Data organisation

I’m a fan of anything that gives a store for day-to-day information and keeps data synchronized between devices so I was keen to give Evernote a try. It has grown on me in a short amount of time. It’s great for keeping snippets of information, replacing post-its and scraps of notes, and a store for pasting research from the internet.

It’s got a fairly unique set of features and fills a gap in my workflow I’d been looking to fill in terms of applications, so here are ways to use Evernote to make life easier.

1. A store for those day-to-day snippets of information so achieving more organisation and less clutter. Let Evernote clean your office.

2. A destination for emails that don’t fit into the office filing system. Just forward them to your Evernote account.

3. When you do research online, compile the relevant information from each page into a research file in Evernote.

4. Take notes during meetings.

5. An always-accessible idea file

6. Plan big projects in Evernote - start a new notebook for a particular project and sort different tasks and research topics using the tags feature. Now, everything you could possibly want to recall or act on regarding a project will be in one spot.

HMRC scam emails

It looks like the scam Reveunue emails contine. This is the latest one received:

Tax Refund Notification

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity, we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of 1527.29 GBP. Please submit the tax refund request and allow 6-9 days in order to process it.

Click Here to submit you tax refund request

Note : A refund can be delayed a variety of reasons, for example submitting invalid records or applying after deadline.

Yours Sincerely

HM Revenue & Customs

| © Crown Copyright | Terms & conditions | Privacy policy |

The graphics have been removed from the text above and make it look quite convincing but let's face it the Revenue are never going to try that hard to give back tax!

Sage 50 Accounts 2010 - launch Sep 2009

Sage 50 Accounts 2010 is due to be launched next month.

New features include:

- Sage Pay "pay now" option
For Sage Pay users there is the ability to put a "pay now" button on invoices that will enable customers to make immediate payments.

- Credit note raising directly from an invoice

- Barcode creation

- Cash Register management

- Improved data importing

For more details call Sharon or Karl on 01462 687339

HMRC security breach

IT security is a hot topic again with fraudulent tax claims being made to HM Revenue & Customs. It appears that an Accountant was logged on to the Government Gateway and unknowingly the PC was taken over by an IP address in the Far East and fraudulant tax claims made.

This is a salutory reminder about IT security to all businesses and throws up the following points to consider:

- Password security should be reviewed and robust rules applied.
- Staff should not know each others passwords and shared passwords should not be used.
- What obligations does your business have under the Data Protection Act? What liability might you have for breaches?
- How is remote access to your systems regulated?
- How secure are the PC's being used to access the systems remotely?

The security topic is vast and it is easy to overlook and think it will never happen but as regular headlines prove it is a real danger to businesses.

Sage Accounts 50 errors

We have come across a number of instances of what seems to be a bug in Version 15 (2009) that is creating what is called a Bucket corruption. This causes the trial balance to not balance, but the corruption does not show up on Disk Doctor warnings.

This can be relatively easily fixed, but I believe if you speak to Sage they are charging £300-£500 to put it right.

For a lower cost solution to this or to discuss any other Sage Accounts 50 issues call Sharon or Karl on 01462 687339.

Webshop opportunity

Virtual Business Source have teamed up with Norwegian company eXcommerce to offer low cost, high functionality, professionally designed ecommerce websites.

This recession-busting product allows any business to enter the world of ecommerce, so broadening their potential customer base to anyone in the world with access to the internet. For a small monthly subscription and potentially no upfront design costs a business can be selling online within 48 hours using the template driven software.

Read more and visit the eXcommerce demo site. If interested call 01462 687339.

Small business software

When looking at accounting software for a small business it is easy just to focus on the accounting aspects. There are a number of packages that will deal with the accounting for a business perfectly well. However the question to as is will the software help you to develop and grow your bisiness?

These days business owners need every advantage possible and so software that can provide some or all of the following should be sought:

- CRM (marketing)
- Logistics (building and moving things)
- E-commerce (selling over the internet)
- Document management
- Integration with Outlook
- Remote access (capable of being used when away from the office)

For an example of software that does all this at small business prices look at Mamut Business Software.