Online Scheduling System

Now, I know there are quite a few Sanjay Kumar’s in the world (1.4M pages, to be exact), but when I saw this in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, I was quite taken aback. I thought, why not take this opportunity to update my profile and share my background and show how it uniquely positions me to tackle the mission that SimplifyThis is trying to address. With that in mind, I have updated my profile (link to the right) with the following details about my background:

Sanjay is a co-founder of SimplifyThis. Prior to starting SimplifyThis, he worked at Microsoft Corporation and i2 Technologies. He specializes in designing business applications for customer management, accounting and supply-chain management. During his time at Microsoft, Sanjay worked in the Business Solutions division where he held several engineering, product management, and senior advisory positions. He led the efforts to build online services for small businesses, decision support software for Microsoft’s ERP line of products, and also worked as an executive advisor to shape the roadmap of Microsoft Dynamics line of products. At i2 Technologies, Sanjay held several senior product management positions for supply-chain management products. Prior to joining i2, he was working as a engineer with Sabre Decision Technologies (Now Sabre Airline Solutions). Sanjay received an MS in Engineering from Penn State University and a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from IIT Bombay.

I hope this clarifies the situation and please don’t hesitate to sign up for our beta. (Yes, that was a shameless plug).

Our post on Successful Freelancing was included in the Business section of the Working at Home on the Internet Carnival. Check out the rest of the Carnival at Working at Home on the Internet blog.

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SimplifyThis is our pursuit to conquer the complexity of overbearing business processes which should have already been simplified through the use of technology. It may be surprising to hear that we often meet small business owners such as plumbers, designers, music teachers, electricians, math tutors and other service-based professionals who cannot easily remind their customers of overdue balances or easily track which invoices they have already paid. Technology has a lot in store for many of these businesses.

Even in our own business, we find the need for the services that we are building. These services come from common-sense, real-life experiences. On a daily basis, we encounter complexity and inefficiency, especially when working with other small businesses. We believe we can solve many of these problems for ourselves, and believe our simple solutions can also be used by many other small businesses as well.

Our Approach

We believe we can create simple, intuitive and easy-to-use solutions for age-old business problems. We too are tired of feature-burdened software products that try to be everything for everyone, and end up doing nothing for anyone. Laden with too many new concepts, often learning and using this software becomes a new problem in-and-of itself. This frustration heavily influences our approach in designing our simple solutions.

“Simplicity is the soul of efficiency”

- Austin Freeman , “The Eye of Osiris”

This quote is etched in our minds, our hearts and our souls. Every decision that we make, we measure it with the yardstick of simplicity. We believe this is the only way to truly inject simplicity into running a business.

Design pundits often make a distinction between simplicity and ease of use. While being simple, our solutions also need to be extremely easy to use. Ease of use of our solutions comes from a user-centric approach, where our designs are centered around the way users work. People use software to get work done and should not be challenged with a myriad of choices for accomplishing the same task in multiple ways. Compounding these choices with new concepts to learn, then very quickly you realize why there are so many books for dummies, best practices guides and training seminars on the market. Software does not have to be this hard! We have taken it upon ourselves to find the best way for a user to accomplish tasks within our solutions, being sure not to introduce convoluted choices or strange new concepts. Our efforts should be considered failures if our solutions require users to learn new concepts just for the sake of using the software.

With these thoughts in mind, our goal is to bring more simplicity and more ease-of-use to business software – one process at a time.

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One more carnival this week: The Carnival of the Capitalists was supposed to be up on Monday, but it was delayed until tonight. Our article on bookkeepers was included — check it out here.

The Carnival of Home Business is up at the Start a Side Business Blog. Be sure to check it out!

When I came across this post by a blogger named Phil Gyford in the UK, I knew I had to share it. Being a freelancer is hard in so many ways, that anytime there is someone willing to share so much truly valuable information about it, you can’t help but share it as widely as you can.As Phil states in his post, there are some UK-specific details and some details relevant only to web designers, but overall the lessons within hold for freelancers of all types (designer, photographers, programmers, writers, etc)

Specific things he covers are:

1. When to start freelancing
2. How to sell and market yourself
3. How to be your own boss
4. Managing the accounting, expenses, pricing and invoicing (This is the one we’re hoping to help with)
5. How to be the project manager
6. How to manage a variety of other things such as: client relationships, legal concerns, IT needs and all aspects of your burgeoning career.

Lets face it, being able to do all of these things well is hard. Very hard. Some of these activities are easy for some people and difficult for others, and vice-versa. The key to being a freelancer, however is to be able to do all of them somewhat well. For those who cannot do all of these things, they often find success in identifying their weaknesses and hiring out those aspects of the job.

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(Photo courtesy of jessicafm)

The Carnival of Business is up at the MineThatData Blog. Be sure to check it out!

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Most small businesses of a certain size can certainly benefit from a fulltime bookkeeper, however not all of them require one, especially the smallest of businesses. For the smallest of businesses, all they generally need is a way to invoice customers, get paid and to pay their own bills. To be clear, I’m talking about tiny businesses with less than a handful of employees.

Invoicing customers for these businesses can be as simple as using Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel to format your invoice, and then printing and mailing them off (or sending them via email for a more electronic experience). The most important aspect in invoicing is having professional-looking invoices sent out in a timely manner and neither one of these tasks requires the help of a bookkeeper.

Receiving payments is where the rubber meets the road. Great looking invoices are important, but formatting doesn’t matter unless your customers actually pay them. One way to expedite payment is by making sure your customers have a variety of method to pay. Checks are still very important, but electronic methods of payment are becoming more and more popular. Payment methods such as electronic credit card payments, and services such as Paypal have gained a lot of traction with these small businesses and they can increase the speed at which you can book payments. Again, doing collections, especially for businesses that have taken a more electronic approach to getting paid, does not require the assistance of a bookkeeper.

Paying bills is another crucial task that can be easily managed on a weekly or monthly basis using either a banking website directly, a dedicated online bill payment website, or one of a wide variety of simple software packages. Depending on the complexity of the business, managing payables can be a time consuming task and could require the assistance of a bookkeeper, but it is usually managed in-house at a tiny business.

To summarize, bookkeepers certainly have their place in small businesses. For the smallest businesses, quarterly or annual trips to a bookkeeper to help with taxes are usually all that is required. But as a business grows to a certain point where the volume of invoices, bills and other receivables and liabilities warrant meticulous tracking and reporting, bookkeepers take on a much more important role.

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One of the great things about blogging is the sense of community, and one of the best ways to join a community in the blogsphere is through blog carnivals. So what is a blog carnival? From
Blogcarnival.com:

“A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.

There is so much stuff in the blog-o-sphere, just finding interesting stuff is hard. If there is a carnival for a topic you are interested in, following that carnival is a great way to learn what bloggers are saying about that topic. If you are blogging on that topic, the carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers.”

Following are a few blog carnivals that have some affinity with what we are trying to accomplish with SimplifyThis. Over the next few weeks and months, we intend to join and contribute to several of these carnivals.

• Carnival of the Capitalists Overview / Current Edition (From 10/23)
• The Carnival of Business: Overview / Current Edition (from 10/23)
• Carnival of Entrepreneurship:

  Overview / Current Edition (from 6/16)

• Carnival of Home Business: Overview / Current Edition (from 10/24)
• Working at Home Carnival: Overview / Current Edition (from 10/27)

If you know of any other carnivals that we should be aware of, please drop us a line.

(Photo courtesy of tanjila)

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There is a good article on the Wall Street Journal’s “Startup Journal” that gives some advice about starting a business as a 20-something. The article basically calls out a few tips that budding young business starters should consider when starting their business. Although the advice holds true for new businesses of all kinds, I have to say, it’s quite refreshing to read an article about starting a business that is different from the next big internet idea. The article gives the following three pieces of high-level advice:

1. Get professional help. Basically, hire out things you are not good at. Accounting, Legal concerns and other specialty skills fall into this category.
2. Don’t live like a millionaire at 25. This is a critical piece of advice, especially in the age of richly valued internet startups. Many young people start new internet-based businesses in hopes of being the next Google, but, many of the big internet successes happened due to a lot of being in the right place at the right time and having the right product at the right time in the evolution of a particular market (i.e., Search, Video sharing, Internet retailing, etc). Don’t get ahead of yourself and expect to be like this guy or this guy, or even these guys. Build your business slowly and deliberately and with the right amount of hard work and luck, your success will follow.
3. Build your resume — fast.
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   Simply put, use some strategies to help your business seem more credible. If you surround yourself with your high school friends, you probably won’t be taken seriously.

Starting a business or even a side job takes a lot of time and effort. The advice provided makes sure you are making the most of your efforts and ultimately are positioned for success. After all, most people that start new businesses aren’t trying to be the next Microsoft or Yahoo, they’re trying to have more control and freedom in their lives.
(Photo courtesy of ozzie)

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