Magnifying Your Money: Tips in Business Finance Management

In putting up any kind of business, the end goals are primarily profitability and progress. Magnifying your money is the target endpoint. To be able to do such, you ought to focus on a very important aspect of your business- Business Finance Management. Below are some tips that you can follow not just to ensure the sustainability of your company, but to probably maximize its potentials.

1. Raise Money- Lots and lots of it. Businesses need more than sufficient funding. They need funds for the expected expenses, more funds for unexpected problems, and reserved funds for possible beneficial ventures. As such, when you are attempting to look for funds and possible investors, maximize the opportunity. Prepare big time but feasible business propositions. When opportunities for investment and profit knock on your doors, take chances and welcome the chance. However, you ought to grab the risks only after you have carefully examined the possible consequences of your business venture.

2. Acquisition is not always the answer. During business ventures, there is always plenty of room for additional expenses. Your first budget allocation for a certain expense may not be enough. You may need additional equipment and materials that require you to make unexpected expenditures. In such cases, note that buying what you need is not the only option. Look for alternatives such as renting or leasing the equipment you need. However, do take note of the rental or leasing fee versus the acquisition expenses, in accordance to your time frame for equipment usage.

3. Inform the concerned. In business ventures, you ought to keep pertinent parties aware of whatever is happening in your business. Pertinent parties refer to those who will be affected by the profitability or fund inadequacy in your business. These parties include your bank, your investors, your suppliers, your customers, and even your inland revenue representative. Realize that keeping them informed maintains good business relationships. It may also heighten their concern for your business needs such as additional funds and/or more profitable business deals.

4. Welcome Renegotiations. There are some cases when your investors, suppliers, and customers ask you for renegotiations on your transactions. Be open for such possibilities and options. Avoid limiting yourself to uniform business deals. Recognize that suggestions made by the people you are working with are worth your attention. This will not only help you maintain good business relations with them. Instead, it can open your doors to business opportunities which may prove to be beneficial in the long run.

5. Stick to strict payment and debt procedures. Renegotiation starts and ends with business deals. They should not extend to your payment procedures and debt accountability. When allowing your customers to go on credit, do a thorough financial check first. Set clear procedures for payment and be sure to follow them, without exceptions. You should also set a specific deadline for each debt. Realize that a service or product on credit is a potential loss for your business finances.

6. List everything. This may be a tedious task but such may prove to be very beneficial for you in the end. Realize that no matter how big or small your business deals are, all of these mirror how you manage your finances and all of these affect the overall outcome of your business venture. As such, you ought to practice proper bookkeeping and accounting.

How Software Asset Management Can Help You Save Money

Simply put, Software Asset Management is a business process that can help you reduce your licensing costs and optimize your software assets. The business benefits of Software Asset Management are:

Reduce software licensing costs – only purchase/renew licenses for software that is used. Track all your license rights, such as upgrade, downgrade and transfer rights to optimize the way you account for and use your software assets.

Reduce help desk costs – on average, 50% of the time spend troubleshooting computer issues is spent on obtaining the computer configuration

Minimize unauthorized software usage, security risks – SAM empowers you to use the right software for you. Ensuring that your employees are using only authorized software helps increase productivity and avoid security risks.

Reduce business and legal risk due to not meeting regulatory requirements, or not complying with software vendor license agreements.

Better negotiation capabilities with your software vendors – knowing exactly what you have and what you need, as well as the number of licenses you need and your current license rights puts you in control in your next license negotiation.

Software Asset Management can help you reduce your overall software licensing costs by only purchasing software that you use and need, organize your licensing assets and keep track of your licenses agreements, terms and renewal dates. It is a process that helps you know which software is installed and used across your enterprise, and minimize unauthorized software usage. You can use it to better manage your software assets from a business perspective, reduce the cost of software licensing and improves your software asset utilization.

Personal Finances – How I Achieved More Money Than Month

Are you familiar with the phrase “More Month Than Money?” It means running short of money either before the end of the month or before your next payday. It’s a condition with which most wage earners are familiar. It was my problem for many years.

I’ve been married to Lois Lane for more than forty years. We raised two daughters. I’ve had several “careers,” and, I’ve always had a decent income. What I didn’t always have was an effective way to manage my income. I’m not an accountant; just a breadwinner who, when I first got married, couldn’t make the ‘bread’ go far enough.

The Early Years

For about the first ten years of our marriage, I used trial and error money management. Even though I had a good job with a decent salary, I never seemed to consistently have enough money to both pay my bills and for day-to-day expenses. One payday we would have more than we needed; the next we would run out of money long before the next paycheck. It was a continual financial rollercoaster. Sound familiar?

Like most people, I had not received any kind of formal or informal training to prepare me for the awesome responsibility of managing my income to effectively support a growing family. I was on my own with no financial roadmap as I searched for any type of a money management method that would work for me. I was looking for a way to both pay my bills on time and to smooth out the amount of spending money available between paydays. I’m sure you can relate to my quest.

I tried budgets and found that keeping track of every penny spent was something I didn’t want to do. My budgets started off great, but they didn’t last long. I tried bill consolidation loans and, after doing several, realized that consolidation loans by themselves are not the answer. They served only to increase my debt instead of helping me to control my finances. Keep in mind that this was all happening over 30 years ago; well before the advent of personal computers. There were no software options for personal financial management. I was on my own.

My First “System”

Over the years I gradually, without any premeditated idea of what I was doing, developed a system for paying my bills which also evened out the highs and lows between paychecks. These were the two features of a money management system that I wanted. This “system” was nothing more that a consistent way of looking at my finances twice a month. I was doing this all on scratch paper with no formal structure.

It’s impossible for me to pinpoint when my very simple approach to cash flow management evolved into something I could use consistently. All I can say with certainty is that while I was paying bills one month it dawned on me that what I was doing on scratch paper could somehow be organized into formal records.

After experimenting with forms design over a couple of months, I managed to create a system of forms that replaced my scratch paper. (Remember, this was in the mid-1970′s; several years before the advent of the personal computer.) With my new forms in place, my informal system had matured to the point that I was able to pay my bills when due without financial strain, and I had a consistent cash flow for day-to-day expenses. I was quite pleased with how my own personal money management “system” had turned out. It was a process that I, nor anyone else to my knowledge, had ever seen or used.

A Friend Gave It A Try

A friend of mine at the time, Fred Thornton (not his real name), became interested in my little system of forms. I had been telling Fred how pleased I was with the effectiveness of the process. My friend was also searching for a better financial scheme. He had an excellent income, plus a generous monthly dividend from a trust fund that his grandparents had set up. Despite his above average income, Fred’s financial condition was characterized by “more month than money.” He had large credit card and charge account balances to which he forfeited substantial interest every month. In addition, Fred was constantly concerned about his ability to pay his bills. He was in the same boat I had been in. At his request, I agreed to create a set of my forms for Fred to try.

After I copied the forms and instructed Fred on the methodology of the system, Fred became very dubious that my set of forms would be any help at all. After he initialized his forms to reflect his financial situation, it was painfully clear that Fred’s finances were a disaster. According to the forms, Fred was in very bad financial straits; bad enough that he doubted his ability to ever get his finances under control. In addition to doubting the usefulness of my forms, both Fred and his wife were afraid that using the system would put unwanted restraints on their lifestyle the same way budgets tend to do.

The Turnaround Was Amazing

Despite their concerns, Fred and his wife decided to give my system of forms a try. They had nothing to lose. Their finances were in such bad shape that they doubted my system could make things worse. The results they achieved so quickly amazed all of us.

After using my system of forms for less than three months, Fred’s finances had stabilized. All of his credit card and charge account balances were under control to the extent that he no longer paid interest on any of his credit cards or charge accounts. Furthermore, Fred and his wife were very pleased that their concerns about having constraints on their lifestyle proved groundless. They were actually able to begin pursuing many interests which, prior to using my system of forms, had been too expensive. As Christmas approached that year, the Thorntons were able to do virtually all of their gift buying without incurring any debt. In the eleven years they had been married, that was the first Christmas that they got through with virtually no additional debt.

The amazing turnaround in Fred’s finances was nothing short of incredible. Because of the original set of forms I had provided to Fred, his finances quickly went from “more month than money” to “more money than month.” After using my “system” for a few short months, Fred found that he was consistently faced with the pleasant problem of having excess income every month. His income had not changed, only the way he managed it.

The Word Began To Spread

My and Fred’s success with the original set of forms was difficult to keep secret. It wasn’t long before I was receiving inquiries from both people I knew as well as strangers; some of whom were out of state. Since I couldn’t make copies of the forms and personally instruct everyone on how to use them, I decided to write a how-to book. The resulting three-ring binder, titled Payday Management System, was self-published in 1975.

Without exception, everyone who purchased a copy of that first book had the same success in gaining control of their finances that Fred had experienced. I began receiving letters from very pleased customers. Sales were slow since all advertising was strictly word of mouth. But, it appeared that, given enough time, sales of the Payday Management System could have taken off. So why haven’t you heard about that first book in the last thirty or so years?

At the time I was still very much involved in my military career and had no time to be a book publisher. Shortly after publishing the Payday Management System, I was transferred to my next tour at sea. Before heading for my ship I put the book aside. I went off to sea and forgot about it. I continued to use the money management techniques; I just didn’t have the time to share them with others.

Fast Forward To Today

It’s now more than thirty years since my personal money management system was formalized in a crude set of hand-drawn forms. Since then, the personal computer has become very much a part of a growing number of peoples’ lives. I decided a few years ago that it was time to update the original book and to convert the manual forms into a personal computer program so that I could again begin sharing this powerful money management process. I was now a software developer with much experience and figured I could easily convert the Payday Management System manual workbook to a Windows program. Boy, was I wrong.

After several years and more false starts, I completed the first version of my personal finance program in the fall of 2006. Expressing the simple techniques that comprised the original Payday Management System proved to be a far greater challenge than I first thought. Those techniques are powerful in their simplicity; and I soon discovered that preserving that simplicity in a technological venue was not easy. But, version 1.0 of the software is finally done. I’ve been using the program for several months. It makes managing our month-to-month finances very simple and easy.

How it Asset Management Can Save You Money

Proper management of your IT assets can help you save money and reduce your overall IT costs. According to IAITAM, proactive IT asset management can reduce your IT costs by up to 25%. By knowing which computers and software are used across your company, and matching the inventory information against your financial and contractual records you can make better IT decisions and get more out of your IT budget. IT Asset Management provides the following benefits:

1. Gain control over your assets, know which assets exist on your network, their configuration and the changes to these assets. A good asset management system would help you easily analyze the information to make decisions.

2. Implement procedures that will save you money a good IT asset management system would help you create and enforce policies and procedures that will save you money. You can implement software usage policies, standard hardware configurations, asset request processes and other processes that would help you extract more value from your assets.

3. Make better IT decisions by organizing your IT assets inventory and aligning it with your financial records and contracts you can better IT decisions. For example, you can better prepare for a contract renewal by knowing what you actually use and need to renew, what terms you negotiated in the previous contract or which computers are part of a hardware lease that is expiring soon.

4. Reduce help-desk and support costs by providing your support personal with detailed asset configuration you help them provide quicker issue resolution, and reduce your IT support costs.

5. Detect risks to your IT assets – analyze your IT assets to detect any potential risks such as missing security patches or improper anti-virus / anti-spyware protection.

6. Ensure regulatory and software license compliance.

To learn more about IT Asset Management for Small Business owners, and how getting started has become easier with on-demand IT Asset Management, visit SAManage at www.SAManage.com today and sign-up for a free 30-days trial of our service.

Cheap Personal Finance: Money at Low Rate for Personal Needs

Are you searching for some bucks to meet your debts, are you in need of money because you have a home repair ahead? Or you may be in need of money because of certain business need. Well, all these needs require you to have money and that you may not have in your pocket. So, are you interested in finance scheme? Just don’t go by any finance scheme for this. There is cheap personal finance available for any of these purposes.

Cheap Personal Finance is available for any of the above mentioned needs. Well, you can also buy a car or can go for a holiday with the aid of cheap personal finance. As most of these needs are personal in nature, they have termed this finance as cheap personal finance.

Cheap personal finance is available at affordable rates of interest, indeed, at cheap rates because there is the collateral pledging in the secured cheap personal finance. Collateral makes your go cheap because it assures the lender that his money will be paid back timely. In lieu of this, he advances the cheap personal finance at cheap rates. Cheap personal finance of secured tag is available for a term of 5 years to 25 years while the amount varies between £ 5000 and £ 75000.

Yet, there is another type that sparks another luminous side of cheap personal finance. It is the unsecured options of cheap personal finance, where you are not pledge any collateral for the money. Here, you can grab the amount ranging between £ 1000 and £ 25000. The term for the advance of this finance goes up to 10 years from 1 year. Cheap personal finance is available for the bad credit holders also. Only they have to pay slightly higher rates of interest.

Well, cheap personal finance is available online where every click of your mouse makes your move smoother and this also works to make the finance scheme cheap enough. Applying online is free and one has to fill in only a small application form to apply. Personal finance becomes cheap here because there are more choices you have here. Cheap personal finance is real cheap as the lender claim and the one who chooses this, is sure to earn a rainbow.

Effective Personal Finance – 5 Ways to Save You Money

Why save? In a world that is constantly in motion and where the term of life expectancy is growing longer, many people find it a waste of time, or simply don’t think about managing their personal finance.

Many find keeping money aside pointless choosing to live for the day. Saving, however, is very important if you wish to have an effective, and secure personal finance plan.

Some people think that saving money goes against the attitude of living for today, or living each day to the fullest. But if you give it more thought, it is better to live your entire life to the fullest than just a single day.

If you save, you will have the means to get what you truly want, or reach your personal finance goal, rather than what you just want now. Saving will also ensure that you will not have to scramble for credit when emergencies arise.

The difficulty, however, lies in implementing the principle of saving. Planning your personal finance can give you an idea of what expenses to do away with. Consider these following simple saving tips.

Having credit cards is a way for money to be spent quickly and sometimes needlessly, but if you must have one, make your payments on time. Again, do not spend more than what you are certain you can pay back.

Gas is another large expense for many, especially with the increasing price of oil, so if you do not want the inconvenience of public transport, make sure you keep your car engine tuned. It will save you more in gas consumption in the long run.

Regarding phone usage, try to remove the extra options in plans and packages if you will not use them anyway. However, if you are on the phone a lot, bundling will save you more money.

When buying food, shun the convenience stores in favor of the supermarkets and make sure you have a shopping list and that you stick to it.

When it comes to clothes, stock up on them when they are on sale, or buy a from the previous season for lower, better and more affordabale prices.

Online Personal Finance Programs May Help You Save Money as a Single Parent

For many people it is hard enough as it is to raise a child with the help of your spouse, but what if you are raising the child on your own? This is the case for millions of parents each year who have to raise their children without the help of a spouse or significant other. The cost of living is so expensive these days it can become very hard to provide for your children when being a single parent. This is when using online personal finance programs as a single parent can become very important. Using online personal finance programs to save and keep track of your money as a single parent is extremely important because you are a sole provider for your children so you have to make every penny count.

Using an online personal finance program can be very easy if you keep a very close eye on your weekly income and weekly expenses. In order to maintain the amount of money you need monthly it is very important to keep track of your spending, and you have to remember, you can’t spend more than you have. One way to do this is create a weekly or bi-weekly chart of your necessary spending online with a online personal finance program. This chart should include how much you need for each week, and how you are going to go about getting that money. This will enable you to plan for each week. Also, it is very important to factor in child support you may be receiving, and if you are not immediately spending it, make sure that it is going into a savings account for your children.

Using online personal finance programs can save money while being a single parent is by allowing you to focus your time on your other priorities because using online personal finance programs are so easy. We understand that money is very important in the life of a single parent, but we also understand that you don’t want to spend all of your time dealing with it. You want to have time to go see your sons soccer game, or your go to your daughters school play, and by using online personal finance programs, this is easily done. The best part about many programs like this is that you are able to sign up for easy, on-time alerts about your money. Many of these great programs send weekly notification to anywhere you like whether it is through e-mail or even text message. This can be very helpful when you are in a situation where you need to know the balance on any of your accounts immediately.

Sometimes new money making ideas are immediately usable. However, sometimes you just have to let your imagination run wild and be impractical. This is a way to get that creativity going, and no matter how crazy the ideas may seem at first, there is usually a way to bring them down to earth, as in this first example.

Rental Cabins In The Air

I started with a crazy thought: “What if people could rent a cabin up in the sky for the weekend?” Right away my mind tries to make sense of the idea, and because the over-all goal is to have profitable innovations, it looks for ways to make it into a money making idea. I first imagined cabins which are suspended under large hot-air or helium balloons.

As much fun as it might be, this didn’t seem very practical. When I explored the idea further, though, I wondered if existing balloon-ride businesses could tap into other markets. If, for example, the gondolas were outfitted properly, and the balloons tethered, so they could be allowed to float two thousand feet overhead, would meditators then pay for a peaceful meditation retreat in the sky?

Another thought came to mind. Balloons could be high in the air, but easily cranked back in on a line. This might be simpler and cheaper than traditional rides, which involve chase vehicles and unpredictable landings. Perhaps this could be another way to make money with the balloons, charging a lower rate for simple up and down rides, and so getting new customers that couldn’t afford the usual rides.

This is how a crazy idea comes back to earth. Perhaps even the “weekend cabin in the sky” idea could someday be a money making idea, but if not, that’s okay. The point here is to get the creative flow going, and then find more practical ways to channel the output.

More Crazy Money Making Ideas

The following are pure imagination. I leave it to you to find a way to make these ones into potential money making ideas. Good luck and have fun!

- Put seats on the wings of an airplane and sell rides to thrill seekers.

- Sell advertising scratched out on the face of the moon.

- Rent out the animals at the zoo.

- Start an underwater school.

- Make a roller coaster course people pay to take their personal cars on.

- Sell pets genetically engineered to die young, for those who hate long-term commitments.

- Rent out children to undecided prospective parents.

- Have marriage insurance policies that cover the cost of a divorce, just in case.

- Have a swimming pool restaurant; diners sit in floating seats and eat off floating plates.

Scan the list and stop on any of the crazy ideas that catch your attention. Chances are good that you can find some way to transform it into a more practical idea, and that is the point. This exercise in imagination may be fun, but it is also a profitable technique for generating money making ideas.