Whether you are running a business as a sole trader or have a number of employee’s, all businesses require a certain amount of software to allow them to run. Accounting software is a popular one that many people use. There are a large number of different accounting software packages and they vary in price. If you just want a basic package to allow you to create invoices, then this will be relatively cheap or even free, but if you want software that will record purchase invoice and calculate VAT / tax returns etc then you may need to invest more. Other software your business may require is a CRM package. This is a type of software that will allow you to create records for all your customers. Again packages vary massively in functionality but some will allow you to contact the customer via enewletters or reminders and flag up when they are due for a renewal of a product you offer.

If you have a website it may well have a content management (CMS) system installed on the back end. This is a system that allows a user to log in and make certain changes to the site such as add or remove products and add / change content. Depending on which content management system your web developer uses and the level of access you have will decide what you can change within the site. Some web development companies will have their own content management system that they have created. The advantage of a bespoke content management system such as one like this is that the web development company will have complete control over what functionality they can add in for you and how you want the back end of the website (CMS area) to work. Off the shelf CMS systems can be cheaper but do often have limitations meaning that you can only change what they allow you too.    

Many businesses are looking to migrate their current software packages to the cloud. This can be for a number of reasons, but one of the main factors is often accessibility for members of staff when out of the office. For some companies it is vital that they can assess client’s files when at their home or business premises so therefore they need cloud based software to allow these documents to be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. One of the many issues businesses face when moving to cloud based software is migrating all of their current data in to the new system. Often these systems will require information to be input in a slightly different way meaning that a manual process may need to take place in order to ensure it is all copied across correctly. Bare this in mind when working on a time scale for Cloud migration as this process alone can take a large amount of time.

Many companies are now migrating their services to use cloud based software. Cloud based software has many advantages such as flexibility and disaster recover. Software that is ran on a local computer or stored on a physical server in your office can become corrupt or lost entirely should you have a fire, theft or some other sort of disaster and recovering that information can be costly. Sometimes you may find that the information cannot be recovered which can be detrimental to a business and has been known to cause businesses to go under and have to close down. Cloud computing offers a safety net when it comes to disaster recovery as the data is not stored on one physical computer, it is essentially stored “in the cloud” meaning it can be accessed from many places should you need to. Research shows that on average a company that uses cloud computing can recover data 4 times quicker than those who don’t.

Social media is one of the fastest growing industries on the internet. The majority of us have a profile on at least one of the social media platforms and many even have companies profiles on there. If you have a company that uses social media as a marketing tool you may already realise how useful it can be and the return on investment it can offer is potentially huge. Often the only cost involved with social media marketing is the labour cost of something managing and updating the profiles. You may have out sourced it to and external company or paying a member of staff to manage them for you. Either way, if you have a few social media profiles that need to be constantly updated this can prove time consuming and therefore costly. There are a few great bits of software available that allow you to update all your social media accounts in one place. You can log in and create a post and... Read More »