The first two weeks of 2010 have certainly been interesting. Some of us (in the UK) have had extended holidays due to the snow and ridiculous Health&Safety rules that cause schools to close whenever the S word is mentioned, ( I probably should add here that this is a personal opinion and nothing to do with Woosabi!) .
It is very frustrating for many start up companies and small business owners who have spent the Christmas period planning for 2010, catching up with their admin and recharging their batteries to launch into the New Year with aplomb.
Hopefully with the milder weather taking hold, the business world will start waking up from its hibernation and we can all start moving forward again (hopefully on more solid ground).
Did you carry out any of the suggestions we made during the break? Is the ‘Contacts’ section of your Woosabi account now fully updated with accurate customer/supplier records and information? Have you set your business objectives and reminders to phone customers at least once a month? Most importantly, have you changed the VAT amount in the invoices section back to 17.5%?
The heating has been on in Woosabi HQ during the break and further development work has been completed. We’ve already had a few more meetings with parties interested in working with us and there are a couple more due to take place shortly.
We’re very keen to strike up relationships with private and public sector organisations responsible for providing business support to start-ups. If you are involved in this sector, we would welcome an opportunity to speak/meet with you.
On behalf of the Woosabi team, we wish you a healthy, happy and successful 2010.
On behalf of the Woosabi team, we hope you are having a great festive season.
Whilst many businessess are closed for the next week, we know that lots of small businesses and sole traders use this period to catch up with outstanding work and begin planning for the next year. The silence of the phones, lack of emails and quiet period in many diaries is welcomed by many as we wait for 2010 to begin.
Why not sign up for our free 30 day trial and use Woosabi to help you prepare your business for 2010? It is very easy to import your contacts from any existing databases, customer records can be easily updated and you can set your business objectives for the next year and use reminders to keep you on track.
Whilst Mary Poppins is on the TV or an old edition of Top Gear is being shown for the umpteenth time on UK Gold, grab the pile of receipts and invoices you might have accruing on your desk, make yourself a cup of tea and sit down to input them – it might sound a very tedious task but the Woosabi expenses section will compile all the information into a table and chart showing your profit and loss status for each month. Once you have cleared the backlog it takes no time at all to do this once a week or even as you receive them to keep your Expenses up to date.
Your Woosabi invoices section will show which invoices are now overdue. Why not use this quiet time to prepare a list of debtors and boost your cashflow to start 2010.
We hope that you enjoy the rest of the holiday and hope that you will let Woosabi to ‘Mind Your Own Business‘ in 2010.
Frozen roads, Christmas post delays and not being able to get hold of people you need to contact due to parties, time-off etc etc – this time of year can be very demanding and stressful for lots of sole traders and small businesses.
How can you keep your business moving when faced with these obstacles?
Woosabi can provide a few solutions.
1. You can log into your Woosabi account wherever you are. If you’re snowed in, faced with a lengthy delay due to the weather or quite simply don’t fancy leaving the warmth and comfort of your home, as long as you have access to a pc or laptop and the Internet you can use Woosabi.
2. Sending your invoices out on time and making sure they aren’t stuck in the Christmas post isn’t a problem. Select the send by email option and your invoices are automatically converted into pdf documents enabling them to be sent electronically.
3. have you considered allowing your accountant or bookkeeper access to your Woosabi account? You are entitled to register up to 3 users per account and quite a few Woosabi customers use this option to enable their accountant or bookkeeper to access their account from their own offices. This cuts out travel time (especially relevant when the weather is bad) but also allows them to keep a watchful eye on your business and speeds up the end of year accounts process. You have the ability to limit which sections of Woosabi other users can access.
So, if you are not already using Woosabi, why not give your business a present this year and sign up to Woosabi. Our special offer of just £7.50 per month is still applicable (it won’t be for much longer!) and before you are asked to pay you get a 30 day FREE trial.
It’s been a busy month for Woosabi. We’ve had a series of meeting in Cardiff and London with potential partners, resellers and investors. It is still early days BUT (and it is a big BUT) the calibre of the companies/organisations and individuals we are talking to could provide us and you with BIG opportunities.
How will they benefit you? well, safe and secure in the Woosabi vaults are a series of additional ‘add-ons’ that we have developed to provide you with even more helpful functions. Marketing tools, inventories and e-commerce functions are just a few but these require a lot of time and resources to develop. By meeting with the various parties, we want to open up as many routes to market as possible thereby increasing user numbers and revenue and then re-investing this back into Woosabi to deliver these additional services to you.
Feedback from the other parties has been great. They understand Woosabi, can see what we want to achieve and why we developed the software. We are hopeful that we will be concluding a couple of deals int he near future whilst others might take a little longer to negotiate.
Are you still enjoy the benefits of Woosabi? Are we helping you to ‘Mind Your Own Business’? The feedback we have been recieivng is very encouraging and we would like to thank you for it.
If you don’t tell us what you think about Woosabi, or how your user experience can be improved we won’t be able to action it. Keep in touch – comment on this blog, email hello@woosabi.com or send us a Christmas card.
Our online tutorials will be available for you to view shortly, they have taken a little longer than expected in production.
In the meantime, have you tried the new ‘Text It’ function we have added to Woosabi?
A lot of our users are small businesses with limited resources (i.e. if you don’t do it then no-one will!). When you are out on a job, in a meeting travelling etc your office and phone is unattended. Using ‘text-it’, you can answer a call and quickly send a note to yourself to remind you who phoned and what you need to do when you go back to your office.
Assuming you have saved your mobile phone number within the ‘My details’ menu of your account, you (and you alone) can then send your Woosabi account a SMS Text message (up to 160 characters).
Next time you log-in to Woosabi the content of each text message you sent will appear as a randomly positioned Quicknote on your Dashboard, that you can then flip in to an expense note, job note or whatever type of item you need to record or schedule.
Helpful? we certainly think so and our beta test users gave us the thumbs up too.
Our presentation at the Centre for Business went really well today. We were allocated a generous slot to present Woosabi to their team of business advisers and received a great reception. The following Question & Answers session gave us valuable pointers and feedback from the experienced business advisers and the meeting ended on a very positive note with their team understanding all the benefits Woosabi will provide for business start-ups and SME’s.
We are also able to offer Centre for Business clients an additional discount to encourage them to use Woosabi.
Do you know about the reseller package we provide for business start-up/SME ‘hubs’ and organisations? No? well send an email to hello@woosabi.com and we will be happy to provide you with this info.
Whilst the video tutorial is scheduled to be filmed on location tomorrow (Tony was seen heading toward the make-up truck this afternoon!), for those of you not using Woosabi just yet (how dare you!), I’ve hyperlinked a screen shot of the What’s On page to give you a general idea about the look and feel of Woosabi. Similar screen shots and product info will be posted soon.
Executive management meeting today in the boardroom (please read as coffee with the team in Starbucks!). Lots of positives to report – we’ve told you about the great responses we’ve received from meetings/contacts, well we’re now receiving them online via linkedin and other sources – thanks for all you kind words, the knowledge and expertise you are sharing, your feedback and your support – all are most appreciated.
Woosabi - the Online Tutorial
We’re filming the Woosabi online tutorials on Friday. Tony is working on the content as I type this, Dan’s checking over the equipment ,dusting down the directors chair and adjusting his beret! We’re hoping to create a series of bite size tutorials for all of the Woosabi functions in a day but previous experiences tell us that we might struggle to fit it all in. (I was going to include a link to our previous videos but Tony just shouted across that they have been sent to London for the attention of the judges at the BAFTA’s).
*STOP PRESS* Just retrieved from the Woosabi video vault – a previous offering from the studios of Woosabi Bros starring our very own Tony O’Sullivan – ‘A Room with a Woo‘.
(Please note the 60 day trial no longer valid.)
We’ll let you know when the new tutorials have been uploaded and look forward to receiving your feedback because (all joking aside) we want them to be as informative as possible to help you make the most of your Woosabi account.
As posted the other day, we have started a Woosabi group on LinkedIn. All well and good – however, as mentioned by quite a few of you, I didn’t post the link to this group, please accept my apologies and for those who want it, here it is:
Last Saturday we attended the New Start Wales Exhibition in the CIA in Cardiff. It might have been cold, wet and windy but there was a reasonably good turn out for the event and for us, it provided plenty of opportunities to do a bit of networking and make some new contacts.
We had some very interesting conversations with the Federation of Small Businesses and representatives from the Economic Development Departments of some of the County Councils here in Wales. Follow ups to these contacts will be made shortly and we hope to be able to report more positive news soon.
Whilst at the exhibition we were shortlisted as finalists in a ‘Dragon Den’ type competition the organisers were running. We weren’t expecting to enter, let alone get shortlisted so that was a bonus and another opportunity for us to promote Woosabi.
We’ve asked before and we’ll ask again – if you know of any similar opportunities for us, please get in touch (ideally they will be based in Wales for the time being although we are happy to consider all options within reason).
Thanks for the feedback you are providing us with regard to how you are using Woosabi. We will be writing up some of these for use as case studies in our media pack so your business will be promoted too. Get in touch directly by sending an email to hello@woosabi.com.
Have you got a LinkedIn account? Are you a keen online networker?
If you are, we’ve just set up a Woosabi Users LinkedIn group for everyone using Woo to interact with one another, share their knowledge and exchange their experiences about Woosabi.
LinkedIn is free to join and a potentially useful business networking channel for users.
Tony O'sullivan
One of the founders of Woosabi, Tony is our in residence Management By Exception (MBE) guru. With over 825 years experience in Sales you really don't want to question his wisdom. We tried; it didn't end well.
Dan Bridge
The world's greatest video gamer, Dan will crush your Donkey Kong high score while simultaneously crafting a database driven web application... 'show off!'
Edryd Sharp
Eds has an eye for detail. He lives for branding and when he's not obsessing over fonts, usability and CSS styles he'll be re-organising his movie collection by alphabetical and genre.
