Author: Suzie

Commercial Property North London: supply and demand basics

Commercial property in North London does not follow the same rules as elsewhere in the country. In the UK, property prices are roughly flat. In the six months between November 2011 and May 2012, prices saw an average fall across the board of 1.1 percent – the market contracting every month. But, of course, these averages are blunt instruments and hide vast regional variation. The capital has experienced slightly brighter fortunes, partly due to the bottleneck in supply. However, even London itself is complex, with Central London providing a very different picture to Greater London and the rest of the country. Office space, retail and industrial property in the centre have remained strong – at least, far stronger than elsewhere in the UK. Look for a shop for sale in London and you could find a very mixed picture. The rental market has experienced some turmoil as a result, with shorter leases favoured by occupiers but long-term buyers and tenants rewarded for their foresight. Those looking for shops to let in north London or industrial space on the outskirts can find some good deals, since landlords are themselves under pressure.

In other words, this isn’t a bad time to be looking for new properties in London. There is plenty of choice on the market, which is increasingly separating into two extremes. In many areas it’s a buyers’ market, meaning that there are some real bargains to be picked up. Anyone with some spare cash on the balance sheet might consider whether now is a good time to invest, since the long-term investor is likely to pick up a good deal. (It was this dynamic that propped up the floundering London office space market in the wake of the crash back in 2008, when prices plummeted 50 percent in some areas and sectors, only to rebound when a wave of foreign money flooded in.) When the market recovers – which it inevitably will, even if a strong economic recovery is still elusive at present – they will be vindicated. This is a time to be laying down strong foundations for the future of your business.

Commercial property in North London present a different set of opportunities to prime office space in the City or industrial space on the fringes. Each of these offer possibilities for those in the right position, whether it’s a long-term let or a short-term stop gap while you wait for a better bet. Commercial property London is in flux and it’s a mixed picture. A shop for sale in London, an office to rent in the Square Mile… do your research and make sure that now is the right time for your circumstances.

Please visit http://www.claridges-commercial.co.uk

The History of Accounts Payable Audit

In the 1970s, many companies expanded or merged to form complex corporate structures. At the same time, many began to outsource more of their functions than usual, developing a need to process hundreds, sometimes thousands of invoices as well as the normal pay roll functions. To solve this problem, the tradition of regular accounts payable audit was born.

Nowadays, most companies of a certain size rely on outsourced specialist companies to create functional and efficient accounts payable audit and reduce€“ or, ideally, eliminate the revenue loss that always comes with overpaid invoices, duplicate payments, misapplied tax, unclaimed rebates, inaccurate currency conversions, VAT and discount adjustments, and all the other little things that can go wrong when running a large and complex company with a robust financial operating system. Because although a couple of incorrect payments to a contractor or supplier may not seem much on their own, they have an insidious way of adding up sometimes to millions of dollars.

Traditionally, a recovery audit is carried out at regular intervals to correct any miscalculations, errors or even deliberate fraud attempts by contractors, suppliers or staff. These audits are undertaken after payments have been made, and often end up considerably increasing a company’€™s bottom line. Usually a recovery audit, as well as identifying specific mistakes, will also spot problems in management or process which may be allowing these mistakes to occur. Then, employees are trained and systems changed in an attempt to reduce the mistakes made in compliance and correct payment.

Now, many of these accounts payable suppliers use recovery audit software to carry out a constant and efficient survey of effectiveness throughout the year. Modern recovery audit software comprises a set of tools which can be operated by accounts payable teams to monitor compliance and weed out incorrect payments or duplicate payments. These analyse payment history through web-based on-demand€™ systems which monitor transactions deeply.

With this kind of transaction monitoring, customers are discovering a large number of historical overpayments – which can be recovered, either by the accounts payable company or, if preferred, by the company itself. Patterns can also be revealed which may indicate a problem in processing systems, an inefficient or even fraudulent staff member, or a regularly dishonest contractor.

Drilling down into data electronically removes human error and provides clear and readable evidence of patterns of fault, error or simply systems that are outdated and can be changed to see an increase in bottom line profit. No wonder that so many managers are adopting this new recovery audit software as a key service for their businesses!

Please visit https://www.fiscaltec.com/ for further information about this topic.

Fiscal Technologies

Shops to Rent in North London – will substantially increase Sales Returns

When it comes to choosing a site for commercial property London is an ideal location for all kinds of businesses, large and small. Searching high and low for shops to rent in north london can be a time-consuming business however. Going to a good consultant is by far the simplest way to find a shop for sale in London, minus all the hassle of independent research.

Choosing to take on the job of renting a new shop space yourself is far from straightforward. All sorts of obstacles can turn the process of finding your dream property into a nightmare. Hiring a professional consultant will obviate all of these problems. Their help and guidance are invaluable when it comes to assessing insurance claims, property management, boundary disputes and mortgage valuations. Taking on a new property is a big decision, and it’s in your interest that you choose well. Experienced consultants undertake frequent building and structural surveys to ensure your property is in good condition. If landlord-tenant relations become tricky, your consultant can act as a mediator and help resolve disputes An experienced consultant will also be able to offer investment advice and make valuations. Having a guide to take you through the process will safeguard against ill-informed decisions, and expose problems such as dilapidation and non-regulatory compliance.

Regardless of whether your business is a café, boutique, estate agents, hairdressers or bookmakers, there will be an appropriate shop space in London to fulfil your business’ every need. When it comes to choosing between a fully fitted shop space or an empty space with the potential for refitting, consider your requirements carefully. It may be that even if your business is specialised, for instance a beauty salon, choosing a property that has been used for similar purposes previously may save you time and money. Current fittings can be made use of, and your budget spent on upgrades instead. For more generalised enterprises, basic but high quality fittings will be appropriate for small market businesses. Several features to look out for are wooden or ceramic floors, air conditioning, central heating and good natural or artificial light sources. Pre-fitted security systems can also save you money on installing them yourself.

Length of lease, the scope for potential and flexibility such as longer opening hours to boost turnover should all be taken into consideration. The locality of the property is another consideration. Is there already a glut of cafés in the area you’re considering? Is there local demand for a hairdressers?

Having taken all these factors into account, it’s important to remember how much potential a shop to rent in North London could bring to your business. Finding a shop for sale in London could change the course of your business forever. Custom and turnover will immediately increase in an optimum location so find your perfect commercial property London is waiting for you.

Please visit https://www.claridges-commercial.co.uk

Sales Presentations and a Presentation Design Company…

One of the most important tools in any sales arsenal is the use of stand-out sales presentations. In no other environment are sales staff able to speak face to face with prospective buyers, using demonstrations of their wares and interacting directly. In sales presentations, sales people have the opportunity to answer buyers’ questions and get across their knowledge and enthusiasm for the product or services.

Sales presentations can also be extremely convenient for travelling sales staff, or for important meetings held at the headquarters of a prospective buyer, as they can be viewed on any computer, as well as lots of tablets and even smart phones, and can be saved to USB, email or the Cloud.

Although there has been a historic decline in UK-made products in the past 50 years or so, this has really picked up in the past couple of years, with the UK now the world’s 11th biggest manufacturer – not bad when you consider the competition of huge countries such as China and America. The UK’s biggest manufacturing companies, such as Triumph motorbikes and Silver Spoon sugar, are among thousands of entrepreneuring British firms that use effective sales presentations to generate huge incomings from their innovative, high-quality products.

When trying to get across the advantages of a truly innovative and exciting product, salespeople face the issue of convincing prospective buyers of the key advantages of the product in a very short amount of time. This is where Powerpoint presentations can be a real boon. Only with Powerpoint can sales people combine facts and technical data with images, sound, video, design, and any other medium they need.

Unfortunately, poor sales presentations can be worse than no presentation at all, with dull slides, overly wordy presentations or irrelevant information that hinders the spoken presentation, rather than enhancing it. This is why it is imperative to remember that the important things to get across to prospective buyers are the simplest things. Think of three main points why your product or service is better than what is already existing on the market. Then state them simply, with accompanying statistics, images or quotations from industry leaders.

Thankfully, great sales presentations can be both memorable and game-changing, making a potentially yawn-filled sales meeting into an enjoyable and interesting experience. Presentations do not necessarily guarantee an instant sale, but the importance of making a good first impression cannot be denied. Whether or not companies choose to engage a professional Powerpoint design company can often hang in the balance between initial price and long-term profit, but for businesses that do choose this route, experts in the field can make a real difference to the quality and effectiveness of sales presentations.

See http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/

Bacs software has still not been fully adopted

Bacs has been around for 45 years now. Despite this history, and its track record of being speedy, easy and secure, bacs software has not been universally adopted by firms and other organisations. It tends to be the smaller outfits who refuse the longest, for obvious reasons. However, instead of making bacs payments, many of these are still paying their bills with cheques or, in some cases, even with cash. This leads to a number of problems and makes for inefficient and even risky practices.

Times are changing, and now the vast majority of financial transactions occur in the virtual arena. The reasons for this are diverse, but speed and security are repeating ones. It is very simple to transfer money with bacs, and because it includes multiple layers of safety measures it is very secure; should you – against all odds – run into a problem, you will almost certainly be insured and protected from any financial impact, unless the issue is unarguably your fault.

Bacs transfers take a maximum of three working days to happen, but the new FPS (faster payments system) is almost instant, and costs no more. Effectively, when people talk about bacs nowadays, they are using it as a encompassing term for electronic transfers, including FPS.

All of this is important for organisations, even the smaller ones who are holding on to cheques and cash. (Although there was an outcry at the time, quite recently the banks suggested that they would be eradicating cheques within the foreseeable future – suggesting the low regard in which they hold them…) No organisation, large or small, wants to have significant quantities of cash on the premises. Furthermore, cheques are time-consuming to write, require counter-signing, and you have no idea when they will be cashed – which can cause cash-flow headaches.

So, if you haven’t already adopted bacs payments for your organisation, now is a good time. So many other outfits use bacs that it smooths the process of making payments – allowing you to budget more easily, and to give time to other areas of your business that are more important. Everything can be automated, and bacs software can even be integrated with your accounts package, streamlining things further. Bacs is safe, secure, fast, and saves you time and money. At a time when every pound is important, this cannot be a bad thing.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Integrating external louvres as part of an environmental strategy

The brise soleil, first invented by Le Corbusier in first part of the last century, is a fairly simple sun-shading structure that is added to buildings (or else integrated in the initial design and construction). Its purpose is to limit the amount of sunlight reaching a surface, often a big glass façade, thereby ensuring that temperatures keep within a comfortable range inside. They take various forms and degrees of complexity, with some of the more intricate versions providing architectural appeal to a building as well as a useful function. The commonest simple forms are horizontal projections that are attached to the vertical face of a building and prevent some sunlight from hitting the surface. Other similar approaches are glass louvres – with various types of finish and in different shapes – or other kinds of external louvres.

The huge variety of designs and materials used in the manufacture of louvres can make for some very intriguing approaches. For example, glass louvres can be coated with reflective material or tinted to refract light and lower glare within the building. However, these can also be combined with photovoltaic (PV) cells, a type of solar panel. This means that not only are you not distracted by the unpleasantly high levels of sunlight in the building, but that sunlight is turned into a useful form of energy. This makes the office space more comfortable, and reduces bills – as well as being more environmentally beneficial. There are therefore a range of reasons to opt for louvres as a climate-control choice. An increasing number of offices are being designed with these in mind from the start.

The brise soleil is the most basic of the choices you can get for controlling the amount of passive heating a room or face of a building enjoys. It is usually also the cheapest option as a result. It can be retro-fitted, although in some cases will be part of the design – some of the most celebrated buildings in the world include a brise soleil in their make-up. Glass louvres and other sorts of external louvres (such as aluminium) offer better flexibility and some truly imaginative design features. They also offer the opportunity to incorporate solar cells into them, allowing you to generate power as well as keep the building cooler. The variation you go for will depend on a number of things, including your budget and the size and nature of the space you want to cover. Some organisations specialise in fitting louvres to existing buildings, whereas if you are starting from scratch there is more scope for integrating them into the building’s appearance.

Please visit http://www.maplesunscreening.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.maplesunscreening.co.uk/

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Recovery audit software: correcting and preventing avoidable problems

Back in the good times it was easy to be a little relaxed about accounting and cash flow. Confidence was strong, credit was cheap, business was easy. But then everything changed and even those firms that were strong on paper found it tough to get a loan, and as the climate changed many found themselves running too close to the wire for comfort. Now, meticulous accounting isn’t a luxury: it’s a necessity. The problem is that glitches still happen; they are almost unavoidable. The good news is that they are not completely unavoidable. An accounts payable audit will tell you where you have lost income in the past – thereby giving you a chance to grab it back. recovery audit software uncovers the vulnerabilities of your systems, allowing you to avoid errors in the future that have already cost you money. One of the biggest accounting errors that cost businesses money is duplicate payments. These occur when, for one reason or another, you end up paying a supplier or client twice. It can be due to real error; invoices can have a dozen or so fields of data and it is quite possible to make mistakes and have two sent through unnoticed. However, there are the cases in which fraudulent individuals exploit holes in your accounting systems and send you two identical invoices, knowing that you probably won’t notice the duplicate.

Duplicate payments are just one frequent form of many different accounting errors. These all add up and can drain the resources of a company – especially at a time when there is very little room for manoeuvre. Real issues can occur if your business is reliant on a large volume of small transactions and has a high turnover but fairly modest profit; in those cases, there is far more room for small errors to aggregate unnoticed, killing your profit margin.

This is why recovery audit software can pay for itself the first occasion you use it. For a small or medium-sized company an accounts payable audit can highlight a five-figure discrepancy – and obviously, the larger your company and the longer the problem has been going on for, the bigger the sum of lost money is going to be. Duplicate payments are just one of the variants of overpayment, but they are very common and you will naturally want to put a stop to them.

Please visit http://www.fiscaltechnologies.com/ for further information about this topic.

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Implementing bacs software will improve the professionalism of your business

Keeping on top of your financial transactions is a must for any business. If things get delayed, not only will your suppliers put you on their black list, but your staff will not be happy, your cash flow will be slothful, and the professionalism of your business will be sullied. Clients will not be impressed with overdue payments. bacs software can prevent all of these difficulties. When your business uses bacs payments, there is much reduced risk of human error. Implementing bacs for your financial transactions mean that payday is something you can tick off your to-do list.

As every good business knows, it’s the details that count. Bacs saves you money in small but important ways. These include the money wasted on stationary such as envelopes, stamps and so on. An electronic system avoids the need for this paraphernalia.

Time savings are even more major, and time is money. Count up the number of transactions your business has to look after: wages, refunds, pensions, dividends, insurance settlements, expenses… the list goes on and on. Each of these requires the preparation, sorting and collating of invoices, cash and cheques. On top of all this each payment has to meet with the necessary remittance advice. All in all, bacs will save you much more than the cost of postage. The associated administration costs associated with a non-electronic transaction system are substantial in terms of time and money.

Cash flow is integral to the fluid running of organisations small and large, and this is something else that will gain from the implementation of electronic transaction systems. As soon as transactions are managed non-manually, the margin for error is much diminished, and eradicates the problem of cheques disappearing. Individual payments are automatically tracked, so you will know precisely when the money leaves your account, enabling you to make that money work as hard as possible. When cash flow is smoother, clients look to you as a professional provider, and you, the payer, will be in the enviable position of being able to negotiate more favourable terms. You’ll also benefit from their recommendations.

The greater control created by bacs extends to all the finer details that can make such a difference to the professionalism your business presents. bacs software produces only a single debit from your account, and payments appear as cleared funds instantly, with the added bonus that payees earn interest immediately. Negotiating potential and early interest are other benefits bacs payments provide. What are you waiting for?

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Document management systems make tracking and storage more intuitive

It’s undeniable that centralised document processing makes life easier for everyone. Rather than information being kept – or locked! – in individuals’ heads, or in separate email exchanges, a well-thought out document management system creates an accessible pool of information. This is most significant when it comes to financial processes, as reliable invoice processing can save not only time but money, optimise working capital, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Having established that effective document management is integral to the smooth operations of any company, big or small, the implementation of a DMS means looking for a dependable provider. It’s not unheard of for some such providers to supply disappointing solutions, not to mention hidden costs. However, a provider who knows what they are doing will be able to enhance every aspect of routine but necessary procedures such as archiving, indexing, invoice and document processing, and central storage.

First and foremost, implementing a good DMS will visibly reduce costs, and increase working capital. This is due to DMS’s centralisation of resources, which gathers your documentation into a searchable library of information. Utilising your data in this way makes the most of its valuable potential to your company. Cash flow is enhanced thanks to the central control of invoice processing, and money previously spent on paper storage facilities is saved thanks to a reduction in the space needed to store a mass of information.

The value DMS systems can deliver does not rest solely upon measurable figures. Making a pool of information readily available does not only make your staff’s lives easier, and increase the smoothness of daily internal operations, but can have a notable effect on the ability of your company to provide an excellent customer service. If your response, allied to your DMS system, to complaints and enquiries is prompt, accurate and professional, you will secure a competitive edge. Not only this, but the distribution of information electronically is efficient at really honing down a target market, using collected data and analysis to get your message out there more quickly and effectively.

Putting a document management system in place is a solution in more ways than one. Saving time and money, increasing value, improving security and control, centralising storage and tracking, enabling sharability and integration are only the beginning of the benefits of much more effective document processing. Ironing out the creases in invoice processing could make all the difference to the success of your business, and consequently document management becomes not a problem, but an investment.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Consider A Quick Cash Advance To Tide You Over

Everyone knows that university students can find it tricky to work with their money. After spending their teenage years living on pocket money from parents, or perhaps a small amount of cash from a minimum wage Saturday job, suddenly having two large lump sums placed in the bank account every year can seem like a miracle. It’s normal for students to take advantage of the new situation by buying new clothes, going on trips or to festivals – or just bevvying all night in the uni bar! But with those larger sums of money come larger bills: for the first time, they’re now responsible for managing rent, bills and food. It’s no wonder that many fill the gap between student loans deposits with unsecured loans, getting a cash advance to tide them over until the next lump sum arrives.

Unsecured loans are a form of loan designed for people who know – and can prove – that they’ll be getting enough money to pay back the loan by a given date (usually next payday, or for students, the date of the loan deposit). They differ from secure loans because there’s no need for collateral: for most loans made by a bank, the lender makes sure they’ll get their money back by having the borrower sign a contract agreeing to give something of greater value than the loan – usually his or her house – if the money isn’t returned. A loan that isn’t ‘secured’ refers to a loan without a contract of this kind: instead, a slightly higher rate of interest is accumulated on the loan, and it is paid back with the next paycheck or lump sum received by the borrower.

This type of loan appeals to students for several reasons. First of all, they know with certainty that they’ll be receiving an SLC loan installment by a given date, and so don’t have to worry, like many borrowers, about the interest accumulating to unmanageable levels. Secondly, students are usually ineligible for secured loans, because none of them (or very few!) have a house or small business to ‘put up’ as collateral to backvalidate a secured loan. Unsecured loans aren’t intended – like a mortgage, for instance – to be something that you pay back gradually over years. They are used as a ‘stopgap’ to supply money which the student wouldn’t otherwise get until a certain date. For instance: if a student loans payment is due on the 5th of the month, but rent has to be paid on the 1st – and too much cash has been frittered on nights out! – this type of loan can give the student a cash advance, which the student will be able to give back as soon as the 5th of the month comes round. This system has been found to give many students peace of mind, at the most difficult times.

Please visit http://www.cashgenieblog.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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