Ultimately it’s all about the money, getting sales in and reducing costs going out.

Here are some notes on how to manage your cashflow, and to decrease your spending on excessive expenses, at the same time building up your assets.

Remember, by bringing down your regular outgoings you can save more, and have more financial freedom. Regard your spending as an investment and you should be able to recession-proof yourself with these handy tips:

Make sales your priority

• Increase your marketing – by generating leads and sales
• Get your costs and prices right
  • Compare yourself to what clients want to pay
  • What your competitors are charging

Get Paid

• Train customers to learn your terms, ie: 14 or 28 days payment
• Take deposits
• Interim/milestone payments
• There is an online filing for claims which costs £80, only use for clients you don’t want to keep!
• Train your customers to pay promptly, by chasing promptly

Value your suppliers

• Reserve money to pay for suppliers promptly
• When times are tough, communicate
• Spread your money around if paying more than one

Get rid of costs you don’t need

• An obvious one, but reduce the tariff of your mobile phone, changing contract tariffs and plans can save a great deal of your monthly outgoings.
• Only think about keeping something on if your are getting a return on investment back on it, like regular web hosting.
• Check your direct debits, and cancel the ones you don’t need.

Personal Finance and Spending

There are three types of personal spending:

• Fixed – Mortgage, rent, phone bill
• Variable – Food, clothes, going out
• Occasional – Christmas, dentist, holidays

Why not try moving the fixed spending into a new current account? Then you will have better control of the other two spending types.

And finally plan and review your cashflow constantly.

After attending a recent business event in Brighton, I was encouraged to hear that there is an active channel for securing new work and contracts for the 2012 olympics relating to digital media and marketing. And I thought it would be worth sharing.

Below are a selection of free services that enable businesses to compete for contract opportunities linked to the London 2012 Games and other major public and private sector buying organisations.

With a particular focus on supply chain opportunities, many of them act as a brokerage service, matching buyers with potential suppliers.

Where to find out about contracts:
Office of Government Commerce www.ogc.gov.uk
Purchase and Supply Agency – www.pasa.nhs.uk
Government Opportunities – www.supply2.gov.uk
Tenders Electronic Daily – www.ted.europa.eu
Partnerships UK – www.partnershipsuk.org.uk
Business Link – www.businesslink.gov.uk
2012 Olympic Games – www.competefor.com
Buying Solutions (Supplier Zone) – www.buyingsolutions.gov.uk

Business Link will be giving access to focused business support through their network, the aim of this will help to boost the long–term competitiveness of your business. This support is free and will help focus and strengthen your business for the long-term.

Magento is an open-source ecommerce web application launched on March 31, 2008 by Varien.

Now this is the ecommerce application that everyone was waiting for, and to be open-sourced, meaning free to install, no licence required, even better!

Magento 1.3 feature list (PDF) is all that customers will need for their online store, and easy for developers and agencies to sell as part of their product family.

MAGENTO COMMUNITY NEEDS LOVE FROM VARIEN
However, I feel that Varien are ignoring important feedback provided by its users, after all there have been over 1 million downloads – so each version is very well tested by the community.

With Varien listening and monitoring what is being said about Magento will lead to a stronger, more powerful and flexible platform for all owners and users to enjoy. This currently isn’t happening.

There are lots of frustrating quirks and ‘Magento-isms’ to the application that are quite easy to debug, being based on the PHP zend framework. However, they still remain on each release, as a developer you just have to be aware of installation or database issues from past experience.

Currently bugs, issues and even ‘how do I’ questions are being left open on the Magento forum, ie: not being answered by moderators. This I feel is rather sad for a product that clearly has huge potential.

For example:
» Reduce heavy load javascript in the headers
» Optimise the code – Magento is very resource intensive
» Less demand on server memory

Many many more at the Community Roadmap

WHY BOTHER?
As the community has to fend for itself (although the forum always says 1000 users online), you will find that a lot of users actually keep fixes and workarounds to themselves, rather than sharing fixes on the forum. Perhaps the feeling ‘why should I bother, if no one is listening?’ attitude?

CUT THE FORUM NOISE
Their are a lot of questions on the forum that are the same, and some threads that go off in a different direction. Moderation and slimming down the unnecessary content is required.

PUSH FOR EXTENSION EXPERIMENTATION!
I would also like to see more experimentation with Magento extensions over at Magento Connect. Currently there are some ‘nice-to-have’ features members or partners have added. However, more CMS integration would be great, like with Wordpress, there is currently a Magebridge extension that allows you to share databases and content, but it’s still early days. I recommend Varien focus on getting the existing features in the next release (1.4?) stable before committing to any new features.

At the moment, anyone can experiment, but again there’s no support or advice when you require it, unless you hire a Magento solution partner to help. Costly.

VARIEN SUPPORT
You can get support from the Magento Enterprise edition which was released this April (2009). This version provides a service agreement with Varien and starts at £5,500 per year. However, the difference between a free model and per annum basis is huge, and one of the main ideas behind the open-source movement is that developers and programmers contribute towards improving the core code of the application.

POSITIVE STEPS
A positive step forward is that Varien have transferred the development of the roadmap to the Community Advisory Board. Through direct involvement with the community the CAB will be able manage and supervise the roadmap more efficiently, more openly and more cordially. Link to Roadmap of Magento.

That’s good news. However, it is very, very sad that Mageno has so far completely ignored interacting wiith the community – there are no team members in the forum any more. Bug reports are ignored and not commented on or just closed without any explanation.

I would really like to see Magento proving that it is listening and working with the community. More Mage-camps and workshops please.

Magento feels like how Wordpress was a few years ago, (good, but could be great!). Magento has some killer features that still prove to be shaky..

Varien will continue to offer an application that will be a few years behind in development if they choose to look away from a community that is sharing very valuable feedback.

Google has a reputation for never completing a project. GMail has been around for five years but is yet to lose its “beta” tag. Docs, Calendar and many other Google services are still beta-products despite having evolved radically since their initial release.

The company’s reasoning for endless beta cycles has never been clearly explained, and Google always insisted the tag would be removed once the product was ready. I suspect Google’s motivation for beta tagging is a combination of:

• It reminded users that the web application was experimental and undergoing development.
• It lowered user expectations of early web systems and gave us a pleasant surprise to find fully-functional online products.
• Version numbers rarely have much meaning when applied to web applications and services. Unlike shrink-wrapped disk-distributed software, web solutions can be incrementally improved on a daily basis. Few people, other than the developers, will care if it’s version 7 or 57.

However, Google has finally recognised that the “beta” label has different connotations in the business world and it could be damaging their prospects. Many business users are put off because they associate the term with incomplete or untested software.

It is possible that other Google products will follow the example set by Chrome. The web browser had a beta period of just 100 days and is already at version 2, even though it was only released in September 2008. Could Google’s beta habit be over?

Has Google’s use of beta labels ever confused, or put off any of your clients?