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Outsource These Tasks for Business Success

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Outsourcing|Outsource These Tasks for Business SuccessDo you have ambitious plans for your business but find yourself bogged down by routine tasks? If so, you will know how frustrating it is when your daily workload stands in the way of your business goals. Developing strategies for future growth so that you can scale your business successfully is vital to keep it moving forward. But when all your time is taken up on the basics of running your business, it can feel you are missing out on opportunities.

Seeing your competitors scaling their ventures while you watch from the sidelines is not something any entrepreneur wants to experience. So, taking decisive action and implementing changes that will help reclaim your time and focus on your business’s strategic direction is really beneficial. Outsourcing some of your daily tasks is an excellent way to free up your time, here are just some of the business tasks you can outsource:

IT Support

Nowadays, every business is dependent on its computer systems to keep it up and running. So, if the system fails for any reason, you need to know that you have a team on hand, and ready to help at the times you need it most is invaluable. Outsourcing your IT support is beneficial in many ways and plays a vital part in keeping your business running efficiently. When you outsource your IT support, you will benefit from help provided by a team with up-to-date knowledge and the skills required to resolve all of your IT issues quickly. This expert help allows your team to work efficiently with minimal system downtime, which is excellent news for your business and its reputation.

Bookkeeping

Keeping your accounts up-to-date and staying on top of your bookkeeping are essential tasks, but they can also be incredibly time-consuming. Add payroll into the mix, and you have a task that is more than a full-time job. Trying to perform bookkeeping tasks accurately can be highly stressful, as making a mistake can have serious consequences, so maintaining accurate accounts is essential. For this reason, many companies choose outsourced bookkeeping provided by a company that they trust. Outsourcing your business’s bookkeeping can help you to gain the peace of mind that your bookkeeping is taken care of and that you no longer need to spend your time trying to tackle complex accounting tasks.

Marketing

The marketing of your business encompasses a wide range of tasks, and paying attention to each of these is vital to getting your business noticed by your target market. But, when you are short on time, it can be hard to make your marketing efforts as effective as they could be. Many business owners find themselves taking an inconsistent approach to their marketing as they do not have the time or knowledge to focus on a solid marketing strategy. If this is an issue that you struggle with, discussing your needs with an external marketing agency could provide you with the perfect solution and help your business achieve the success that it deserves.

How to Organize Expense Reports for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Expense Reports|How to Organize Expense Reports for Your BusinessDid you know that 5% of small business owners get audited each year? While the likelihood of your business getting audited by the IRS is low, it’s still important to keep your business expenses organized. Not only does that protect you on the off-chance you do get audited, but it helps you avoid paying more taxes.

Expense reports are a great way to track how much you and your employees spend. You want to have receipts and documentation to support all deductions you take at tax time.

This guide will discuss how you can track expenses and avoid tax-related headaches.

What Is an Expense Report Used For?

An expense report lists all costs related to running a company. Certain purchases are needed to run a business, such as:

  • Traveling for an event or conference
  • Entertaining and hosting clients
  • Driving your car for work
  • Meals, parking, gas, and hotel costs related to work
  • Supplies and hardware

Many of these costs are deductible when you file your business taxes. However, they need to be documented and organized.

Employees also use expense reports to get reimbursed by their employers. If an employee pays for something out of their pocket, you’ll want to verify that they paid what they’re claiming.

What’s Included in Expense Reports?

Whether you use paper or software to do your expense reports, they need to include a few things. These details include:

  • Date: The date the expense was incurred
  • Cost: The total amount for the expense, including taxes and tip
  • Description: A description of what the expense was
  • Category: What type of expense it was, such as a plane ticket or meal

You can require other details on your expense reports depending upon your needs. Noting what client the expense was for will help you stay even more organized.

Keep Your Receipts

Filling and organizing your receipts is essential to creating expense reports. Your receipts provide physical proof of the deductions your business claims on its taxes.
However, keeping around piles of receipts can take up a lot of room. You also run the risk of losing important documents.

Many programs use AI-based receipt capture to organize expenses. You can take a picture of your receipt with your smartphone. The image then gets uploaded and stored in your expense report system.

Use an Expense Report Platform

A software program is a great way to create an expense report without sifting through a ton of paperwork. For example, Bento for Business uses virtual cards so employees can track their expenses.

Employers can set daily limits for how much their employees spend. Employees can snap photos of their receipts and upload them into the system. Bento for Business then matches the transactions with the receipts, making the expense report process seamless and fast.

Save Time and Money With a Reliable Expense Report System

It’s important to stay organized with your business’s expense reports. Avoid stress around tax time and have the proof for all of your deductions with comprehensive expense reports.

Check out one of our other articles to improve your business’s practices.

Improve Your Career Prospects With This Sound Advice

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StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Career Prospects|Improve Your Career Prospects With This Sound AdviceTrying to maximize your career opportunities and get the best professional future for yourself is the ideal way to love what you do. But this is a journey and a process, and you need to make sure you work on the best ways of being able to improve this process and make your prospects better in the future. There are a lot of things that play a part in this, and it is important to focus on the best ways of achieving this.

Make sure you come up with some of the key ideas that will help you to improve your career prospects and make you more successful. Working toward the career of your dreams is something that can start happening right now, and this is certainly something you need to be working toward as much as possible. Here are some of the best ways of being able to improve your career prospects.

Improve Your Qualifications

Improving your qualifications and experience is the best thing you can do to help improve and enhance your career prospects. This is something you have to make sure you focus on when you’re trying to achieve the right levels of success. There are a lot of options you can use here when you are looking to improve your professional status. For instance, looking at things like a school for massage therapy would be a great idea if you want to go into this field for a career. So, you need to try to think about some of the best ways of improving qualifications and making the right choices for the future right now.

Recalibrate Your Career Goals

Recalibrating your career goals is one of the best ways of being able to achieve this, and you need to make sure you look for ways to do this. Making changes to your career goals and expectations is important when you are trying to find some of the best ways of improving your future career. This means rethinking what you want to do, and the path or paths you are going to take to give you the best possible opportunity of getting there.

Be Ambitious

Ambition is crucial in business, and it is essential that you make sure you come up with some of the best ways of improving your career and making it better as a result. This is one of the key things that you need to keep in mind when you are trying to make your career prospects better as much as possible. There are so many ideas that play a role in this, and being ambitious is one of the best things that you can do to achieve success with this.

These are just a few of the key ideas that you need to think about when it comes to improving your career prospects and trying to make things better for the future right now. There are so many ideas that will play a part in this, and you need to try to make sure you come up with some of the best ideas that will help you here. Improving and boosting your career is something that you have to try to make the most of right now.

What Are The Different Levels Of Customer Engagement?

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Engagement|What Are The Different Levels Of Customer Engagement?There are many different levels to customer engagement. This can be important to consider when building a comprehensive and varied marketing strategy – some companies can end up focusing too much on one stage of the funnel (such as focusing on new customers and neglecting loyal customers), which can lead to you losing customers at other stages. Below are the five main levels of customer engagement and how to nurture each of these consumers.

Aware consumers

The first stage of engaging customers is to make them aware of your company. Aware consumers are those that haven’t yet used your company and who may not even show an interest – however they are familiar with your brand. Most of us are more likely to use a company if we’re familiar with them, which is why building brand awareness is so important.

You can build brand awareness by using advertising strategies such as PPC ads, posters, billboards and flyers. A marketing agency can serve as a brand catalyst, helping you to build this awareness and helping you to construct a recognized brand, which typically requires elements such as a memorable company name, eye-catching logo and identifiable color scheme.

Leads

Leads are consumers who are yet to become customers, but who show genuine interest and potential. To generate leads, you need to not just make customers aware of your brand, but appeal to their wants and needs.

There are so many different marketing strategies that you can use to acquire leads. Creating engaging informative content is often a great way of building leads – detailed product descriptions and explainer videos are great for hooking customers’ interest. You can also use sales pitches, tasters and demos to get consumers interested. Generally speaking, lead generation is best achieved by targeting your marketing at specific consumer groups using personalised strategies. Not everyone is going to reeled in the same way.

New customers

Only by turning leads into customers can you make money. Some leads will naturally convert themselves, while others will need more convincing – it’s important to nurture both types of leads.

For those leads that are already willing to buy your product, you should focus on making the payment process as easy as possible – promising leads may still be scared away if you don’t offer enough payment options or if your checkout process is overly complicated. When it comes to leads that require extra persuasion, you may have to do some negotiating. Things like follow-up phone calls, pop-ups discouraging people from leaving your website or last minute discounts can all be used to convert undecided leads.

Loyal customers

Loyal customers are customers who continuously use your service or continuously buy your product. These types of customers can help you to maintain a steady flow of income without having to constantly convert new leads.

You can generate loyal customers by nurturing your new customers. Don’t just focus on taking their money – check back on them by asking for feedback and support them with the product or service if necessary. Offering return discounts or introducing loyalty reward schemes can be another way of helping to encourage loyal customers. All in all, don’t neglect the customers you already have.

Advocates

Advocates are not just loyal customers, but customers who are willing to fight to defend your brand and who take it upon themselves to recommend you to others. These customers can essentially provide free marketing for you.

Every business should aim to build customers that are advocates for their brand. This typically involves getting to know your customers and rewarding them for their loyalty. You can even introduce a referral program that encourages customers to help find you new customers in exchange for rewards.

Why We Aren’t Prepared for What’s Waiting Over the Horizon in 2022 and Beyond

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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective Article |Over the Horizon in 2022|Why We Aren’t Prepared for What’s Waiting Over the Horizon in 2022 and BeyondAn ambulance is racing down the freeway, transporting a suspected heart attack victim in critical condition. Long before the patient arrives at the hospital, doctors are remotely examining his condition, pouring through up-to-the-second data from sensors and video feeds transmitted from the ambulance over a 5G wireless connection. Even before he gets wheeled into the emergency room, the attending physicians already have a detailed picture of the problem and are ready to go to work. Or, even more exciting, the patient’s life was saved by being remotely treated while in the ambulance.

Amazing stuff, but it’s just the coming attraction.

We’re on the cusp of a transformative era where the deployment of real-time, event-driven technologies turns vast volumes of data into actionable information, leading to fundamental improvements in everything from commerce to personal security. For example, if a child gets lost in Central Park, her picture could be automatically transmitted to thousands of video cameras equipped with AI recognition to enable searchers to find her.

Or think about filling your grocery lists with the help of intelligent shopping carts that guide shoppers through a supermarket, optimizing their route and making suggestions based on what it knows about their buying habits. (In fact, these intelligent shopping carts are already being tested in Israel and the results show shoppers using them are spending on average 20% more per visit.)

That’s a glimpse into our future – if we do it right. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. As cool as it sounds – and it is – this sort of advanced functionality is complicated and requires a reliable infrastructure that can guarantee the kind of high-speed bandwidth for the transfer of massive volumes of information – which still needs to be built.

Gaining an Edge

One advancement that will help speed this transition is the emergence of multi-access edge computing (MEC), which is essentially a distributed architecture where compute and cloud-like capabilities get pushed out to the edge of the network. This will be key because the new applications we’re talking about put extra demands on network capabilities, particularly when it comes to low latency, high bandwidth, and resource consumption. The telcos are best-positioned to lead the way here and we should expect to hear more from them over the next few years.

Think of the possibilities that would arise as massive amounts of data get filtered and processed on the edge in actual real-time as these systems react instantaneously to help manage critical events. Think back to our connected ambulance example. The system is communicating with the biometric systems monitoring the patient in the ambulance. If something about their condition changes, the emergency personnel in the hospital are immediately forwarded an analysis of the voluminous and complex data collected at the edge.

A lot is going on in the background as this deployment must support the dynamic movement of data in a distributed edge-enabled network. While the ambulance moves down the road, data sent from that vehicle must get transferred reliably. Maintaining ongoing contact with the ambulance literally becomes a matter of life and death where the system must guarantee that the information will get picked up by the next MEC down the road.

The Developer’s Dilemma

When it comes to designing applications that make all of that work seamlessly at the edge, we immediately encounter two problems. One is a developmental challenge, the second an operational one.

From a development perspective, you need to tie everything together to create real-time systems that essentially sense, analyze, and act on situations of interest. That’s not easy. Operationally, how do you deploy and then keep this edifice up and running? And how do you make sure that the infrastructure can handle the load as there’s a need for more capacity?

Also, an event-driven application in a distributed environment (such as when a connected vehicle changes from one network to the next) needs to be able to share data across multiple administrative domains. That raises new multi-tenancy issues. Do we share data across multiple administrative domains? How do we do that? Am I sharing inside the company or outside the company? My point being, that in a distributed environment, these developmental and operational issues get extremely complex in a hurry.

Think again about the example of our ambulance passing one MEC after another as it speeds to the hospital. The MEC is running the logic – essentially serving as a mini-cloud – where it’s analyzing the streaming data on the patient, such as an EKG. When the vehicle moves from one MEC to the next, however, what we refer to as the “state information” from the ambulance needs to get transferred seamlessly when the ambulance connects to a new MEC, rather than re-calculated from scratch.

Make it Simple

These types of applications are highly complex, and they won’t work with traditional development platforms where a simple application may take months or longer to create. This is the third time in my career that I’m building distributed systems. I did it at Ingres and Forte – and now again at Vantiq – and I can say from experience that it’s incredibly difficult. Things are getting too complex for us to hard code anymore. Even elite coders are discovering that this kind of task is near impossible and would require a series of discrete products to get the job done; and even then, it might take months to finish the project.

Frankly, we need to make coding a lot simpler – to find ways to help developers convert high-level operational processes into a framework for real digital applications.

One way to overcome this hurdle is to embrace an abstracted low-code framework that allows developers to handle the complexity that they’ll face in these kinds of scenarios. These low-code tools allow for a more agile framework that developers can use to create solutions much more quickly. While different forms of low-code have been around for a while, the approach is fast gaining speed thanks to the market’s demand for digitalization, which soared throughout 2020 as businesses accelerated their plans due to the pandemic. It also fits well with the need for speed found in mature agile DevOps practices.

How this unfolds in practice remains unclear, but the debate over the best approach must surface sooner rather than later. We’re fast approaching a future where we’ll need applications that can take advantage of the latest advances in IoT, AI, machine learning, and edge computing. And we’ll be there in a hurry.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Marty SprinzenMarty Sprinzen, Co-Founder and CEO of Vantiq is a visionary leader and successful software entrepreneur. The organizations he created and led have introduced some of the most innovative software solutions in the areas of systems management, relational databases, internet application development and, currently, real-time, event-driven applications. Sprinzen founded and became CEO of VANTIQ Corporation. Prior to VANTIQ, he was CEO and co-founder of Forte Software, which was acquired for over $1B. He also served as VP of International Operations and VP of Engineering at Ingres and VP of Development at Candle Corporation. He holds a BSEE from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.