ProfitBooks is the simplest online accounting software that lets you create great looking professionals invoices and receive payments from your customers in no time!
ProfitBooks lets you :
Create Time-based invoices from tasks
Create ‘Cash Invoices’ for cash transactions
Track overdue invoices and receivables
Identify customers who owe you and follow up with them
Everything you need to run your business
See how you can save time and manage finances easily with Profitbooks
Customize Everything
You can customize invoice numbers, footer information and change template. Add custom fields to capture more information related to your business process.
Recurring Invoices
Automate your invoices by setting a frequency for future billing. This feature can save lot of time when you need to bill your clients periodically (monthly, yearly, etc).
Do More
Convert an estimate to invoice, create delivery challans from the invoices or directly email invoice PDF to your clients. Do lot more.
Track Day To Day Expenses
Know where your money is going and organize your spending easily.
ProfitBooks lets you :
Attach scanned expense receipts
Categorise expenses according to projects
Record payment made to vendors
Track your payables
Record stock purchases
Create professional Purchase Orders and send them directly to your vendors.
Record Banking Transactions
Get all your bank accounts at one place. Easily record cash withdrawals, deposits and transfers from a simple interface.
Unlike traditional (read complicated) accounting systems, you don’t need to worry about the debit-credit effect. Just simply record the transactions as they happen and all the necessary accounting will be automatically done in the background.
Manage your stock efficiently
Manage all the products, their production, transfer, wastage and everything else easily with ProfitBooks!
Maintain multiple Warehouses
Allocate batch numbers
Maintain re-order level
Identify top-selling product
View all transactions at one place
Complete Accounting
ProfitBooks is designed keeping Indian Accounting Standards in mind. It presents a very simple interface that even non-accountant can understand and takes care of all the complexity behind the scenes.
ProfitBooks lets you :
Record Journal entries
Maintain chart of accounts & taxes
Simple accounting entry screen to record all type of transactions
Invite an auditor to review your books
Run Monthly Payroll In Minutes
Save time every month by processing payroll with just few clicks. Accounting entries are recorded and salary slips are generated automatically.
Manage employee leaves
Define salary structure easily
Maintain pay revision history
Generate payment advice for bank
Payhead wise reports
Built For Entire Team
Work become much easier when we collaborate. With ProfitBooks, you can add new users and assign them specific roles. Users can create tasks, record their time using timesheets and manage work using projects. Better productivity means more work and more work means more profit!
Take Better Decisions
With in-depth reports available at a click of a button, you always know whats going on in your business.
Balance Sheet, Trial Balance and Profit & Loss reports
Customer Statement & Outstanding due
Product wise reports
Task, Timesheet reports
Payroll reports
and various other useful reports.
Mr. Rakesh is a distributor of industrial pumps since past couple of years. Recently, he met a potential customer at one exhibition and after explaining about the products he sent a quotation to that customer. After receiving that quote, first thing that customer did was to google Mr. Rakesh’s company name on Google! He was hoping to find more about the company, its product range and details of existing customers. Guess what, he found nothing.
That customer just couldn’t build enough confidence to do business with Mr. Rakesh and eventually stopped responding to calls.
If this story sounds familiar to you, probably you do not have web presence and for your potential customers, your company does not exist!
Why its important to have a web presence?
Well, its very obvious. Nowadays, every customer turns up to Google before making any purchase decision. If you send a casual introductory mail to a recently met person, chances are – he will try to find more information about you on Linkedin or search for your company on his favorite search engine.
People do this because they want to get comfortable with you before doing any business and to do that they will try to find as much information as possible from various sources.
When done right, online presence can help you establish a credible brand image, spread awareness about the products/services you are selling and get you more leads and customers.
How to build a strong web presence of your business?
The process of building a web presence does not happen overnight and it requires a well thought strategy and investment in terms of time. Ready for it? Lets see how you can create online presence for your business with minimum efforts.
Step 1- Setup Goals
We can’t start working on building online presence just because somebody told us to do so. There has to be some well defined goals. Our goals can and should change with the time but first its required to set measurable goals and a time frame. Ask yourself why you want to do this. Below are some of the goals you can start with:
Provide information about the product or services
Increase brand awareness
Generate leads for the business
Another way to find a right goal is to research about your competitor. Just google them and see how they are managing their web presence. Once you achieve your first goal, you can move on to the next one.
Step 2- Get your company website right
Consider company website as the most important part of this project. For most of your potential customers, it will be the starting point where they can learn more about what you have to offer, know about the work you have done so far and contact you for further discussion.
You can hire a web design company to work on your website but if you have limited budget, you can do it on your own without having technical skills.
Check this easy website builder to get started. Most of these sites also offer a free plan and you are required to pay only when need additional services like a custom domain name.
A good company website should have a clear information about the products or services and contact details. Avoid using flash and large images that might slow down the site and affect visitor’s experience.
Next step is to ensure that the company website is discoverable on Google. You can read this guide to search engine optimization which might sound like a too much of work for a non-technical person. However, its really worth it once you grasp the basic concepts. Objective here is to optimize pages for your company name and the names of your products or services which visitors might enter in search engines.
It might take a while for your website to appear in search results. So, have some patience and work on other aspects of web presence.
Step 3 – Effectively Use Social Media
This is an easy part. You can get overwhelmed with the number of social media sites available today but to keep it simple, lets start with the big 3. Most of us already have a profile on Facebook. It takes less than 5 minutes to create a page on facebook for your business. Check out this presentation below.
Next, create accounts on Twitter and Linkedin. I won’t recommend to go and create profile on every social network out there. It won’t work if you can’t post regularly on these networks.
Here are some useful tips to build a brand on social media:
Project a professional image of your company by using beautiful photos/background
Decide the posting frequency and stick to it. Normally, you should post thrice a week on Facebook, twice a week on Linkedin and thrice a day on Twitter
Do not post only about your products. You should provide value by talking about your industry or by providing useful tips
Respond to comments and engage your audience.
Pro Tip – Use Hootsuit to manage upto 3 social profiles at one place. You can also schedule the future posts.
Step 4 – Build Relationships
No matter which industry your business belongs to, I’m sure that there will be few online communities related to that industry. It will be worth finding out the communities where individuals or thought leaders from similar industry share their views. By participating in the relevant discussions and being an active member, you can start building relationships.
Why is this so important? Well, chances are these people are better connected than you are and they might be able to help introduce you to others who are in your industry. New connections can be customers or partners who can help you grow your business.
Next question is, where to start from? Google groups and Linkedin Groups are the best places to start. Quora is another great question-answer platform where users help each other on various topics. Important thing to note here is, you should participate in the discussion with an intention to add value, avoid advertising your products or services directly as community might ban you for that.
Also never forget the good old networking that we do at events or in business expos. When more and more people start recognising you offline, they will start looking for you on search engines and social networks online.
Step 5 – Keep improving using analytics
Like we track the performance of our business using a good accounting software, we should also track how we are doing online on regular basis. Once you start building online presence for your business, its important to know if the efforts are paying off well. We should track the progress from day 1 and keep improving it till we reach our goals.
Start by tracking website visitors. Google Analytics is great free tool to track website performance. It gives you detailed statistics about the users visiting your homepage like their location, browser or device they from where they accessed the site, their age, source they came from and how they browsed through the pages.
Social media performance can be tracked by recording the growth of followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook Page.
Over the period of time, you will start recognising the trend. There could be spike or dip in the website traffic based on certain events. For example, you might see a surge in traffic after your participation in a business expo. Once you have this data, you can take better decision for your business.
Conclusion
By now, you must have realised the importance of building online presence for your business. It has a huge potential to build a good brand image, spread awareness and attract new customers.
You don’t have to be everywhere but the business should be discoverable through search engines. You can build meaningful relationships online and open channels for customer acquisition.
The process is time consuming and it might take a while for results to show up. Have patience and keep improving. If you have a nice tip to share with other reader, please post it in comments below.
In simple words, business metrics is the collection of relevant and meaningful business data that can help you take informed decisions to grow your business. Some people call it KPI (Key Performance Indicators) or analytics.
Depending on the nature of your business there could by 100s of KPIs you can track but I would definitely not advice to waste time on monitoring too much data. Business owners have already too much on their plate and big words like these only make them frown.
However, collecting, analyzing and using the right data can help us make smarter business decisions about our time, our budget and our team. We’ve seen it with our own successes. We need to get to a point where we can treat our efforts — marketing channels, product features, team hours — as levers; when we push or pull one, we know what result to expect. We can’t depend on luck; this will be the only way to make business growth systematic.
Here is a list of 6 key metrics every successful business track without thinking but most small business ignore or procrastinate.
1) Cost Of Acquisition (CoA)
If you have a business, you need customers. You need to find these customers and persuade them to buy your product or service. This is called customer acquisition and generally it costs money. Advertising & Marketing costs are increasing day by day and investing in wrong marketing channel can badly affect profit margins of your business.
So, how to calculate cost of customer acquisition? Its very simple, take a look at below formula:
Cost of Customer Acquisition = Total Sales & Marketing Cost / Number of New Customers Added
Lets say, you spent Rs. 50,000 on sales & marketing and got 10 new customers on board, so the average cost of acquisition will be Rs. 5,000. This is overly simplified example. In reality, you should consider all the hidden costs such as salary of your sales team, phone bills, internet bill or any other expense that goes into making a sale.
Its also possible that every customer is paying different amount for your product or service. So, use the term ‘average’ with an intention to get meaningful insights.
If you are running multiple marketing campaigns, you should track the customer acquired during each campaign. This might not be as easy as it sounds as you will have to track the source of every customer. At ProfitBooks, we normally ask customers this question during a welcome call and record it in our internal CRM. You might find it cumbersome to get this data but it will be worth the effort.
Why track cost of customer acquisition? Well, in above example, if the cost of your product is Rs. 3,000 and you are spending Rs. 5,000 to acquire new customers, you are clearly making losses.
This business metrics will also help you understand which marketing channel is working for you and helping you generate more profit.
2) Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
According to the definition on WikiPedia, revenue or turnover is income that a company receives from its normal business activities, usually from the sale of goods and services to customers. Companies usually calculate and report revenue for a quarter or a year.
Monthly recurring revenue is the amount of revenue you expect to receive every month. Idea is not to track how much you are gaining or losing, the real question we are trying to answer here is “Will that revenue be here tomorrow?”
We should focus on building a sustainable business and thats why tracking MRR is very important. Cashflow is a lifeline of any business and it must be positive.
If you are into SaaS (Software as a Service) business like ours, its the key business metrics you should track without fail. You don’t need fancy tools to track this number. A simple excel sheet is good enough.
3) Expense By Category
We all know the importance of tracking business expenses, but its really surprising that most business owners consider only the large expenses like purchase of raw material or appliances. I know a startup owner who used to order pizzas for his small team every Friday. It was a nice ritual to unwind from a hectic week. During tax filing time, he collected all the bills for previous year and shocked to see that he had spent more than Rs. 50,000 only on Pizzas! Small expenses are easy to ignore but they can affect the profit margin if not controlled.
Right from the day 1 of your business, you should track every small expense like travel, phone bill, Tea/Coffee bills, expenses incurred during recreational activities and so on. Apart from big ticket purchases and marketing expenditure, all small things like these matter in a long run. Track spends in every category and try to minimize it every month.
Learn how to track business expenses with ProfitBooks.
4) Highest & Lowest Selling Product/Service
In every business there are certain products or services that sell well as compared to other items. These top selling products fetch the major chunk of total MRR and make business owners happy. So happy that they ignore the less popular products and miss the opportunity to improve them.
So rather than focusing only on collective sales of all the products, business owners should track sales of every individual product or service. If something is selling well, we should know why. We should ask customers why they preferred that product and what made them take that decision. Answers to these questions will help you improve the lesser selling product/service.
If you are using a good accounting software, this process can be automated. Most softwares today give one-click access to the reports that give intelligent data about the product sales.
5) High Value Customers
High value customers are the customers that keep coming back and buy your product. They are the advocates of your product/service and sometimes help you get more customers through reference. In some businesses, retaining customers determines the future survival of the business.
If you track and keep an eye on your high value customers, you are more likely to succeed in your business. You can take measures to nurture them so that they give you consistent business over the period of time.
They will also be happy to provide you testimonials which you can use to persuade new customers. Its also easier to upsell to these type of customers. This important business metric will help you to grow your business in a methodological way.
Below image shows how you can find out high value customers with ProfitBooks accounting software.
6) Staff Productivity.
Measuring the staff productivity is important for obvious reasons. An under-utilised staff is a liability to your business. Having trust or perception without any supporting data that the staff is hard working can be deceiving and surely not a good sign of a successful business. From receptionist to your highly skilled engineer, you should track productivity of everyone.
Idea here is not to become a police but to find the opportunities to improve utilisation of available resources.
So what should be tracked and how to track? First, find a way to assign roles and responsibilities. You can use any task management tool for this. Some business use sophisticated project management software designed specially for their industry. Every staff should have objectives or tasks and a timeline associated with that goal.
If your receptionist is spending entire day on phone calls, you should track the type of calls. For example, how many of them were sales calls or support calls. Later you can dig deeper and find out if there are repeated support calls. If thats the case, you can build a knowledge base to answer common questions.
A software company track how much time was spent on development and defect fixing. You can apply same principle to track sales team’s performance. You will not only know what is going on in your business but will also find opportunities to save time which can be used for more productive work.
Every business owner wants to put their products or services in front of their potential customers. However, most of the traditional ways cost money and not everyone can buy TV ADs when they are just starting up the business. Don’t worry as its still possible to successfully promote your business without spending a lot of money.
So to prove my point, I’m putting up together a list of 8 free ways to promote your business. These marketing ideas would not cost you money but require one time investment of your time.
Marketing Idea #1 – Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
What is the first thing that people do when they are planning to buy something? Well, they search for that product or service on Google. First they try to collect as much information as they can about the product and then they search for vendors who sell that product. So, if your website is not appearing in Google search, that means you virtually do not exist.
How can we fix this? Easy way to is to hire someone who can optimize your website for search engine but even in that case you need to be aware of the process, otherwise you might end up getting penalized by Google. Its not very difficult to learn these techniques. Below are some links to get you started :
Beginners Guide to SEO.
Google’s SEO Guide in Hindi
Comprehensive Guide to SEO
By reading these guides, you can tweak your website and rank higher on Google and other search engines. Even if you chose to hire an SEO agency, they won’t be able to fool you if you are aware of the process.
Marketing Idea #2 – List Your Products In Business Directories
Buyers search for vendors in popular business directories. If you sell B2B products, add a free listing on IndiaMart, Trade India and Indian Yellow Pages. These are popular business to business directories.
If you sell directly to customers, list free on Just Dial, Ask Me and Get It. These services offer mobile apps and attract huge traffic. You can list services as well on these sites for free.
If you sell Software then SoftwareSuggest is a very good directory. It lists softwares in various categories like HR, CRM, ERP, etc. I have listed our accounting software there and we get good response from that listing.
Marketing Idea #3 – List On Google My Business (Local Business Listing)
Google is making search personal and now displays results that are tailored for your location. For example, if you search for a McDonalds, it will show you the one in your city with a map. So, it has almost become mandatory for a business to get listed on Google Local.
Google has made it easy to add & manage your location on map. You can also manage your Google Plus profile from the same place. Just head over to Google My Business and claim your listing. If you don’t have a physical shop, you can even add your office location and give details about your business.
Marketing Idea #4 – Use The Power Of Social Media
We all know how our PM Modi leveraged the power of social media to win Lok Sabha polls in 2014. New York Times even called him social media politician and Business Todays wrote a case study on his social media strategies.
To start with, you should create profiles on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. This will not only help you get more customers but you can engage them and get quality feedback from them about your products or services. ProfitBooks’ Twitter & FaceBook page alone amounts for 20% of our total traffic.
Here is a good guide to get started with social media. Also check this tutorial.
Frequency of your posts is the key here. If you post regularly, you will gain popularity and loyal subscribers who can convert to your customers at a later stage. You can share your business updates or news related to your industry. Best way is to follow the influencers in your industry and monitor their activity. Ideally you should post twice a week on Facebook and 3-4 times a day on Twitter.
Marketing Idea #5 – Answer Questions
When people are stuck and looking to solve their pain point, they turn up to specific forums on Internet. QnA sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers are popular places where you can find new customers. People also post their questions on Linkedin Groups.
So how can you benefit from it? Create accounts on these sites and start searching for your product or service. For example, I will search for ‘Accounting Software’ as I want to create awareness about ProfitBooks. You will get lot of questions related to your product. People might be asking about the top companies that sell this product or comparisons between different products and so on.
Start answering with the easy question and then move towards complicated questions. Again taking example of ProfitBooks, I searched for ‘Best Accounting Software‘ on Quora and got hundreds of questions around this topic. Then, I simply started answering and recommending ProfitBooks to users. We get a good amount of traffic every month via Quora.
You can do the same on Yahoo Answers and Linkedin Groups. All these 3 networks are very influential. Best part is, these sites are indexed by Google. So, your answers will appear in Google search whenever anyone searches for it. Isn’t it great?
Just be sure to answer with an intention to help. Nobody likes hard selling
Marketing Idea #6 – Attend Networking Events/Meetups
Events/Expos/Meetups are the great places to expand your network and find new customers. Just search for “business events in (your city)” and Google with come up with list of upcoming events. Check AllEvents.in for events in various categories. Most of these events are free and attract customers as well as distributors/resellers/consultants.
Slowly, you will start to realize that people attend these events just to meet other people and the people you will meet there can turn into your customer. I had met one person in one these events and now that guy is our distributor.
Another site which I absolutely love is Meetup.com. In my city – Pune, lot of entrepreneurs, startup owners meet frequently using this site. I make it a point to attend as many meetups as I can during weekends. People coming to these meetups are open minded and are open to new ideas or partnerships.
You will be amazed to see the value you can get out of these events, so make sure you start attending these events on regular basis.
Marketing Idea #7 – Showcase Your Product on YouTube
Did you know that over 4 billion videos are played on YouTube daily? This number is growing every passing day. So, it makes a whole lot of sense to upload a video about your product or service right away! Best part is, this video will appear in search results as well giving your product more visibility.
How to get started? First decide what you are going to create. For products, a short 2 minute demo will work great and in case of service, you can record a testimonial by a client and upload it. YouTube offers nice tools to edit the uploaded video. For example, you can add narration or music, trim video and do much more.
Remember to use product name or related keywords in the title and description of the video. Once you have uploaded multiple videos, you can create a channel like one we have created for showcasing product tutorials. If you came come up with interesting content that can go viral, you will hit the jackpot and leads will flood your inbox.
Marketing Idea #8 – Offer A Deal On Groupon
Deal sites like Groupon and Coupon Dunia attract millions of users to their portals. So, if you can come up with a mouth watering deal, you can get good number of buyers at no cost.
This is how it works – You will contact Groupon and their executives will meet you at your office. Then, you have to agree on a good discount (more than 30%) and commission percentage that will go to Groupon. Once this is done, Groupon will do the promotion for you. They have a huge database of registered users. Process will be more or less similar in case of other deal sites.
Now the big question – Will offering heavy discounts affect my brand? Well, every big brand out there is offering discounts in the name of Diwali offer, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and every small event you never cared about before. So relax and focus on getting customers.
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