One of recent converts to Simplifythis converts, Alex of Akademikas Education Consulting Ltd., did not quite like the looks of the invoices coming out of Simplifythis. He just redesigned the invoice and gave us the CSS for a much nicer looking invoice format which we promptly tested and deployed today. Hope you and your clients like it. Thank you again Alex.
Category: SimplifyThis News
We have just updated our servers with several minor feature updates to Simplifythis. These features were being sought by Simplifythis users for quite some time, and we are happy to say that they are available for immediate use. Without further ado, let me get right into the details.
- Sign-up using your Google account – Now you can sign-up for Simplifythis using your Google account. No need to remember one more password. When you sign in, just click on ‘sign-in with a Google account on the login page. Very soon we will be providing a mechanism to associate existing Simplifythis accounts with Google account.
- Export of appointments to Excel – The ‘Print Appointment’ button on Appointment Book has been replaced by ‘More Actions’. As the name suggests, you could do several things after clicking this button, including appointments to Excel. Just search for appointments that you want to export and click on Excel icon.
- Charge multiple appointments simultaneously – Admittedly, this has been a gripe for a long time. Nonetheless, finally it is here. Take the ‘More Actions’ route, select the appointments you want to charge, and click on ‘Create Charge’. Corresponding line items will be created for all the appointments you selected.
- Invoice appointments directly - Earlier, invoicing an appointment was a two step process – first create line items from appointments, and then invoice those line items. With this update, you can directly invoice one or more appointments. Again, take the ‘More Action’ route, select the appointments you want to invoice for, and click on ‘Send Invoice’ link. Now, while selecting appointments, make sure that they belong to the same account or otherwise you’ll be flagging an error message.
- Improvements in recurring appointments – This update also brings much needed improvements in recurring appointments, notably the ability to delete or cancel individual appointment instances. In addition, this also fixes some of the bugs associated with time / date of individual occurrences.
- Record payments on invoice – This update also gives you the capability to directly add and show payments on invoices. It is especially useful if you take prepayments for appointments and want to show the remaining balance on the invoice. In other cases, if you want to show that the invoice is paid for, just add the payment on the invoice and it will show the adjusted total due along with the payment details.
I am sure you’ll find these features useful. We’ll have our next major update towards the end of this month, which we are sure will make Simplifythis even more useful for your business.
Massage therapy is becoming more and more recognized as a main stream aspect of healthcare around the world. More and more massage therapists are turning their passion for body work into a full time career. But in these economic times when businesses are going bust left and right, do you have what it takes? If you’re a part time massage therapist ready to delve deeper into the field or you’re ready to start a new career entirely, find out if you’re a good fit for the profession.
The Modern Day Massage Therapist
If you’re considering going full time, you’re not alone. You may be surprised to learn that most people start in massage therapy as a part time job, working about 20 hours per week, and from there move into a full time career. A large majority, nearly 85 percent of massage therapists are women and their average age is around 40 years old, according to the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) http://www.amtamassage.org/.
Choose a Fiscally Responsible Specialization
You need to know which massage treatments bring in the most repeat clients. The good old standby, the Swedish Massage is performed the most, on 84 percent of clients, followed by 77 percent deep tissue massage, 49 percent trigger point massage, and 45 percent sport’s massage, according to AMTA. So you would likely need to be versed in these methods to be able to make a go of it.
If You’re Not a Savvy Business Person, It’s Hard to Survive
It’s certainly not a lucrative profession, but you can make it as a massage therapist if you work hard. But you’ll need to focus on always pleasing clients because repeat clients make up the majority of your clientele. Median hourly wages of massage therapists, including gratuities, were $16.78 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $11.36 and $25.14. The highest 10 percent earned more than $33.47. Because many therapists work part time, yearly earnings can vary considerably, depending on the therapist’s schedule, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos295.htm#outlook
. Take into account that these statistics are for working about 20 hours per week, so they are a bit on the low side. The better the therapist and the harder you work, the more money you’ll be able to make per year.
Accreditation Separates the Weakest Link
AMTA requires at least 500 hours of classroom instruction from an accredited massage therapy school. Within that 500 hours, you’ll need 300 hours of theory and technique and 200 hours of pathology, physiology, and anatomy. It’s important to be certified with the AMTA especially when it comes to building a client base, so it’s crucial to enroll at an accredited institution.
Build Your Business with Part Time Work
Most massage therapists are self-employed and that’s the easiest way to be successful because you don’t have to give a cut of your wages to another business. But you should start by working part time in spas, hospitals, physical therapy centers, hotels, yoga studios, and chiropractors. From there, you can refer business and build a clientele. Joining a professional association is another good way to network and build your business.
So, What’s the Job Outlook?
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos295.htm#outlook, massage therapy is growing as a field but recently certified massage therapists should expect to work only part time until they can build a client base of their own. Employment of massage therapists is expected to increase by 19 percent from 2008 to 2018. But if you’re not self motivated and a self starter willing to seek out clients, it’s hard to make a go of it.
Significant improvements in project billing in place now. Well, we deployed these changes a few days ago. I just did not have a chance to write about them.
Let’s get straight to what these improvements mean and how you can use them. First, now you can create projects with a fixed price and bill your clients incrementally. Simplifythis will track the invoiced amount and the remaining unbilled amount for these fixed price projects. You can see the complete billing history for each of the projects -just select a project and click on ‘Summary’ to do so.
When you create a new project, you’ll notice 3 billing options: (i) Fixed price projects, (ii) Hourly billed projects, and (iii) Non-billable projects. Select the billing option for the project. For tracking purposes, we now have added a budget field for hourly projects also. You can track the amount billed against the budget and see whether you would be able to stick to the budget or not.
I know – it has been a long time since our last post in the ‘New Features’ category. Not that we were twiddling our thumbs; we were busy updating the underlying architecture so that we can incorporate your feature requirements more easily. In the process, we did release a key feature-ability to customize your SimplifyThis page, which may have gone unnoticed by many of you.
The re-architecture effort is finally paying off. We are happy to announce the first major feature : ability to keep notes on contacts. In brief, this will allow you to:
- - Take multiple notes on a contact. As usual, select the contact and click on ‘Add Notes’. To view all notes for a contact, just click on view notes.
- - Make a note actionable. This is good to remind your self of particular task that you need to do for a contact. While creating or editing a note, select ‘Actionable’ and due date. Once the task is complete, you can easily mark it as complete.
- - If you do not wish to view a note again, you can delete it. If you think you may need it later, you can also hide it.
I know we don’t have the capability to search on notes, or to alert you when an actionable note approaches its due date. Be rest assured, we are working on it and will make it available very soon.
The idea of notes came from Brian at Empire Computer Services. We sounded it off with several other users and everyone felt that this would be very useful.
Well, the list of new features does not end here. We have also refreshed the look and feel of client facing pages with a sprinkle of new design, and the capability to choose multiple color schemes. In addition, we have simplified the appointment booking process as well. I’ll be writing about these two features in more detail separately.
New to the Seattle Startup Index list this month, SimplifyThis.com ranks 90th of 209 startups in the Seattle area. Be sure to check out all of the other great startups on the list.
Some of our favorites include: 43Things, Mpire, SmartSheet, Jackson Fish Market, and of course, Sampa!
Labels: SimplifyThis.com
Most businesses do it — they put off paying their vendors until they really, really have to pay them. Many put it off even later than that. It could be that they’re taking full advantage of their payment terms, have other payment priorities, or cash flow is just generally tight. Whatever the reason, the point is that if you do work with one of these businesses, then getting paid can be hard.
It’s not enough to only track who owes you money. In addition to tracking, you need to be the squeaky wheel. Don’t be shy about contacting them and letting them know what they owe and when you expect it. Many times, even this is not enough. Often, you need to also communicate what happens when the payment is late. Without communicating consequences of a late payment, your communications can be all but ignored.
With SimplifyThis.com, not only can you track who owes you money and who is late with payments, but you can also email reminder letter. The best part is that we’ve done the hard work and created the letter for you, so you don’t have to spend a bunch of time wondering if you are going to offend someone. It’s professional and to the point — all you need to do is send it.
If you get a response to your reminders, then great. If not, you may consider picking up the phone and trying to get a hold of them in person. For businesses that you have a regular relationship with, this approach can keep the relationship friendly, but still serve the purpose of nudging the payment along.
Beyond sending reminders and making phone calls, sometimes it’s necessary to up the stakes a bit for businesses that are basically stonewalling you. After two to three reminders, it’s not uncommon for some businesses to hand their unpaid accounts over to a collection agency. Even if you don’t intend to follow through with it, just mentioning a collection agency is sometimes all it takes.
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(Image courtesy of _gee_)
Labels: Business
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.
Many service providers and small businesses have been moving away from doorknobs and paper slips to online invoicing systems. Not only do many of these systems automate invoicing and reminders, they also notch up the professional image of the service provider. While this level of automation works great for medium and large businesses, as a service provider playing solo, you need to be mindful of the perils of extreme automation on your relationship with your customers. The difference comes from the fact that in addition to the professionalism and quality of service, your business rides on your personal relationship with your customers.
For instance, say you are a yard care provider and one of your customers has some outstanding dues. You bump into this customer during a service visit and the customer apologetically tells you that the check in the mail. That night your super efficient invoicing system sends out an automatic 30 day overdue reminder to this customer. This reminder would not serve any purpose other than notching down your personal relationship with this customer. Instead of sending a reminder, another thing you could have done is added the overdue balance in next month’s invoice. Along the same lines, what would you do if there are five overdue invoices to the same customer; would you send five separate reminders, or compile them and send a single one. These are small things that have a potential to inflict big dents.
Unlike large corporations, solo service providers carry a human face to themselves, and this aspect has got to be reflected in all the communications between service providers and customers, including the invoices and reminders. If your invoicing system is making you myopically manage your invoices while jeopardizing your customer relationship, it is time to change the way you are using it, or to look for some other system. The efficiencies of extreme automation can be hurtful too. Make sure that your invoicing system helps you take a holistic perspective towards your relationship with your customers.
