Clear the clog: Get your project flowing again with quick decisions

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This is a guest post by Shabana Shiliwala, who owns The Financial Sort, a financial planning company based in Austin, Texas.

Is your project not flowing smoothly? If you’re plagued with missed deadlines, overspending or incomplete tasks, it’s time to find out what’s clogging the pipes. A clue is that these blunders are often related to each other. For example, when overlooked tasks are discovered, going into emergency mode to complete them can require employees to work overtime, which pushes the project over budget. So if these problems are related, there must be a single culprit behind them. The usual suspect? Decisions aren’t being made efficiently. Find out what’s preventing the right people from making the decisions that will get your project flowing again.

Meetings. Think about how long it takes to organize a meeting, maneuver schedules so that all the major players can attend, keep it focused and obtain a consensus by the time it’s finished.…


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Save the world, on time!

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Tracy is a highly proactive customer success leader. She manages a customer support team at her company. Delivering little nuggets of customer happiness everyday is her ultimate goal. Needless to say, she trusts her helpdesk software as much as she trusts her own team.

She gets into office every morning and has a huddle with her team. They discuss important highlights from the previous day and their plan of action for the rest of the day. That’s all she needs from them. For every other detail, she trusts Zoho Support. She loves the automation features and finds them really useful. “You guys really make my day!”, she says, all the time.

Last week, we heard from Tracy. But, she sounded a little serious.

Her company just signed on a big client. This one’s really important for their future. A strong responsibility now rests on her shoulders.…


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Making unwanted travel a deductible expense

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This is a guest post by Craig Keolanui of SmBizWinningTips

You might have heard of planning a vacation around a trade show or convention that you can attend, but consider those trips you want to take but don’t necessarily want to spend money on, such as weddings or other family events.

It would be nice to write off some of these expenses and, if done carefully, it is entirely possible.

Most often these trips involve expensive airfare and covering your business in your absence, so getting a tax break is the best way to recoup some of these costs. The key is to mix business with pleasure and the rest is as easy as keeping organized receipts.

What else can be accomplished on your trip?
Make your personal trip a business trip. Network with old friends and read up about conventions or events involving small businesses in the destination city’s publications or websites.…


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Case Study: Using Zoho Reports for Strategic Planning

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Zoho Reports is a versatile reporting tool and we keep coming across customers who use it in a myriad ways. One such customer is María Inés Plaza of Envases, a food/industry packages manufacturer based in Venezuela. María Inés uses Zoho Reports for her planning department’s activities. From automated balance scorecards to variable compensation pay for employees to sales forecasts, Zoho Reports does it all at Envases.

Till 5 months back, Envases’ planning department, like any other SMB’s was using the ubiquitous spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel) for the above functions. It took María Inés a lot of time every month to update the spreadsheet, apply the proper filter and share a copy of it with everyone concerned. She realized there has to be a better way to do it and hit upon the idea of using Zoho Reports. Now, she’s automated all data uploads and calculations.…


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Now Possible: Scheduled migration of data into Zoho Creator from MS Access and MS Excel

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Migrating data between services is a pain, regardless of the services. We’ve always been for simplifying these tedious tasks, because most of Zoho Creator users have the need to synchronize data from in-house applications (ERP system for example), with their custom apps in Zoho Creator.

The Zoho Creator migration tool was a result of a conscious effort to simplify data migration. The tool made it easy to create new apps during migration or migrate data into existing apps. Now, we have enhanced the tool to support command line option for uploading data from files. This version of the tool allows you to perform tasks on Zoho Creator, right from within the command line interface. You can

Create an application
Create a form
Add records
Update records
Add or Update

This makes way for cron jobs; customers can schedule synchronization of data from in-house apps like MS Access or MS Excel, with their custom Zoho Creator application, without manual intervention.…


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Just In: New estimate statuses to better track potential business

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Last week’s flavor was saving time with bulk printing. This week we are planning to get you more organized with regard to your potential business.

The average life of an estimate undergoes several trials and testing phases before it reaches the ‘invoiced’ stage. Along with Draft, Sent and Invoiced, we’ve now introduced three new estimate statuses in Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice – Accepted, Declined and Expired.

When a client approves the proposal, you can mark the estimate as ‘accepted’. All the accepted estimates will give you an idea on how to prioritize and plan your time so you can manage multiple projects comfortably.

Declined estimates could be a due to a lot of reasons even including the low budget. But if you have a trail of declined estimates for specific customers, analysis of that will give you insight on how to change your modus operandi the next time.…


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Find Nearby Customers On the Go

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A customer meeting wraps up ahead of time, leaving you with some time to kill. Making the best use of the time in hand,  you connect to the Zoho CRM App in your Smartphone. And in a single tap, your contacts and prospects near you are displayed on the map. In a few more taps, you can schedule a meeting and even get the driving directions to the customer’s location!

Wow! All this is just a few seconds. Thanks to ‘Find Nearby Customers’ option in the Zoho CRM App for Mobiles.

Find Nearby Customers on the go

The latest offering from Zoho CRM App for Mobiles is the ability to locate your customers in and around your current location. With the help of the Location Services in your Smartphones (iOS, Android and Blackberry), the app detects your customer’s location within a specified radius from your current spot.

And that’s not all! You can view the customer’s details, send emails and even make a call to the customer.…


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