“Where have all the workers gone, Long time passing, Where have all the workers gone, Long time ago….” So I was reading a great piece in BloombergBusiness by Hugh Son and Margaret Collins today that talked about wealthy investors bypassing human advisers and going to robots for advice. I suppose it’s not surprising. Been in a paper mill lately? […]
Archive | The QuickBooks Yooper
To Succeed, Who Do You Need to Please?
There was a time when I was an employee of a very large organization. As most people who want to get ahead, I found out that the key to success was pretty well defined – please the boss and keep the boss happy! Did keeping the boss happy improve the bottom line of the company? […]
You Do Want to Leave Your Business Someday, Don’t You?
You have owned your business for some time now and you may be thinking of retiring. Or maybe moving on to your next great challenge since you’ve got this one all figured out. Depending on the size and structure of your business, the exit strategy may not be the same. For example, if you own […]
Using a Personal Credit Card for Business
Most business consultants, including myself, would not recommend making a practice of using personal credit cards for business expenses. But, on the other hand, for small and startup companies, it may be a necessity and the only viable option before business credit is established. So how do you keep the books straight? The first thing […]
Personal Property Tax and It’s Affect on Michigan Business
I attended a session on Mighigan’s Personal Property Tax Reform which will be included on the August ballot in Michigan. As with most of these proposals, the language can be very confusing. The vote is going to be held on August 5, 2014 to dedicate a portion of the existing state use tax as a local […]
How We Survived B.P. (Before PowerPoint)
I had to chuckle as I was going through some business articles talking about ways to revamp stale PowerPoint slides and whether using PowerPoint is so yesterday. Some may even want to know the answer to how we made presentations B.P. (Before PowerPoint). Well, I’ve got some experience on the subject. Years ago, when I […]
Prioritizing a List of Choices
Often we are presented with selecting a single choice from many alternatives. One of the ways to systematically accomplish this is by using Pareto Voting. So who is this guy Pareto and why should I vote for him? Wilfried Fritz Pareto was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and, in his spare time, a philosopher […]
Keeping Your Receivables Under Control
One of the many issues a business faces is keeping their receivables under control. So unless you are a cash only business, keeping tabs on this is critical. The two key parts of the puzzle are quality and liquidity. Quality means the likelihood of collection and liquidity refers to the speed of collection. As a […]
Three (for starters) Good Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Policy Manual
Ask any business owner if they have a good, up to date policies and procedures manual and the eyes get that far away look and her thinking moves on to much more exciting thoughts. Let’s try to refocus on the subject by talking about more money that can be thrown to the wind faster than […]
Why Use QuickBooks Online?
QuickBooks Online is becoming very popular, and for good reason. I’m going to discuss some of these reasons, as well as some of the drawbacks. First of all you can have access to your data from a number of different devices. So you can access through browser, tablet, or even your phone. Mobile access is […]