficient, much more
Now I have time for self-development. Now I have time that I have lacked for the last 4 years. Now I can read books not only on economics, but just books, classic books. Now I have time to go in for sport. No more rush in my life, now I feel confident and safe. I’m no longer afraid to forget anything. So many changes have come for this month and a half.
Many things that seemed to be delayed forever are now in progress
I think that anyone has such things in life that are left in a closet for some future because there is never time to spend on them. I used to have this kind of closet. But on some nice day I realized that it was the day when I could afford it. I can afford to spend my time on it without being afraid that it will negatively affect my business. How do I feel about it? It is like a long-awaited meeting with an old friend.
Ivan Abramovsky is cofounder of Unattended Installation Systems. The company’s flagship product MultiSet has become a “must-have-software” in homes and offices in more than 60 countries.
Accept Credit Card To Increase Your Sales
By chee kin ho
In today’s internet market, it really isn’t possible to run any business that does not accept credit cards online; to make ecommerce possible this had to happen. With orders that can be taken at anytime of the day, there is no point in restricting business by only accepting a check or money order; mainly because it delays completing the order. It is hard work getting loyal customers so you don’t want to lose them; caring about what your customers want is the key to success.
You need to have a way to take a payment instantly so you can get your product or service up and out the door as soon as your customer orders it. Websites in the business of making money make sure that they accept credit cards online so ordering from them is simple and painless; companies have realized just how important this is. The amount of time your website has been up and running is immaterial, as your customers will be unaware of your origins. This should not stop you from organizing online payments before the website is completed.
It is possible and quite normal to use more than one method to accept credit cards online; however, due to the cost involved in setting up some of these, many site owners are reluctant to use all of them. Because it is possible to use more than one method to accept credit cards online, many larger internet businesses use more than one system to attract additional customers.
The advent of Paypal
You can have a system that takes the card numbers much like they do in retail stores; alternatively you can use the system that many sites now use called Paypal. Paypal was started by ebay and although it requires the buyer to have an account, most people who buy products online now have an account as it is free and easy to set up.
With Paypal, an account is created for the payment process and a number of credit and debit cards can be used within the account; once you have an account with them, payments are very quick. You must ensure you present your visitors with a secure setting if you want to accept online payments; you need to ensure they trust you when they arrive at your site so they do not leave it, worried about purchasing from you.
This means that the transaction is encrypted so that their information is not broadcast around the Internet for those who may take those numbers for their own use. You can see an https:// beginning to any web address that has a secure setting. If you want to accept credit cards online you have to have this facility or your customers will most definitely think twice before they put their information in your ordering system. With internet fraud being one of the top concerns on the internet it is your responsibility to make your customers feel safe and secure when they place an order otherwise they will leave and order elsewhere.
CK HO is an article writer for :
http://www.thecreditcardprocessing.com/
More about Online Credit Card
Processing
Present Your Company through Unique Business Card Ideas
By vikram kumar
There are different ways for you to make your business or company visible to your target market. Some of these include website development and design, search engine optimization, print materials, and media marketing. You can also use business cards to advertise your company. As of the current times, there are already plenty of professionals that are creating their cards. But if you want unique business cards, you can have them designed by expert business card designers. The basic information that a business card contains include the companys name and its owner, its location, email address, and contact numbers. You can also add in other information, as long as it is related with your business.
Like other marketing methods, business cards are used by companies to generate more sales and gain more visibility. While there are expensive advertising solutions, you are guaranteed that creating company cards is not one of these. As a matter of fact, it is one of the most affordable ways of promoting your business to your target customers. Not only this, you will also be able to increase your prospects and your social contacts. You may think that business cards are only for company owners. However, there are also some clients that design or have cards designed for them. This goes especially if the client or customer is searching for businesses that want to make transactions with them.
The efficiency of your unique business cards depends on their design and where you hand them out. Since your company cards bear the image of your business, they should have the logo and name of your business. They may also contain brief information regarding the services or items that you are offering. You can hand out the cards during meetings with clients, community gatherings, or company meetings. The more presentable and professional-looking your business cards are, the more you will be able to attract or generate customers and sales. During the current times, there are plenty of designs and materials that are used to make effective business cards. You will find more options, when you avail of business card design from online sources such as Business Cards Professionals.
Almost all websites offer digital business card printing services. You can take a pick from different patterns and designs. While there are classic styles for more attractive and unique business cards, you can also go for new styles. If you want exceptional company card design, deviate from standard concepts. Get creative and opt for custom styles and patterns. The more unique your business cards are, the more efficient they will be, when it comes to attracting prospects. What is more, do not just go for conventional sizes or shapes. You can look into the available patterns and styles that your choice online business card design company has to offer. This way, you will know your different options.
When coming up with the design and style of your unique business cards, make sure that these are related with what you are offering. If you are promoting the safety of the environment, an appropriate card should be made out of a paper material. On the other hand, huge corporations opt for elegant opaque and sleek plastic cards. If you do not know how to come up with appealing designs, you can ask your business card design company to help you out.
There are several online websites that can help you with the design of your unique business card . One of these is Business Cards Professionals, which offers more than forty business cards designs.
Find Accounting Information And Resources For Your Business
Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 12:05 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
