Does collecting invoice payments from your customers pose a challenge? If you’re like most business owners, the last thing you want to do is call up your customer and ask when they are sending in their payment. But you want to get paid. Enter WorkingPoint Payment Reminders.

With WorkingPoint’s Payment Reminders, you can automate your collections efforts. Once you determine which reminders you want to send: invoice due, late payment or both; set the timing of the reminder for “x” number of days before or after the invoice due date; and frequency of any subsequent late payment reminders; and customize your email messages, we’ll take it from there.

Invoice Due Reminder

WorkingPoint will automatically email out a copy of the invoice “x” number of days before it is due as a reminder to your customer that their invoice due date is approaching. This feature is great at eliminating the oft-heard excuse, “I never received the invoice.”

Late Payment Reminder

For any invoices that weren’t paid by their due date, WorkingPoint will send out another copy of the invoice “x” number of days after the payment was due to reminder the customer to send in their past-due payment. You can also schedule automatic emails to go out again every week or month the invoice remains unpaid.

Whether you want to set up a global setting to handle all invoices the same way or pick and choose which invoices to send reminders on, WorkingPoint’s Payment Reminders helps take the headache out of collections.

You can find more info in our help section here: Turning on Payment Reminders

As always we welcome comments, feedback and questions. You can reach us via the web form: Contact Us Web Form

Thanks!

-The WorkingPoint Team

Small business owners have a lot on their plates; invoicing, expenses, inventory management, payroll, marketing, business development, accounting, the list goes on and on. At WorkingPoint we believe we offer a great service to help you manage your finances. We also know that there are many other aspects of your business that you could use some help with. Below are some of our favorite services and products to help make your SMB lives more manageable.

Receipt and Document Management

Shoeboxed – We recently teamed up with Shoeboxed to offer you a great integration with their service. We are excited about this partnership because they have a fantastic suite of services. Essentially they take all of your paper receipts, business cards and other documents, digitize and analyze them and then send them back. Once you have the digital version you can quickly create reports and summaries, which will save you hours during tax season as well as allow you to have a better overview of your expenses. We encourage you to give their free trial a shot.

Neat Receipts – Neat has a slightly different take on document digitizing. Instead of shipping your paper documents away, you scan them all yourself. After buying one of their scanners you can quickly and easily feed in all of your documents to be recognized (OCR) and ordered. Their products have rave reviews and can definitely help you to get more organized.

File/Document Management

Dropbox – A relatively older player in the online document management game, Dropbox allows you to effortlessly upload any type of digital document which can then be viewed on all the devices you own. A real strength of their system is the ability to share folders and files with others, making collaboration with coworkers near and far a breeze. You receive 2GB of space for free, and can pay for more.

Google Docs/Drive – If you are a user of Gmail or Google Apps, then this is the solution for you. Similar to Dropbox you can easily upload files from your computer which are then available anywhere. In addition to being able to share your files with others, one of the major pluses of Google drive is the ability to create and edit documents from any web browser. You get 5GB free; 25GB will set you back a measly $2.50/month. A great tool that we enjoy at WorkingPoint!

Outsourcing Tasks

TaskRabbit – If you haven’t heard of TaskRabbit, then listen up! They offer an amazing service where you can hire individuals near you to complete mundane or repetitive tasks that you don’t have the time/interest in doing yourself. For example, scanning all of those documents into your brand new Neat Receipts! Check out their website to see if they offer services near you.

Elance – Elance in an online marketplace where professionals can post their services and you can hire them. For small business owners the on-demand nature of the service can be invaluable. If you need a logo/website redesign you need look no further. Web design is just one example of the huge number of different things you can get accomplished for your business. There is a bidding system, where you post your job and the approximate amount you are willing to pay and then can review all of the bids that come in.

Website Creation

OnePager – OnePager is a fantastic tool for those of you that don’t have a website yet (you really should!) and want something that is simple and elegant. As the name suggests they can create a site for you that is one page displaying your info and anything else you want people to know about your company.

WordPress – Another website creation tool, that is more powerful than OnePager but at the same time easy for a layman to use is WordPress. They have been around for quite a while and have a huge community of people who create themes, plug-ins etc. for you to optimize your website.

This is just a small sample of the ways that you can leverage the web to streamline and optimize your business. If you have any other ones you use please feel free to post them in the comments. As always questions/feedback /comments are welcome!

Thanks and Happy Optimizing!

-The WorkingPoint Team

Today we have two exciting announcements to share with you.

(more…)

We know that many of our users work out of their homes, using their personal space to conduct business. Doing so allows you to take deductions on your taxes, but until this year the process was a grueling one that we know many of you avoided to spare yourselves the headache. The good news is that starting this year the government has made taking these deductions A LOT easier.

For the current tax period, starting January 1, 2013 (meaning you will file this next year) you can simply deduct $5 for each square foot of home space you use for an office, up to a maximum of $1500 – without having to fill out complicated forms or jump through hoop after hoop. If you normally deduct more than this then you will have to continue to do things the old way, but this should be a great boon for many. You can read more about the change at the IRS Blog, in addition the NY Times has done a piece outlining some of the pros and cons: here.

As always we here at WorkingPoint are looking our for you, our SMB users. If you have any questions, or comments please leave them below.

Thanks and  Happy Deducting for this year too!

-The WorkingPoint Team

Hello WorkingPoint Users,

With the start of 2013 comes the introduction of a hotly anticipated feature in your WorkingPoint account: Paperless Invoicing.

With Paperless Invoicing, when you email your customer an invoice, they will receive a link that they can click on to view their invoice online, pay it, and save it to PDF for their records – All without using a single piece of paper! No paper required – though there is an option to print too.

(more…)

As many of you probably know the Friday after Thanksgiving, Black Friday,  is typically the biggest shopping day of the year (fun fact: Black Friday’s name “originated in Philadelphia, where it originally was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic which would occur on the day after Thanksgiving [Source: Wikipedia]”).

It is also typically a day when stores sell their goods at heavily discounted prices, which gives you, the small business owner a fantastic opportunity. If you have been thinking of buying a new printer for your office, or perhaps that chair you sit in everyday needs to be put out to pasture; Black Friday, and/or Cyber Monday might be the day(s) to do it. The question really becomes how to avoid camping out the night before, or navigating through crowds of deal hungry people. If you are interested – here are some good links for you to do further research:

Office Depot’s Black Friday Page: Office DEPOT

Staples Black Friday Page: Staples

Shopping Tips:

Top 10 Tips to Getting the Best Bargains on Black Friday

Black Friday tips: How to snag door-buster deals

If you haven’t seen this site yet, it pulls together all of the flyers from the big box retailers: Blackfriday.com

Also here is an interesting article about creating your own Black Friday Sales: LA Times

Good luck, HAPPY THANKSGIVING (and happy shopping!) – The WorkingPoint Team

We have recently revealed a slew of partnerships that we’ve been working on for the past few months. Today we are excited to announce that we have just completed integrating another partner into our system – Dropbox (www.dropbox.com).

For those of you that are not aware of Dropbox it is “a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. This means that any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website” (you can learn more about Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/tour/)

What does this mean for you, the WorkingPoint user? In a nutshell you will now be able to easily access important business documents stored on your computer from within your WorkingPoint dashboard. Some examples:

• Quotes – If you work with subcontractors or other vendors and you quote projects based on their estimates, scan and link their quotes to the final quote you send your customer. That way, if you have to look up the figures, you’ll have them all together with your quote.
• Bills – You can scan your original bill hardcopy and add it to the Dropbox folder and link the image to the bill record
• Items – There is usually a good amount of supporting info on the products and services you sell. Link your item record to images of your items or scans of important information regarding the service or product.
• Purchase Orders – You might want to scan and link the vendor’s product information or catalog feature of the item so you have the item details, like size, color, price, etc.
• Invoices – If you have incidental expenses that you have incurred during the course of your work for a client, you can attach scans of receipts for those expenses that you are including in your final invoice.

To learn more about how to integrate your WorkingPoint account with Dropbox, please see the following link: http://help.workingpoint.com/customer/portal/articles/821666-connecting-to-dropbox

As always please submit any feedback you might have to us via email: support@workingpoint.com or via our web form: http://www.workingpoint.com/support/contact–us

Thanks and happy Dropboxing!

-The WorkingPoint Team

In today’s hectic world it is easy to make mistakes, indeed it is human nature to err. When you do this in your personal life normally an apology will rectify the issue. However, if you make a blunder in your work it can have disastrous consequences for you and your business.  At WorkingPoint we want your business to thrive – and a part of this is protect your assets and your company.

Most of us have insurance for our homes, our cars, our health, perhaps even our lives. But is your business properly insured? Business Insurance is a very broad category that includes (but is not limited to): property, liability, workers comp and business interruption. Depending on what type of business you run you may need some (or all) of these.

If this isn’t something you have properly considered, we would urge you to do some research into what sort of insurance you need. The following websites would be a good jump off point:

• About.com: http://businessinsure.about.com/od/insuringyourbusiness/tp/listtypesins.htm
• SBA.gov: http://www.sba.gov/content/types-business-insurance
• Insurance Information Institute: http://www2.iii.org/business-insurance-general/

Once you have figured out what you need you need to do some research into providers – we really like this site for comparing different options:

• FindtheBest: http://business-insurance.findthebest.com/

What experiences have you had with this? Any recommendations for the rest of us? Please leave feedback below. As always we are here to support you in your business. If you have comments/questions/complaints please let us know.

Thanks and be safe out there!

-The WorkingPoint Team

We are constantly striving to improve our users experience, and one of the ways we do this is by partnering with exciting companies that we believe will enhance the way you do business. We have a number of these partnerships in the works and today we are pleased to announce our newest partner – Etsy. Etsy is an online marketplace where creators of handmade products can sell their goods. If you have a business selling handmade products and aren’t doing it on Etsy, we would encourage you to give them a try. Their marketplace caters solely to individuals who create their own goods, allowing you to differentiate yourself from sellers of electronics, services, etc.

If you already have both a WorkingPoint and Etsy account, you can link your existing shop with WorkingPoint and import your item listings and orders. The upshot of this is that you will no longer have to enter your sales in two places, giving you more time to focus on the tasks you love to do!

To get started simply: Log into your WorkingPoint account. Then, from the home-page dashboard, locate the Etsy Integration widget and click “Connect your Etsy account.”

If you are an Etsy user and are interested in signing up for our Risk Free Trial, the process is as easy as navigating to www.workingpoint.com/Etsy and completing the registration form.

We are always looking for ways to improve your experience with our product, and strongly believe that this partnership is one of them! As always feel free to drop us a line with compliments or complaints: http://www.workingpoint.com/support/contact-us

All the best, and happy selling!

The WorkingPoint Team

We were recently mentioned in an article on Web Apps for Business Finance through our deep integration with Yodlee. It is a good article, definitely worth a read! Click through below:

PCWorld: New web apps tackle business finance problems

As always please feel free to leave us comments and feedback.

Have a great weekend!

-WorkingPoint Team