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A lot of CRM information gets shuttled around your business on a daily basis. New project information, timesheets, invoices, contracts . . . with all of the information, you would think you’d know what the smart steps are to take next to solidify your company’s position.

The problem is, none of this information is organized to help you draw conclusions. You don’t know which clients are the most profitable, or whether certain kinds of project management are more effective than others. Heck, you don’t even know exactly how much revenue you’re going to pull in this month.

WORKetc can help with that problem.

The WORKetc software keeps track of all of your business information and lets you generate real-time reports using whatever parameters you need to investigate. If you have a question about employee productivity, for example, WORKetc can create a report that shows you how much each employee has accomplished over the last month.

That’s information you can use to make smart decisions for your business’ growth.

Use WORKetc real time, company wide reporting to find out:

• How much money you’re expecting to invoice this month – or next month, or over the next six months. You pick the time frame, WORKetc will find the information.
• Whether your customers are profitable. If you have a low margin profit, just a few customer support inquiries could wipe out a year’s profit. Use WORKetc to identify those problem customers before they damage your profit.
• Whether your projects are getting done on time. If you don’t know how much time is being spent on each project, then you don’t know if that project is profitable. Track progress daily and take steps to eliminate problem projects.
• Which employees are pulling their weight. You can use WORKetc to find out which employees are the most productive, the most innovative, and the most capable by studying their productivity and project management.
• About problems with your product or service. Tracking customer service inquiries can help you identify issues with your products and services before they cost you new customers – and profits.

It’s rough for businesses right now, and every little piece of information that can improve your business is incredibly valuable. Use WORKetc to get the insight into your company you need to eliminate problems before they start and save your business from falling under.

We just told you about six great tools you may not have been aware WORKetc was capable of. Surprise, surprise – we’ve got seven more, and they’re time and effort savers on par with their highly impressive predecessors.

As we’ve said before, WORKetc is a pretty complex machine, and the more you know about what’s under the hood, the more spectacularly it can perform for you. Here are seven more fantastic tricks this system can do.

1. Search Your Company, Not Just Your Website. Your current website may have a search engine, but we’re talking about one for your business. Every contact, project, document, customer note, sales lead and support enquiry is instantly searchable inside WORKetc. It’s the secretary with a photographic memory you never had.
2. Go Local with Regionalization. WORKetc comes pre-regionalized for your location no matter where you are – the UK, the USA, Australia , Europe or Asia. You’ll be able to set local tax rules, timezones, date formats, currency symbols, and even business literacy differences. Those customizations will go on all of your data automatically.
3. Get Real Time Reports. As soon as you enter data into the WORKetc system, you can use it to generate reports on the fly. See how this last project has affecting employee productivity, find out the real-time status of accounts and WIP, compare one project’s management with another’s. WORKetc has the answers.
4. Keep Your Data Safe and Portable. At any time, you can download the entirety of your WORKetc data for your peace of mind onto a backup. You also don’t need to worry if you decide WORKetc isn’t for you – your data is always ready to go wherever you need it. With flexibility like that, though, we can’t imagine why you’d want to leave us.
5. Create Document Folder Templates. Different clients need their information presented in different ways. With this tool, you can create a template structure for your documents and assign that template to all new folders. You’ll never have to spend time re-adjusting the setup for the next client again – it’s all ready to go.
6. See Your Data However You Want. You can export any of your data in WORKetc as a cleanly formatted PDF or Word document, get data sets downloaded into an Excel file, or create detailed Gannt charts to better visualize your project, deliverables, roles and responsibilities.
7. Integrate Data Into Other Programs. We know you’ve probably got a few programs established that you really like, and we wanted to make it easy for you to transfer data back and forth between WORKetc and them. Integrate your WORKetc data directly into MYOB, Quickbooks, and many other programs for easy transfer.

And with the release of version 2.5, we’ve introduced a few more time savers:

1. You can now duplicate projects for quick set up.  So, if your business uses a similar project structure each time you start a new job, setting that up each time is now a 10 second job.  Participants in the project even recieve automatic alerts.
2. Nest projects means tthat you can now quickly view all your sub projects from the single screen, and change the progress.  Nice and simple.

More cool stuff coming soon…

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Pay close attention to accurate billing, pursue leads relentless and make every cost accountable if you want to come out of the recession alive.

A tough economy often means tough times for small businesses and freelancers who may already be struggling. Even if there is no struggle, there’s always concern about encouraging income, cutting back on expenses and surviving until the situation is more favorable for business. Having run a number of small businesses before building WORKetc, I understand this all to well.

But it is always more than just weathering the storm.  You want to come out of this recession flying!

Staying ahead of the game (or at least, staying in the game!) means working harder, but it also means thinking smarter. With a calm, cool attitude and a mindset of seeing what you can do to make sure your business survives without giving into panicked worry, you’ll be there to greet new customers when the situation picks up.

Here are six ways to shore the supports of your small business so that it can weather the tough times – and make it through the storms – and I’ll be straight up here, it all loops back to using WORKetc.  Fundamentally you need to put in place systems and work toward automating those systems.

1. Pay close attention to accurate billing. When times are good, business owners often wave off small charges, round down when billing to be nice with clients, or let slip a few forgotten minutes that didn’t make the first invoice. WORKetc helps you easily tighten up loose operations so you can make sure that detailed timesheets are carefully filled in to capture every bit of revenue you can.
2. Stay on top of your accounts payable. Don’t wait to bill clients, as they may not always be able to pay if you are lenient with payment terms. Try to implement deposit or retainer policies to avoid spending time (and wasting money) chasing late payers. Even better, with WORKetc, you can monitor accounts payable in real time and auto generate reminder notices.
3. Monitor profits and losses carefully. Sometimes taking a loss can lead to opportunities, but sometimes adjusting operations creates better profitability. Analyze project expenses as well, to see which types of projects you should focus on most (or least).
4. Pursue leads – and manage them properly with a detailed lead management system. Very often, business owners don’t pursue interested consumers effectively or often enough, and that means lost sales. Sometimes the person has a question and just the answer makes that consumer a customer.
5. Help customers help themselves. The more accessible your customer support, the happier your customers will be – but you can reduce support and service costs by encouraging customers to use self-serve support so they can get fast answers and you can save money.

One last and important tip is to capture team member or employee knowledge before moving towards layoffs or downscaling. Record key account details, product information, lead tips and strategic ideas in a central location so that if people do have to take a temporary leave, their departure’s impact is only minimal and the valuable information they held is accessible.

Follow these 5 6 strategies and your business will surely be in a better position to really take advantage of the good times when they come rolling around again.