When we went live back on June 23rd, I promised that we would be adding new things all the time — well, it’s true, many new features have been added in the past 4 weeks that we need to let you know about.
One of the biggest additions is our Affiliate Program, that lets you earn cold, hard cash, when you refer your friends and colleagues. Unlike many affiliate programs that “apply” your earnings to offset the cost of your own subscription, we give you real money. Even better, you don’t have to be a user of SimplifyThis.com to participate! Anyone can be an affiliate and start earning money right now by signing up to participate.
So how much cash will you earn? Well, when someone signs up for a paid account using your affiliate URL, you receive 30% of their paid subscription for 1 year
! This and all the other details can be found on our Affiliate Program page.
So go ahead, help us spread the word about SimplifyThis.com!
Labels: SimplifyThis.com
New Trends in small businesses: An article by Anita Campbell based on U.S. census 2005 highlights the growth of Single Person Businesses at rates four to five times the population growth rate of USA during the three years beginning 2002. Looking at this data, the first and foremost question that comes to my mind is whether the new single person businesses are managed by people who earlier were employees or partners of larger units or are all of them fresh entrepreneurs. Since the growth percentage of small businesses heavily out numbers the overall population growth rate one would logically assume that a larger proportion of the new single person businesses are managed by people who were earlier attached to a larger business in one capacity or the other. Is it a sign of the larger businesses disintegrating due to desertion by skilled individuals?
What motivates people to go for self managed businesses? Obviously the freedom to work the way you like and expectations of higher returns for your skills may be the main incentives for preferring self managed business over working for or with others. Independence of working style, sole right on the returns, fewer constraints on self and familial conveniences and promises of shining are all incentives to run a self managed businesses. Despite all these lures, it is a huge decision for anyone to play solo. Of course you need to have enough confidence and skills to manage the show singly. Before you start, you should thoroughly look into the feasibility of sustaining single person businesses. Once you sport this endeavour, not only do you lose the economy of scale of a larger business, you also miss the complimentary skills that your co-workers have been providing in running a business. If you are currently part of a larger business, take a comprehensive note of every activity that goes on in running the business. You would need to run all these activities yourself. Evaluate your skills and identify areas that you may need help on. Once solo, you would be managing every aspect of the business from sales and marketing to accounting and customer support. At the risk of sounding apprehensive, I must that say that the risks are no less discouraging.
Notwithstanding the aforesaid apprehensions, entrepreneurship is on the rise which is great news. This substantiates the fact that people like to take the challenges of solo businesses head-on. Despite all the benefits of economy of scale and efficiencies of complimentary skills, larger businesses with several employees suffer from the unavoidable constraints of limited freedom and flexibility. These constraints inhibit the inherent capabilities from showing up and performing. This ultimately leads to under utilization and consequently suboptimal individual performance. Dissatisfaction and disappointment are the natural corollaries. Another human factor for the suboptimal performance of larger businesses is decidedly the growing lack of tolerance among the people working together.
The basic fabric of our economy is changing in a way that supports the survival and growth of solo businesses, and it is a symbiotic effect as these businesses support each other in a direct or indirect way. In a sense, while the freelancer community has grown multi-fold, so has the number of small projects and work items. Such small businesses cannot afford to (and do not need to) employ full time for various specialized work items that fall outside of their core competency.
This is phenomenal change in the basic arrangement of workforce in our economy, giving rise to several thriving marketplaces for small slices of people’s time and equally small work items. This should also improve the business productivity of our workforce because inherently one’s productivity for one’s own business is much higher, and the marketplace for small projects and work items reduces the overall dead time.
We’ve now added the capability to include .pdf
attachments to emailed invoices. From now onwards, whenever you send new invoices, they will also automatically include a .pdf
attachment. Thanks for the feedback for all who asked for this.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the capability to take existing invoices and create .pdf files out of them. Hopefully this is a reasonable trade-off.
Labels: SimplifyThis.com
It is always good to know the way people are using SimplifyThis. A couple of days after releasing auto-billing feature, I got a call from a music teacher asking about the best way to handle credits with automated billing. She is an music teacher and she bills her students in advance for monthly tuition. This part is simple as she can just setup a monthly auto-bill schedule for her students. The complication comes from her generosity. Unlike many others, she gives credit for missed and cancelled lessons. She wanted to know if there is any way to include these credits in the following month’s invoice while still using the auto-bill schedule.
There is an easy way to handle such credits with SimplifyThis. All she needed to do was to select “include unbilled charges” in the auto-bill schedule. Whenever she needs to issue a credit, she would enter a credit in the unbilled charge section. The next invoice created by auto-bill will automatically pick these credits and apply it to the invoice.
When we went live back on June 23rd, I promised that we would be adding new things all the time — well, it’s true, many new features have been added in the past 4 weeks that we need to let you know about.
