Category: Business

Thinking about bid support? Read on to find out more about how it could help your business.

Skilled business proposal writing is essential to winning work in many businesses.  While many people believe that they as they have being writing bids for most of their careers, they have mastered the art, a long career in sales presentations can lead to a tired old style that will hardly inspire potential clients.  For this reason, considering sales presentation training may be a good choice for many businesses.  Rather than being embarrassed about asking for bid support, it should be seen as a forward thinking way of improving one’s performance at work.  The following suggestions on writing bids may give you some inspiration in terms of how professional support could help you.

There are some words and phrases that are usually best avoided in business proposal writing.  For example, words like ‘we understand’ and ‘we believe’ are often overused, and are not specific enough to be effective.  Rather than vaguely stating what you understand or believe, is it often more effective to show how you understand, or demonstrate your beliefs by giving positive recommendations.  Similarly, proposals can often be peppered with phrases that sound hyperbolic or grandiose.  Promoting your company as ‘world class’ or ‘uniquely qualified’ may seem a good idea, but these sort of claims are very difficult to prove and do not succeed in informing the reader of how your bid would succeed.

A particularly important component of a presentation is the executive summary.  It is usually best to write this after the rest of your proposal, so that you have a good overview of its contents. Rather than being a summary, the executive summary should direct the reader’s attention to the strengths of your bid.  In this sense, it should consist of a few paragraphs explaining why the client should select your bid, without them having to read anything else.  Particularly for very long bids, it is often the case that the reader devotes more of their attention to the executive summary than the rest of the document in its entirety, and in this sense it is certainly the most important part of the presentation.

If these minor points have been useful in terms of your business proposal writing, it may indeed be the case that professional bid support would be a good idea for your business.  Even if it only gives you a small edge over your competitors, you may find that sales presentation training is the best investment you could possibly make for your business.

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

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Duplicate payments can silently eat into your company’s profits

Any accounts manager will recognise that things don’t always add up as tidily as they should. It ought to be simple in principle: incomings, outgoings, profit, loss – the columns should balance. When they don’t, you can be almost certain of the reason why: human error. duplicate payments are easy to make when people are disorganised and don’t keep track of invoices. An accounts payable audit is likely to turn up a number of similar mistakes and glitches, highlighting just how dear this can be for a company. Recovery audit software is one way of pinpointing and tracking the discrepancies in your accounts system, gaining back the money you have unnecessarily paid out and stopping the same thing from happening again in the future.

Whilst automated systems are reliable and straightforward, people often don’t work the same way. Duplicate payments can occur when invoices are submitted twice, perhaps mistakenly due to miscommunication, or perhaps because the client has emailed it to two different departments in the illusion that it will get dealt with more quickly. If clients are disorganised, this can be even worse – you could be dealing with a backlog as they try to get up to date, and be expected to sort out the mess of their own accounting system. Then there are the rarer cases of fraud, where people deliberately try to use loopholes in your accounts department. Naturally, you will want to be aware of these, since this represents a deliberate and dishonest attempt to siphon money off from your company – rarer than simple error, but by no means unheard of.

Estimates range wildly about the extent of the fact of duplicate payments and other unnecessary payouts, and naturally it will depend on the scope and size of your firm, as well as how organised and qualified your accounts department is. However, an accounts payable audit on the average business might typically reveal a one percent over-payment – a deceptively small figure which can nevertheless add up to a significant amount of money, especially if a company is very large or perhaps close to the edge to begin with. For a one-off outlay, recovery audit software can avoid such problems occurring again in the future – and help you to recoup any past losses at the same time: a nice bonus that might pay for the investment at a stroke. Put in those terms, there’s no downside to putting that kind of procedure in place.

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

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Bacs involves a series of important regulations: make sure you are compliant

bacs, or Bankers’ Automated Clearing Services, is a payment scheme that governs payments in a range of transactions in industries all across the United Kingdom. Bacs payments are processed all the time between companies and individuals, and the scheme makes up a huge proportion of wage transactions for employees. As a result, most business payments need to be processed through bacs on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This can result in clunky and ineffective procedures, which can slow companies up. Part of this is due to the fact that bacs takes three working days to be processed, which can lead to challenges in accounts payable. Often a top quality bacs software solution is in order.

Bacs software providers can customise solutions to the needs of individual businesses. The potential benefits are numerous, and they begin with the saving of costs on payment processing. It is usually integrated with your company’s accounts system, which helps to boost the efficiency of your payment processes. Accounts payable teams have enough to do, without having to chase down duplicate payments or rectify other errors in the payment system. That is why a dependable bacs solution is absolutely necessary if your business is going to stay competitive. The leading high street banks will be able to inform you about this, and will probably also be able to provide recommendations.

Aside from these basic benefits – that is, making life easier for accounts payable teams and saving on payment processes – there are a number of others. For instance, a quality software solution will give you a tight control over your payments, the upshot of which is that you will be able to comply with the legislation that governs bacs payments. The same factor – your optimised level of payment control – can prove to be a factor in minimising your exposure to the risk of fraud. Whatever answer you go for in the end, it is absolutely imperative that it is fully approved by bacs. Otherwise, you might run into all kinds of problems.

Whether your company is small or big, it could potentially benefit from the use of bacs software. The best solutions from top bacs specialists are likely to remove a number of obstacles to the efficiency, and thereby the success, of your company. bacs payments are a reality you have to deal with on a regular basis, and it would be an error to process them in anything but the most effective way possible.

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

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Powerpoint presentations can be an art and a science

It’s an unfortunate truism that it’s not just what you say that’s important: it’s how you say it. And that’s never more apt than in the context of sales presentations, where the product or service itself can too often come second to the pitch. Most businesses use powerpoint presentations or similar to get their message across, but the problem with this approach is that your pitch is necessarily only as good as your Powerpoint design. Effectively, it doesn’t matter how good your company and product is, if there’s a weak link in the chain somewhere else.

Good presentations are memorable. They stick in the mind and leave people thinking that the company is professional, competent and diligent. Bad presentations have precisely the opposite effect. They leave audiences thinking that the company can’t afford or can’t be bothered to get such a fundamental step right – so what does that say about the way they will approach a business relationship? It’s worth reiterating the point that a forgettable sales presentation will be consigned to the mind’s dustbin in short order, along with any chance of a contract.

As a mainstay of such presentations, Powerpoint has a lot to answer for. It has become something of an industry standard, but a tool which is misused, or used in an unhelpful or mediocre fashion, more often than it is used to make a presentation shine. Some people know how to use it well, either through experience, instinct or training; others do not, and this can sink an otherwise strong pitch. The moral is that it’s not worth glossing over the Powerpoint slides when it comes to preparation: visuals are strong and attention grabbing: make sure they grab the attention the right way.

If you don’t have the in-house talent to come up with the kinds of powerpoint presentations you will need to make effective sales presentations, it’s worth knowing that there are companies out there who can do them for you. They may also be able to offer training in Powerpoint design, so that you can up-skill your own workforce rather than rely on outside agencies for the foreseeable future. Either way, this is an area of client interfacing in which it simply isn’t worth doing anything less than your best. It doesn’t matter how often people complain about spin overshadowing substance, or claiming that their product will overcome any deficiencies in presentation: if there are other companies doing the same thing, then you need every competitive edge you can get.

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

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Learn the benefits of outsourcing your document management

Finding a way to streamline financial processes is one of the cost saving areas that more and more firms are exploring now that the world has emerged from the economic crisis.

Invoice processing can be both time-consuming and expensive. Research shows that it costs between £4 and £10 to process a single invoice.  By automating this vital process through a world class managed service, companies have more time and resources available to spend on the essential day-to-day running of the company.

You don’t even need to worry about spending a lot of time implementing these new methods. You only need to communicate a new mailing address to your suppliers and then you can start to reap the advantages of Bottomline’s automatic systems.

It’s not only invoice processing that eats up time, think about all the daily documents that stream into your company. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if you could outsource document processing as well? Believe it or not you can!

Invoice processing, document management and document processing are all specialist services offered by Bottomline Technologies. Bottomline specialises in executing financial process improvement and they guarantee that you will see instant business benefits.

Some companies are hesitant to outsource document management for security reasons. Have no fear! Bottomline uses only the newest encryption techniques that ensure the complete safety of all your sensitive information.

By adopting electronic document processing, you will also be fulfilling another vital role. That of improving our quality of life. We read a lot about green issues and one major problem facing the world is the decimation of the rain forests. Trees are used to make paper and if we can eliminate the need to use as much paper, fewer trees will be destroyed.

Establish a green strategy for your invoice processing and document management and you will not only save time and money, you’ll reduce your carbon footprint as well.

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

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