Here are the top 5 features that might make you consider using Sugar:

1. It’s affordable. Their most popular plan – the ‘professional version’ is only $540 per year per user. That’s equivalent to only $45 per month. It has a lower cost of entry and its open platform is cloud-based allowing for it to be cheaper than most on-premise solutions. Needless to say, it’s a cost-effective way to stay engaged with your customers and give them what they love – a little sugar.
2. Options and flexibility. SugarCRM offers customizations galore! It integrates fluidly with many of the current CRM products you may be using. Sugar uses common language, utilizes SOAP and REST API and there’s no hidden fees or limitations which gives you greater control. There’s also a myriad of add-ons that can be used with Sugar. Not to mention…SugarCRM also works in an open environment, giving you more control of your company’s future and saving you money while doing so.
3. It’s social! There’s an Activity Streams dashlet that allows you to see Facebook friends’/fans’ news feeds, see who you should get connected with on LinkedIn, and read tweets of all the people you follow in the dashlet. The platform also lets you add a Twitter handle to a contact or lead and read their tweets directly in the contact or lead record. Lastly, Sugar also has great e-mail integration, letting you sync contacts, calendars and tasks from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Lotus Notes and pretty much any IMAP mail server.
4. Collaboration and Project Management. Sugar delivers a full project management solution combined with the sales management, marketing automation, and customer support used by employees to manage customer-centric activities. These capabilities allow users to deploy projects across all customer-facing tasks, including campaigns, opportunities, accounts, and customer cases. Since project management is integrated with Sugar’s customer information, users no longer need to be concerned with redundant or inaccurate information, lost customer data, poor information sharing, or lack of user adoption.
5. It’s Mobile! Sales teams surely love this feature as they’re often on-the-go. Sugar allows you to access client information from your tablet or Smartphone and also lets you add info in real time. This means that if you’re at an event and encounter a lead, you can seamlessly add their information to Sugar mobile and your sales team can have an e-mail to them in minutes!

For further business improvement ideas please contact Roger Brown from nuOrder Limited, a leading business consultancy working with many award winning clients.
See www.nuOrder.co.uk

Business doesn’t happen, you make it!

To increase your profits you need to determine factors contributing to your gross profit and your overheads. Gross profit requires you to either expand your sales income while controlling your direct costs, or reduce direct costs to increase gross profit.

WH Smith the high street retailer has pleased the financial markets by delivering lower revenue but with a higher margin %. As they say ‘revenue is for vanity, profit is for sanity, and cash is reality’.

To do this you need to ensure the following:

• You know and understand your market/s and your competitors
• You have full product and/or service knowledge and you are technically capable in managing all aspects of the business
• Your service and/or products are of the highest quality, delivered on time and run in accordance with any legislation or other specifications.
• You apply marketing campaigns that are cost-effective but increase your sales. These include in-house promotions, leaflets, press releases and adverts.

Your business overheads also need to be kept under control and requires you to monitor, review and strategise for the following:

• Business Expenses – keep to an absolute minimum, and ensure that any additional overheads you assume result in increased profitability and/or efficiency.
• Increase Overheads – ensure that you have reviewed the market and established where the best place is to purchase your stock. Reliability and costs need to be justified.
• Assets acquired on finance – Review and check your finance options to see if you can getter a better deal elsewhere or reduce your general loan costs
• Reviews – Many businesses could benefit from a regular review of their telephone and insurance costs. Even bank charges can often be reduced through negotiation or review.
• Credit – Regularly monitor your credit account customers to avoid bad debts occurring and find the best credit card deal relating to your business.

Roger T Brown
Consultant
http://www.nuOrder.co.uk

Often a small business must undertake a large capital equipment investment in order to grow. The balance sheet of the business is often not strong enough to justify a Hire Purchase or Finance Lease facility.

Without capital investment the business can not grow and become more profitable. A chicken and egg scenario.

Small Business Finance is an area in which XL Business Finance has a great deal of expertise. As an independent finance broker we understand the problems of small business finance, arranging equipment leasing and machinery finance for example.

At XL Business Finance we can provide small business finance for investments from as little as £1000. This could be useful for providing tax efficient leasing for office furniture, computer equipment and telephone systems for instance.

Do not think of us as a company who provides you with a one off service to get you up and running then disappears into the night. We work along side many clients for many years providing finance solutions such as factoring, debt factoring or factoring invoice discounting facility.

As an independent factoring broker XL Business Finance can provide you with the best Business finance to meet your specific requirements.

Although the provider was a substantial financial institution and one of Europe’s biggest banks this particular factoring company were not interested in taking on the clearing banking or doing the commercial mortgage. Therefore the business was able to carry on using their existing finance company for clearing which kept the overall banking relationship on an even keel.

The problem with a  bank overdraft means that you are at the beck and call of the bank. An overdraft is repayable on demand and at the first sign of trouble it can be withdrawn at a moments notice. No one ever thinks this will happen but believe you me, we have seen it happen and the consequences are not pretty. Another problem with bank overdrafts is that the amount you can borrow is determined by the strength of your balance sheet or the level of  security available. Bank overdrafts of any significant amount are normally secured against bricks and mortar.

Invoice discounting couldn’t be different. A facility is secured against your unpaid invoices and within reason as your business expands so does the size of the facility available. Providing you are looking for standard trading terms borrowings of 80% of debtor book are the norm without the need to provide additional security.

Directors warranties are the normal comfort obtained from the invoice discounting company which provides an indemnity against any fraudulent activity. Fair enough one thinks

XL Business Finance has been helping the SME market for over 10 years sourcing the right kind of funding for a business’s particular needs. Give us a call today to see how we can help you

 Most finance companies have the same funding costs and they have the ability to link it to fixed rates or variable rates. At the time of writing this article the cost of fixed funds for most finance companies is around 4.o%. I would suggest that a margin of 2.5-3% would be a fair return giving a nominal rate to the customer of about 6.5-7%. Therefore when a customer was being quoted 5.5% on a hire purchase deal one can only deduce that the broker was about to sign the deal up on a variable rate. Most finance companies on a variable are taking a min base rate of around 3% so this would seem to stack up.

At a time when interest rates are really low it would make sense to go for the slightly more expensive fixed rate because rates are only going to go up but maybe not in the immediate future. At the end of the day it must b the customers choice and as such the customer must be aware as to what he is signing up for. As provision of  hire purchase or finance lease to business users is totally unregulated the end user must be aware that even a written quote may not contain this vital information