Cost, Cost, and more worries of Cost…

From new to past clients, everyone is worrying about costs.  Whether they are making money or losing it, everyone wants to get the best deal.  But, that is just business.  

I hear “We really need the website, but we are just concerned with the cost?” and “That would be a really cool feature, but how much does it cost to add it.” 

So I ask, “What does it cost you to not have a website?” and “How much time does that new feature save your staff? What does it cost you to not have that feature?”.  Maybe there’s a feature that can help an employee do something twice as fast – making more time for them to get to the other 100 things on their plate.  Maybe not having a website is keeping you from closing more deals, contracts, advertisers, billing more hours, etc.  Can you put a dollar amount on that?  Saving $2,000 dollars while you are missing out on $12,000 doesn’t make sense to me.  Perhaps, my experience hasn’t matured enough to know whether or not these assumptions are right, but they do make some logical sense right?

 It has become more apparent to me that risk is a vital part of business. For those who are having clients turn down new work or new websites, try a profit share/revenue sharing program. Yes, you will work for free for quite some time on a profit share website and money will trickle in slowly enough to drive you crazy….but its still trickling in.  Some money, is better than no deal, and no money. And maybe not this month or next month, but someday, there will be a pay-out that has you break even with your initial “risk” investment. I recommend handling only one client at a time this way or it could feel like you are working for free.

Really? There is a recession?

Business has been keeping my busy in spite of the current economic whirlwind.  Several new businesses have embraced Zapata Data’s design and development offerings stretching its client-base into the landscape/plantscaping, loan modifications and traffic ticket markets. 

Our recent project with Hot Calls Inc, a Florida-based call center, is now fully operational.  They have made over 35,000 calls on 37+ projects with 20+ callers.  Needless to say, it is Zapata Data’s largest accomplishment since opening its web doors in April of 2008.  Zapata Data is looking to integrate the Hot Calls Software system with EnterYourHours.com’s payroll and Quickbooks support.  The Hot Calls software program tracks when callers login and logout out of the system.  While the API is not yet available for EnterYourHours.com, it is certainly starting to show its face on the horizon.  I look forward to making the Hot Calls Software program integrate thru EnterYourHours.com and end up in their Quickbooks file.

Building a quote was too easy this morning…

A customer was looking for a quote on a specific project they had sent some specficiations for a few days back.  Realizing it had been left on ice, i needed to get to it ASAP.  After reviewing the spec, i was ready to build a quote on my EnterYourHours.com account.  I built the quote, reviewed the quote and emailed it in all of about 5 minutes.  I didnt have to go open word and overwrite iinformation in a template. It’s just done. And once the quote gets approved, i can convert it to an invoice and be done with it.

EnterYourHours.com Handles Credits Easily

Prior to starting with EnterYourHours.com, a web-based hourly billing software solution, I had a client pay me before their first official invoice.  At the time i wasn’t using QuickBooks, but needed a way to apply a credit to show them in one form or another (on paper) that i had received payment.  I looked around on various screens, but nothing was jumping out at me.  Being a programmer myself, I started to think: A credit could be defined as a negative price or negative fixed-price item, so I looked under the Fixed-Price Items tab on the Enter Hours screen.  And, just for the heck of it, I tried entering a negative number.  And there it went.

 

I was able to apply a credit to a client, without having any prior invoices or hours tracked in the system.  I ran bill batch to see how it would lok to the customer. By default, EnterYourHours.com adds these fixed-price items to your invoice as such:

 

            [FIXED-PRICE ITEM] – Descriptive Text Here

 

All I did for the “Fixed-Price/Expense Summary” was:

 

            [CREDIT] – Descriptive Text Here

 

So when I actually generated the invoice, the line item looked like:

           

            [FIXED-PRICE ITEM] – [CREDIT] – Descriptive Text Here

 

To my surprise, the invoice read out looked great and even showed the numbers in parentheses, standard designation for negative numbers in accounting. So after worrying EnterYourHours.com had missed a simple need, I realized it had inadvertently provided a solution that just took a little creative thinking to find.

 

I was asked by a friend and respected colleague to integrate a graphical user interface into some heavy database architecture and scripting for a new peice of software. After integegrating the interface, I saw the enormous potential it had to help me run my own consulting business.  I have been using EnterYoursHours.com as beta-tester since April 2008.  It has saved me countless hours of billing and tracking project hours. I don’t even think about billing until the day i need to email the invoices.  It truly is that simple.