Browsing the archives for the Business category.

Recovery Audit and Duplicate Payments Software – To Make Substantial Savings…

Business, Finance, Software

Accounts are simple in theory, but all too often extremely complicated in practice. Thanks to that unwanted but unavoidable fact, your business could be losing surprisingly high amounts of money through duplicate payments and other sorts of accounting mistake. An accounts payable audit can enable you to find these, thereby saving money that you have already wasted and preventing the same thing from happening again. You may be under the impression that your company is already as smoothly-run as it needs to be in this area – or perhaps you merely think that these sorts of errors are unavoidable, and the price of doing business. However, this is not true, as recovery audit software will prove. The most reliable estimates suggest that somewhere between 1 in every 1,000 and one in every 200 payments is a duplicate – which means that between you are maybe overpaying between 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent in just those cases. That has a high cost associated.

That’s only one example of accidental overpayments. There are an awful lot of others – not least when devious suppliers intend to take advantage of the faults in your accounting system and end up costing you money through basic fraud. It’s not nice to consider, but it’s something you should bear in mind: if you haven’t, then there always the chance that someone else has – all with a cost to your company. In this economic climate, no one should be throwing money away like that.

All in all, overpayments are an expensive business. An accounts payable audit of the last few years for a medium-sized business could easily show a six-figure discrepancy – money that could have been used to pay staff or invest in hardware or training. Duplicate payments occur because accounts systems often only have relatively basic safeguards in place, and mistakes (and dishonesty) do occur. A typical accounts payment will require a dozen different pieces of information to be entered into the database – plenty of room for human error. recovery audit software can eliminate most of these. In fact, it would be surprising if the software didn’t more than pay for itself the first time it was used. Moreover, it’s worth acting fast. Duplicates and other mistaken payments can be corrected – but only if the supplier involved is still in business. If you wait around for too long, you may find that more and more of them are no longer operating, meaning that you have no chance of reclaiming the lost funds.

Please visit https://www.fiscaltec.com/uk

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Commercial Property North London: Always A Good Investment

Business, Commercial Property, Rental Property

Shops to let in North London have, like all commercial property north london, suffered in recent years. The credit crunch and resulting recession hit properties hard in capitals across the world. In many of these, prices have still not recovered. In London, however, the picture is unexpectedly different. Commercial property took a real hammering as the economy nosedived, and prime office space in particular was badly hit. That meant a couple of things. Firstly, yields rose quite strongly as sale prices fell but rental prices dropped less sharply. Secondly, there were significant opportunities for outside investors who recognised a bargain when they saw one – which is what happened not long afterwards. The relative strength of the Euro against the pound meant that investors on the continent (as well as further afield) made the most of the depressed prices. Whether it was a high-rise development in the Square Mile or a shop for sale in London, it could be seem as a potentially lucrative asset.

This dynamic led to a strong bounce back in property prices in the capital. This was supported by a relative dearth of additional development. As the long-awaited recovery appears on the horizon – subject to further shocks from the Eurozone – the bottleneck this will cause is expected to nudge prices even higher once again. Things in London aren’t exactly ‘business as usual’ but the picture there is far better than in other areas of the country, which helps as well. The GDP figures that the nation awaits from quarter to quarter are not a reliable local indication, since they are not uniform; London and the southeast, in particular, are in a much stronger position economically than elsewhere.

Shops to rent in North London can thus be seen as an investment opportunity. Property has fallen from grace as an investment in recent times, being blamed as a key strand of the global economic traumas that are still working themselves out. commercial property north london doesn’t play by quite the same rules as property elsewhere – office space, industrial, retail or otherwise. This means that, assuming you’re able to be in it for the medium-term, you can expect to make a profit on your purchase. A shop for sale in London might not have the prestige of a skyscraper on Canary Wharf, but with a little research you could find it yielding the same kind of return on investment.

Please visit https://www.claridges-commercial.co.uk

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Shop For Sale North London: A Fresh Start

Business, Commercial Property, Property

Shops to let in north London are just one of the top opportunities currently offered by commercial property London. One of the interesting things about a shop for sale in london is that this might provide a more stable form of investment than other kinds of property. There has been enough in the news about house prices stalling, although this always has to be seen from a country-wide perspective. Overall, residential property is set for a somewhat brighter future in 2013 than it enjoyed in 2012. Some disappointing dips across England and Wales and in the north especially pulled average figures down, but in London residential property saw a 7 percent jump on last November’s prices. Prices across the city now average £365,000, with some areas commanding significantly higher prices.

Residential property is just one sector. Office space is a second line of commercial property London, but the last few months and years have shown the volatility of this. At one point, not long after the crash of 2008, the cost of office space was down 40 percent – and almost 50 percent in some areas. This was followed by a sharp uptick, due to the low number of new developments and the consequent bottleneck. Still, as many people lost out heavily as gained on the low prices, and much of the cash came from foreign investors who were in a position to grab a bargain.

Retail space, by contrast, has been a lot more stable. Shops to rent in north London are a better long-term prospect, at least for those who are able to put their money in and wait it out for at least a few years. Consequently a shop for sale in london might be a firmer prospect for a landlord looking to make an investment into commercial property London. Retail space tends to follow nominal GDP growth relatively closely, as might broadly be expected. Despite the ups and downs of a business cycle, this means that if you take a long view things should broadly continue upwards, and never drop too badly. Office space, on the other hand, is affected by other factors, including the development cycle. The volatility that this brings to the sector can be worrying for landlords, unless they plan to hold onto the property for decades. Naturally, as sales prices fall yields rise, so if you judge your timing well it can nevertheless be a lucrative market.

Please visit https://www.claridges-commercial.co.uk for further info…

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ICT infrastructure: driving economic expansion

Business

The UK’s ICT infrastructure is better than much of the rest of the world’s, but connectivity is badly distributed throughout the country. Whilst London and the southeast generally have fast internet access, some of the outlying regions and rural areas are still stuck with the old telephone network’s copper cables for their infrastructure. Consequently speeds can be down to the ‘dial up’ rates of a decade or more back. Next generation access involves enhancing these phone networks – which were never intended to support high-bandwidth internet traffic – to fibre-optic cables which are capable of transmitting enormous volumes of data very quickly. The problem is that such upgrades are costly, and companies are not always able to make the investment. However, this means that whole areas can be stuck with slow internet access. Given the significance of the web for business, personal communication and life in general today, this is problematic. One solution is community broadband.

Community broadband is a way of drawing groups of people together and sharing connections between them. These are locally-organised movements aimed at addressing ‘not spots’ – those areas that today have little or no connectivity. They are often administrated by social enterprises or not-for-profit groups and are therefore cost-effective. There have already been some exceptional success stories, with tens or hundreds of thousands of people in some places connected to the high-speed web. This obviously comes with many benefits, not least that e-commerce now accounts for a non-trivial amount of GDP; good internet access is viewed as a prerequisite for the economic recovery which is currently elusive.

Communications technology is fast-moving. Only a few years ago it was almost inconceivable to browse the internet on a smartphone – the mobile phone revolution is itself less than 20 years old. Whilst this makes some organisations (and individuals) wary about upgrading – the new technology may fast become obsolete itself – it also means that those without next generation access are being left behind, reliant on phone wiring that were never intended to handle the load that is currently demanded of them. The UK’s ICT infrastructure is patchy, and large areas – particularly remote places – have very slow access. Community broadband is a way of addressing this and bringing equality of speed to the country. This will be fundamental both to economic recovery and addressing the north/south divide in terms of web access.

Please visit http://www.broadbandvantage.co.uk/ for further info

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Bacs means you can instantly see direct cost savings

Business, Finance, Software

Using bacs software for all your business’s financial transactions conveys greater reliability to your operations, a more even cashflow and makes instant cost savings on paraphernalia such as cheque stationary and postage costs. Bacs can be used to pay wages and salaries, for supplier payments, refunds, pensions, dividends, employee expenses and insurance settlements, covering every expenditure needs of any size of organisation. What is more, bacs payments profit both payer and payee.
For the payer, bacs cuts down on administration costs and time spent banking. Sorting, preparing and collating cheques is a time-consuming task, not to mention meeting relevant remittance advice – whereas using bacs to create and authorise a payment is simple and inexpensive. Bacs payments also give the payer greater command over cashflow management, so that the payer always knows exactly when the payment leaves their account. Thanks to this constantly up-to-date information, you can make your money work for you right up until the moment it leaves your account.

By generating only a single debit from your account on a specified date, the need to track individual payments is eliminated. As well as cutting down on reconciliation, bacs payments augment efficiency and put you, the payer, in the position of being able to agree more favourable payment terms.
As a payee, bacs software makes your life much less complicated. Organisations that pay using this system tend to pay earlier than those who do not use bacs. They also tend to be more dependable, as they rely less on more fallible human handling of payments. On top of being reliable, its is more secure than cheques and cash, which are more liable to go missing.

Like the payer, as a bacs payee you will save time handling and banking cheques and cash – with bacs, the money goes directly into your account electronically. Cashflow is smoother, as payments immediately appear as cleared funds, ready to be withdrawn directly. And all this efficiency means you’ll earn interest earlier, too.

In conclusion, bacs software can really provide you with dependable solutions to sluggish financial transactions, greatly narrowing the margin for error, easing cashflow and saving time. For both payer and payee, bacs payments are faster and smoother, which leads to other benefits, such as negotiating potential and early interest. To make the most effective use of your finance resources, bacs provides a solution and more.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.bottomline.co.uk/

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BACS – the end of the cheque

Business, Software

In the days before bacs, payments were made in several ways – most typically by cheque or cash, once a month. Paying money by cash meant a number of problems, not least the presence of a large amount of money on the premises, and the need for workers to collect their wage packages in person. Cheques were a huge improvement, but still relied on a degree of administration, as well as the vagaries of the mail system. In addition, any problems – a missed signature, a bad date – meant delays. BACS payments avoid all of these problems, and almost all larger businesses nowadays have some form of BACS software to facilitate all the payments they need to deliver – whether to clients, employees or suppliers.

Smaller companies can also benefit from BACS software. Of course, the smallest companies may find it easier just to use online banking; if your company is just one or two people and a very small handful of clients, this may be all that is necessary. Payees can be set up and paid one at a time, as and when invoices come in. However, any degree of growth will soon demonstrate that such an ad hoc system can become unmanageable, if only through the sheer number of contacts and their various types. You might manage to keep track of a dozen payees, but what if that expands to a hundred? Sooner or later, it gets too easy to drop the ball. That’s when you start hearing complaints, and even lost business. Apart from anything else, there are the hours taken to deal with all of the accounts this way – it’s just not an efficient use of time.

BACS software can pay for itself pretty quickly in terms of efficiency and peace of mind. The programmes will integrate BACS payments with your existing accounts system, automating the process and ensuring that you pay people the right amount, on time. Payments are quick (three-day standard, or an expedited same-day payment for an additional fee) and secure, and the bacs setup will provide you with an audit trail so that you can track what is being paid when. Funds can be transferred abroad, too, if you wish, so this is a solution suitable for the international company, of whatever extent. As the alternatives – cash and cheque – become less and less widely used, there are few reasons not to bring this capability to your business too.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.bottomline.co.uk/

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