Sound Advice From the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce

The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce recently published a paper outlining some very sensible strategies businesses can employ in seven different arenas “when the economy sours.” While we might argue that, at this point, if the economy has soured, following the advice provided may either pull your business out of a slump or keep it from falling into a slump in the first place.

Two of the sales strategies mentioned in the document recommend prioritizing both your sales prospects and your existing customers. We can all agree that we should exert our effort where we will realize the biggest return; after all, how many references to the Pareto Principle can you recall from prior sales training?

ACT! by Sage ships with some pretty terrific reports for prioritizing your efforts that might work for you right out of the box. By following the Reports Menu to Edit Template, you can even modify the existing reports to meet your needs or click New Template to start from scratch. By using these tools to analyze where you need to focus your sales and marketing energy, you will also be working within another of the included strategies: optimizing operations.

Report Selection Simplified

Sage Software shipped all customers on a current subscription the 4.3 release last week. There has been a lot of talk for a long time about this release such as:

• The inclusion of the most popular Paperless Office enhancements

• Integrating the Fixed Assets module with Accounts Payable and Purchase Order

• The expansion of Business Insights Explorer to include General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Inventory Management and Purchase Order views

However, there is another less talked about (but maybe more anticipated) enhancement included: the simplification of report selection criteria.

No longer are users required to move to a second tab to define the criteria, but better yet is that users now have the option to keep the selection criteria window open after printing or previewing a report. That means you no longer have to navigate through the menus to run multiple iterations of a single report. It has been a long time coming.

Considering that and the fact that we’ve had some time to do our best to break the new release so it doesn’t break at the customer’s site, we’re getting excited about moving ahead with the upgrades. It’s also important to note that Sage has not yet had to release a service update for version 4.3.

Let’s hear what is exciting you about the upgrade to version 4.3 in the comments.

Improve Productivity By Using The Keyboard

In the latest issue of The Peachtree Insider, the tip of the month addresses keyboard shortcuts: a way to keep your hands on the keyboard rather than slowing down to move to the mouse for a couple of clicks just to go back to the keyboard. If you are unfamiliar with reasons why you might want to leave your mouse alone, read this.

While the short list included is a fine start, it hardly scratches the surface on ways you can keep your productivity up by keeping your fingers on the keyboard. Going beyond mere keyboard shortcuts, other tools are available to help with text substitution. Text substitution is a system in which a user creates a hotstring (specific characters) that when typed are automatically replaced with a longer string of text. For example, rather than typing the entire name of our company, I can simply type A-S-L to get Acuity Solutions, LLC.

I recommend Texter from the folks at Lifehacker.com which works across all Windows applications so you can use it in Peachtree, Word, Excel, Outlook…you get the idea. Texter allow users to include date and time variables in text replacement and punctuation can be used in hotstrings. By the way, it’s free.

If you’re using text substitution, let us know how it works for you. We also want to hear any others ways you avoid the mouse.