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I read with interest a post on Emily Hill’s blog about Dell claiming to have made £6.5m from their Twitter activity. Well done. Dell! Twitter is very useful as a sales channel/tool, I’ve previously written about how it’s been really useful to me in growing KashFlow. Whilst Dell seem to be doing very well from Twitter on the sales front, they’re doing considerably worse with using it for customer service or brand monitoring. It’s in the brand monitoring stakes that … …Read more

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Speak to any accountant who works with small businesses and they’ll tell you HMRC are a nightmare to deal with. Their systems, both technical and procedural, just aren’t fit for purpose The accounting forum on UKBF is full of war stories. A company I’m involved with (not KashFlow) is owed around £4.5k as a tax rebate. So far it’s been over 3 months since it was asked for and we’re no closer to getting it. The “accepted” procedure to claim a … …Read more

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The first thing I do when I first log in to Windows XP is right click the “Start” button go to Properties and set it to Classic mode. It’s what I like, it’s what I’m used to. So when I recently had a play with Windows 7 it was the first thing I looked for. The option wasn’t there. And rightly so. The Microsoft guy I was talking to convinced me I need to embrace all the new changes and … …Read more

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There are a number of changes to VAT on 1st Jan 2010. This is how we’ll be helping you to easily deal with them with the minimum of effort and fuss Change to Standard Rate of VAT The standard rate of VAT will change from 15% to 17.5%. If you’re VAT registered then a message should be showing on your Overview page which to take you to a page where you can click a single button and have your account added to the list … …Read more

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If you’re a watcher of the accounting software market, you can’t have missed the fact that Microsoft withdrew their accounting product recently. The very short notice on the withdrawal of the software, along with the payroll element being turned off  left lots of customers stranded. The customer base was sold to Mamut who don’t have a great track record of looking after bought-in customer bases. Richard Tyler at The Telegraph has picked up some interesting info from Microsofts PR firm. Firstly … …Read more

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On Monday I posted a blog entry with the title SEO is no substitute for a marketing plan. It attracted quite a few interesting comments, but I felt one of the comments deserved to be highlighted. The below was posted by Ian Hendry from WeCanDo.BIZ. It’s interesting to note that if you ask someone in the generation below me to ring a doorbell, they use their thumb to do it. This seems weird to me as I use my index … …Read more

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After the Global Entrepreneurship Week launch event last Monday I went along to the IoD for the final of The Pitch. Think Dragons Den without the TV cameras. It was an entertaining afternoon with 6 businesses pitching for a prize package worth £50,000, Anthony Lau, Founder of Cyclehoop was crowned the winner. One thing that did worry me was the finalists response when asked about their marketing plan. For some of them their entire marketing plan could be summed up in … …Read more

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Yesterday was the first day of Global Entreprenurship Week - a global initiative to promote entrepreneurship. We’re involved in a  couple of ways. Firstly I’m a Young Ambassador (emphasis on the “young” please!) for Enterprise UK, the government-funded agency at the center of it all. Secondly, we’ve donated £200k of accounting software to them to provide to startup businesses around the UK. The launch event took place yesterday at the British Library with a conference on entrepreneurship. Yes, it sounds awfully dull … …Read more

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Today we have released integration with web-based invoicing application, FreshBooks. By connecting FreshBooks to your KashFlow account you can automate the copying across of invoices and customers from your FreshBooks account to your KashFlow account. If the FreshBooks invoice is paid this will also be copied across or if the invoice is paid at a later date then you’ll be able to apply that payment, along with all of the details, to the relevant invoice in KashFlow. It even maps … …Read more

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After executing the plans laid out in my July blog post “Warning – this blog post may radically alter your business” – KashFlow has now been radically altered. We’re now based in London and I’ve lured the CTO I’ve been after for years. I’m now not allowed to touch any code myself and the development team, free of my interference, are turning out product enhancements based on your requests at least twice as fast as they were previously. We’ve now got … …Read more