Do You Need Help Staying on Top of Employee Expenses?

Do You Need Help Staying on Top of Employee Expenses?
AOL Plans Shut Down of Hundreds of Patch Sites
Multi-Screen Ecommerce Strategy: Beyond the Single Shopping Screen
HTC Introduces Smartphones for the Budget Conscious
Small Business Employment in Recessions and Expansions

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 04:00 PM PDT

employee expenses

Who likes dealing with petty cash on business trips? I know I don't.

Every time I travel for business, which is often, I come back with a stack of annoying little receipts (the ones I don't misplace), which my CFO then has to pester me about organizing and passing on to her so she can enter them into our system and expense them. Using credit cards is often easier, but that isn't an option for smaller purchases.

If you have employees who travel a lot or simply spend most of their day on the road, such as sales staff or service people, keeping track of their petty cash and expenses is a huge pain for everyone involved. Receipts to collect, scan and record—who needs it?

Business credit cards can simplify the problem of paying for your employees' expenses on the road, but there are some downsides to these, too. Interest rates can be high, and accidentally missing a payment can push them even higher. Plus, having to keep a high limit on the cards in case of travel, even when employees don't need it all the time, might make you nervous.

Do you really want your employees walking around with all that spending power in their wallets? When you don't know what they might spend it on, it's hard to predict expenses.

Staying on Top of Employee Expenses

Recently, I was on yet another business trip when a colleague told me about PEX business prepaid debit cards, a pretty cool solution to the problem of managing employee expenses. Have you ever given your child a prepaid credit card for school expenses? PEX business prepaid debit cards are kind of the same idea. They function similarly to a credit card, with some important differences:

You don't need credit approval.
You don't have to worry about high interest rates because the card is prepaid from your business bank account via ACH transfer.

What I like about PEX cards is their flexibility. You can give every employee his or her own personal card; you can also give each of them a different debit limit. If one employee regularly travels overseas, while another only drives within your local area, they can get limits commensurate with their needs. And if that employee on a business trip suddenly needs more money to, say, change a flight or cover dinner when that client she's entertaining shows up with six colleagues in tow, she can contact you and you can immediately add more funds to her card.

The other nice aspect of the cards is control. Most small business owners are control freaks, at least about their money, so you know what I'm talking about. PEX business prepaid debit cards let you set daily limits on employee spending. If an employee won't be traveling for a while and you know they have no reason to need to buy anything for business, you can take their limit down to zero and not worry about it. And if someone doesn't need their card anymore, or leaves the company, the money left on the card can simply be transferred back to your business bank account with no problem.

When PEX did their Mid-Year Survey Report of small business owners in June, they found one of the top four issues keeping small business owners awake at night was "expenses eating into profits" (pictured above). They also found that for the second half of 2013, more than half of small business owners want to either keep their spending levels, on everything from fuel to materials, the same or cut back.

Tracking your cash flow is crucial for small businesses to stay on top of expenses. A tool like the PEX business prepaid debit card can clearly help. In addition to breaking out individual employees' use of the cards, you can also view aggregated data for the whole company. You can export reports to Quickbooks (the company is working on features that would allow transactions to easily integrate with Quickbooks, which would make it even better).

It didn't surprise me to learn that PEX is an entrepreneurial company. Founder and CEO, Toffer Grant, started the business when he saw that banks and large credit card issuers weren't filling the niche for small and midsized businesses to obtain prepaid debit cards. Toffler grew up in a family business and knew from an early age what matters to small business owners.

Don't you love it when you can solve a business problem with a cool tool created by another small business owner?

Image: Pex Mid Year Survey

The post Do You Need Help Staying on Top of Employee Expenses? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

AOL Plans Shut Down of Hundreds of Patch Sites

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 01:30 PM PDT

patch

If you operate a business website, especially one that updates regularly, then essentially you run an online publishing operation.

That’s one reason news breaking over the weekend that AOL plans to shed about 400 of its Patch local news sites by either closing them or merging them with other sites, is so important.

Media blogger Jim Romenesko reports the company plans to focus on a core 500 of nearly 1,000 Patch sites and make them profitable.

Patch’s business model targets local advertising sales in the communities its sites cover. Venture Beat reports that strategy hasn’t been working so far.

Impact on Local Business

Techcrunch, also an AOL owned website, reported hundreds of employees will be laid off as a result of the decision to close so many Patch news sites.

But the decision is also likely to affect local businesses that use the sites as a way to promote themselves to local customers.

Patch’s advertising page states 87 percent of the websites’ visitors are local and that 77 percent of the local community a Patch site covers visits monthly.

A testimonial page displays videos representing what the company says are thousands of local businesses that advertise with the network. Patch also lets businesses sign up for local listings free. See the video below.

Of course, those businesses have many other choices for online marketing including their own business websites, social media and evolving services from sites like Yelp.

The post AOL Plans Shut Down of Hundreds of Patch Sites appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Multi-Screen Ecommerce Strategy: Beyond the Single Shopping Screen

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 11:00 AM PDT

multi-screen ecommerce

With the emerging growth of technology, we all are becoming screen jugglers. Our preference changes within a wink of an eye. There is a growing need for different means to connect consumers across all types of devices. This is simply because online shoppers prefer to use a variety of devices ranging from smartphones, televisions, laptops, tablets and personal computers to shop online.

So, what is your strategic plan for screen jugglers?

How about integrating a multi-screen strategy for marketing and simultaneously ensuring shoppers with an improved browsing and purchasing experience?

It has been found that the majority of online shoppers search for products and product information on one device and then switch to another device to continue their purchase process.

Here lies the importance of multi-screen shopping.

Develop a Multi-Screen Ecommerce Strategy

I am sure you simply hate to leave your shopping experience incomplete. For example, an evening gown on mobile that can only be acquired once you complete the purchase process on a desktop. This can be really annoying.

To prevent this, online merchants should consider a multi-screen strategy to make their shopper's experience enjoyable. The following diagram from Marketing Land shows that 90% of consumers use multi-screens during their day:

multi-screen ecommerce

Clearly, some consistency is necessary to make the shopping experience and enjoyable one for your customers. So how can you begin to do that? Below are some suggestions.

Design a Responsive Site

Taking a closer look at how consumers react to the multi-screen world will help you design a responsive site. But why a responsive site?

Every online retailer wants to organize the content so that it can be easily read, seen and used, regardless of the types of device and the size of the screen. A responsive site puts emphasis on providing the shoppers with the same useful content whether they see it through their tablet, PC or smartphone. Buying decisions can change if your customer finds it difficult to access a product through their device.

An online store without responsive Web design can suffer severely.

Make Your eCommerce World App-Friendly

According to Google, smartphones are now the backbone of daily media interaction. Mobile phones are a common starting point for the highest number of user interactions. As people are interested in learning about new apps, help them also get familiar with any new apps to find your products. Your app should provide value and they should find the app interesting enough to visit your online store again and again.

Increase Multi-Screen Content Consumption

Offer visitors useful, valuable content. To encourage repeat purchases, your content should win attention. Content plays a major role in presenting the product description and images successfully on your site. In a nutshell, your site content should aim at helping the customers. They should find the content easy to view and understand. Most importantly, keep the same content for a desktop computer that is available on a tablet or smartphone. Your customers will be more than pleased to see that your site has been optimized for swiping and touch.

Don’t disappoint with different versions of a same content across different devices. For instance, a shopper that sees one of his favorite sought after items suddenly available on his desktop enthusiastically informs one of his friends the item is now available. The friend is excited, only to find that his current device for purchase, a smartphone, does not have the same item available.

This becomes a truly disappointing shopping experience.

Follow Up with the Message and Shut Off Pop Ups

You need to have a consistent message throughout all your channels. At the same time, you need to be faster and more concise in your message, having several people accessing your site's content via different screens simultaneously. Do not make them wade through a lot of messages to get to what they’re after. Hit them with an offer right away.

But when it comes to pop up ads, they can be disastrous for many devices. The best way is to use responsive design that can convert any pop-up into a banner or any other form on various devices such as tablets, PC’s and smartphones.

Using a Mobile Domain Usually Does Not Help

Using separate domains for different versions of your website is not recommended. It usually has a negative impact on your store's search engine ranking and more importantly on branding. Incorporating various domains can be quite confusing to shoppers.

Are you giving your customers a fluid, enjoyable shopping experience across multiple devices?

Responsive Design Photo via Shutterstock

The post Multi-Screen Ecommerce Strategy: Beyond the Single Shopping Screen appeared first on Small Business Trends.

HTC Introduces Smartphones for the Budget Conscious

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 08:00 AM PDT

htc one mini

Small business users looking for budget smartphones have more to pick from everyday it seems. The HTC One Mini, little brother of the HTC One, was unveiled by the company last month.

The device will be available in select markets sometime this month with a global availability in September. What’s more, CNET speculated the device would likely be priced in the $89 to $129 range with contract. That would seem to make sense given the pricing of the HTC One listed at $199 with some mobile service providers and $599 full price without a plan at Google Play.

A Smaller Version of the Original

The HTC Mini is in many ways just a smaller version of HTC’s flagship phone. It retains what TheVerge.com describes as the best qualities of the original, a “superb” display quality and unibody aluminum shell.

The new phone has:

A smaller screen-size, 4.3 inches instead of 4.7.
A 720 pixel resolution versus the larger phone’s 1080p (though reviewers say this is not much of a downgrade on a screen this small).
An equivalent Super LCD screen to the larger model.
About half the memory (1 GB) and half the storage (16GB).
A considerably shorter battery life (one of the big drawbacks of the new phone).

A New HTC One May Wait in the Wings

And if smaller isn’t your thing, there may be a super sized version of the HTC One coming.

The company recently dropped a hint with a tweet and Vine clip of a larger phone (some are calling it the HTC One Max) potentially coming soon.

Here’s a hands on review of the HTC One Mini from Android Central.

Image: HTC

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Small Business Employment in Recessions and Expansions

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 05:00 AM PDT

Small business employment has grown more slowly than big business employment since the end of the Great Recession. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Conventional wisdom is that small business employment declines more in economic downturns, but rises more in economic expansions. Small companies, the argument goes, are more nimble, making their employment decisions more responsive to economic conditions.

The evidence was once consistent with this theory, but the pattern has broken down over the past two decades. Between 1977 and 1991 – but not since 1991 – small company employment grew faster than big business employment during economic expansions and shrank faster during economic contractions.

The earliest data available on this question come from the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Database, which provides annual figures on employment by firm size. Consistent with the “nimbleness hypothesis,” small businesses increased employment by 14.2 percent between 1977 and 1980 (a period of economic expansion), while large businesses increased employment by 11.8 percent. Between 1980 and 1982, when the economy experienced two recessions, small businesses shed 1.6 percent of their workforces, while big businesses added 1.2 percent to theirs'. Finally, in the long expansion from 1982 to 1990, small business employment grew faster than big business employment, rising 27.4 percent versus 20.8 percent for larger businesses.

The pattern continues through the 1990-1991 recession. Using more precise monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that are available from 1990 to 2011, I have constructed the table below, which shows small and large business employment growth for the different expansions and recessions. As the table reveals, small business employment fell more than big business employment during the 1990-1991 downturn (-2.03 percent versus -0.27 percent), consistent with conventional wisdom.

But that's where the traditional story breaks down. During the long expansion from 1991 to 2001, small business boosted employment by 17.4 percent, while big business increased employment by 33.4 percent, nearly twice as much. Then in the recession of 2001, companies with 500 or more employees cut employment by 2.7 percent, much more than the 1 percent decline at small businesses, and counter to what most economists would have predicted. During the 2001 to 2007 expansion, big business increased employment by slightly more than small business (5.8 percent versus 5.6 percent). Finally, while small business shed jobs at a higher rate than big business during the Great Recession (7.4 versus 5.8 percent), small company employment rebounded less during the subsequent recovery (0.9 percent versus 1.2 percent) than conventional wisdom would have suggested.

I can't tell you why conventional wisdom about small and large business employment growth in economic expansions and recessions no longer holds. I don't have the evidence to evaluate the impact of technological change, a shift in the regulatory environment, different credit conditions or any of the multitude of other factors that policy makers and pundits say is responsible. All I can say is that the "nimbleness hypothesis" appears to be a thing of the past; small businesses no longer increase employment faster than their big business counterparts in expansions while decreasing employment faster in recessions.

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