Spring is nearly here, and we’re seeing signs of the change of seasons all around us -- but what can the changing of the seasons mean for your business? Here’s some of our favourite insights into how seasonality can affect your business - and how you can benefit from it.
Understand your seasonality
Do you know which is the best time of year for your business? A quick check of your records may show that certain months are a goldmine, while others are less fruitful than you remember. Armed with this info, could you be able to better identify when to branch into new avenues, or even when to take a holiday so it has the least impact on your business.
Investigate customer behaviour
Think the summer holidays spell a downtime for your business, as all your customers are away? Well, you could be wrong. According to psychologists, consumer activity is actually likely to increase during the sunnier times of the year - meaning that you may be better off delaying your own vacation to focus on growing sales during the summer months.
Use your downtime
If you run a seasonal business - or even just if there are times of year where you find things a little quiet - there’s still much you can do during the downtime to help your business grow. This list gives some great examples of how to market your venture during the quiet, off-season months, so you can be better prepared to hit the ground running once your profitable time begins.
Think outside the box
Enjoying the peak season boom is all well and good, but how do you keep the cash flowing in the quiet months? Perhaps you could branch out into a new market, or partner with another seasonal company in order to provide a year-round service. Or are there any other creative business strategies that could help you survive the off-season lull?
How does seasonality affects your business? Hit us up on twitter or leave a comment to let us know - and have a great weekend!
It’s spring cleaning season, which means you’re probably thinking about busting out the feather dusters for another year. But before tackling the spare room or the garage, should you be looking more closely at your workspace? This week we’re looking at how you can revitalise your work space and hopefully improve your efficiency along the way.
Look to the top for inspiration
If you want to feel inspired or just better about your own workspace, try checking out the desks of powerful people- Are you inspired by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who prefers a minimalist space purged completely of clutter? Or are you more interested in Al Gore’s organised chaos? And of course, we couldn’t miss out that iconic photo of Steve Jobs’ sparse apartment floor.
Call in the professionals
If the thought of tackling your home office makes you shudder, you might want to consider calling in some experts. Some home cleaning and moving companies offer general decluttering services, but you may find it more beneficial to go with a business that specialises in home office decluttering or try to find a local bespoke “clutter fairy” who can identify what you need to throw out to make your office more efficient.
Use the right system
It’s easy enough to throw all your junk out and start from scratch, but how will you set up your workspace to avoid future clutter? This Lifehacker article describes a great system to use for your desk: treat it like a cockpit, where only the most important things are at your fingertips. And it explains how you could improve your efficiency by working from left to right - ie, putting all your equipment on the left side of your desk and leaving the right side completely clear.
Think outside the box
Stuck for ideas about where to store all those papers now that you’ve cleared your desk? Or the plethora of electrical leads and cables spreading through your office? Well, start looking at how you could repurpose a few everyday household items to keep your clutter manageable. And check out this Pinterest board filled with outstanding - yet simple - decluttering tips.
Have you got a sure fire way of de-cluttering your workspace? Or think there’s a great tip that we’ve missed? Hit us up on twitter or leave a comment to let us know - and have a great weekend!
As we've talked about before on the blog, from April HMRC will introduce big changes to the way payroll information is reported. The good news is FreeAgent has it covered and we wanted to give you a further update on our progress.
Real Time Information (RTI) comes into effect from April 2013, and will mean big changes to the way businesses report information to HMRC regarding payment of their employees.
Traditionally, PAYE data would be submitted at the end of the tax year, but the new changes will require data to be submitted to HMRC online whenever employees are paid.
For FreeAgent users this means we’re completely overhauling our existing payroll system, improving our underlying engine and properly supporting student loans. Finally, we’ll enable Real-Time Information (RTI) filing of payroll data directly to HMRC.
How will it work?
The actual workflow of payroll will change a fair bit, and you’ll see the first changes released in the next month or so. We’ll support this change with plenty of helpful information on the knowledge base, so you’ll be well prepared for the April switchover. For now we've put together a quick primer on the scope of our new Payroll functionality.
In the meantime, if all this talk of government legislation and initiatives has got you excited (get help now btw) then you can find out more about RTI in this no-expense-spared video by the HMRC or on their website.
Finally, if you haven’t registered for a Government Gateway ID or PAYE Online then you'll need to do this to file RTI.
Until next time,
Roan and the team at FreeAgent
Here at FreeAgent Towers we’re normally not given to sentimentality. We prefer tangible metrics and we adore cold, hard data.
But this week, we’ve come over positively dewy-eyed as we celebrate an important milestone - exactly six years ago myself, Olly and Roan officially started a company called FreeAgent Central Limited and set out on our journey to make accounting better, easier and more intuitive for small businesses and freelancers.
Back then we didn’t call our goal ‘Democratising Accounting’ as we do now. But we believed that we’d found a great idea that would resonate with people like us - those small business owners that were struggling to manage their finances effectively and were getting frustrated with using spreadsheets to do their books.
We imagined that we might find a fair number of customers for our online tool, but we’ve been delighted and thrilled to see FreeAgent resonating with so many people.
Now we have more than 25,000 happy customers, we’re the market leader in online small business accounting in the UK, we have customers in 82 other countries, investors in both Europe and the US, and an awesome team helping us make our product even easier to use and ever more useful. We’ve built something we’re really proud of and the great thing is we’re only really getting started.
Looking back, it’s clear that 2007 was a big year for ideas. It was the year that the first iPhone was launched, and also when we learned that Viagra helps hamsters recover from jet-lag. We like to think the idea of FreeAgent ranks right up there as well.
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Thanks to @freeagent I will never need to use the crappy HMRC payroll software come April.
all sorted and ready for PAYE RTI thanks to @freeagent awesomeness.
The latest reason why I continue to love @freeagent http://t.co/nfYqVJDfa4 HMRC chucks a stress out at businesses, FreeAgent bats it away!
Those folks @freeagent do it right. The confirmation mail includes important information: http://t.co/HCHIvgjpI0
@NickClement @freeagent its excellent for invoicing, very flexible & easy - esp billable time by task from timeslips-capture the revenue!
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