Golden Bookkeeping Services

In the vast majority of industries, referrals are the most cost-effective way to gain new clients and grow your business. When you attract new clients through referrals, your marketing costs are lower, your selling process is easier and more effective, and the referral usually makes for an excellent client. It’s just good business sense to look at how we can proactively increase our referrals. Here are five ideas.

1. Your Email Signature

We know it can be embarrassing or uncomfortable to ask your clients and friends directly for referrals. A great compromise is to add a line to your email signature that takes care of it for you. Here are a couple of wording options:

Your referral is our greatest compliment!

Referrals are the lifeblood of our business. We thank you for yours.

We appreciate your referrals.

Adding one of these lines to your email signature file is a subtle notice to everyone you email that you are open to taking referrals. It’s indirect enough to where no one feels put on the spot, and it takes all of five minutes to implement.

2. Acknowledge Your Referral Sources

When you find out someone has sent you a referral, be sure to acknowledge that person with a thank you note or a gift. (Be sure to check any licenses you hold so you know what restrictions you are under concerning gifts to clients; some industries disallow it.)

You might want to reward your top referral sources with more than a thank you note. If you are not sure who your top referral sources are, we can help you create a report in your accounting system so you can track that information on a regular basis.

3. Set Up a Referral Program

Creating a formal referral program generates several benefits:

• It formalizes the process of asking for referrals. This lets clients know you’re serious and interested in referrals.
• It gets the word out to everyone without anyone feeling pressured.
• It is cost-effective and still far lower cost than using other marketing channels.
• It is not too time-consuming and produces results.

To set up your referral program, decide how you want to reward your referral sources. It could be as fun as awarding prizes such as Kindles and tablets to clients who send the most referrals to you. The cost of the prize is a small price to pay for the lifetime revenue of several new high-quality clients. Send a letter or email out announcing the program, and then set up a process for tracking.

If you’re in an industry where prizes and programs are simply not done, then a simple letter requesting referrals will work too. Be sure to include a description of the specific type of client you are looking for; you are far more likely to get referrals when clients know who to look for.

4. Develop Referral Sources

One way to truly quantum-leap your business is to find new sources of referrals. Your clients are a great source, but they each know so many people. If your clients have been with you for a while, your referrals could stagnate because your clients have referred just about everybody they are going to.

Keep your referrals growing by tapping into power partners. These are small business owners that have the same type of client you do, but are not competitive at all. The best way to reach out to them is to send them a referral!

5. Set Up Referral Processes

There’s a lot your back office can automatically do when it comes to referral processes.

• You can remember to ask how a new lead heard about you when they first call. Then you can record and track that, so that you will know where your top referral sources are.
• You can systematize the thank you notes and gifts so they go out timely and automatically.
• You can regularly schedule times with power partner to keep them up to date on your business changes and opportunities.
• You can systematize a referral program or related communications to keep everyone informed.
Once you set up these processes and delegate the tasks, you will grow your referrals and subsequently your revenues.

Oh, and by the way, we appreciate your referrals!

Watching the cash balance is one of the most frequent activities of a small business owner. Besides making sure you have enough cash for payroll and bills, there is another huge opportunity you can benefit from: lowering the cost of processing your bills. It can be expensive and time-consuming to process bills and handle the paperwork involved. We’ll take a look at a couple of the many ways you can streamline your accounts payable processing costs in this article.

Opportunity #1: Go Digital

The Intuit Payment Network (IPN) is a best-kept secret when it comes to sending and receiving money. It’s free to set up your account, and it’s also free for your receiver to set up an account. All you do is add your bank account, and you can easily transfer funds between the two accounts just by knowing the receiver’s email address.

The receiver of money only pays 50 cents per transaction, so when you have a large transfer of funds, it’s totally worth it. It saves you postage, check stock, envelopes and the related mailing labor. You could even increase your payment by 50 cents so that your receiver receives exactly what you owe them.

Another way to go digital is via PayPal. Fees vary, and are usually paid by the receiver.

Opportunity #2: Get Control

When it comes to finances, it’s never a good idea to mix business and personal, especially when it’s coming out of the same bank account. Keep separate accounts for business and personal, and your bookkeeping costs will go way down. Do the same thing for credit cards as well.

If you’re comfortable with credit cards and you can maintain control of your spending, it saves accounts-payable time when you can charge everything you spend on business to your credit card as long as you pay it off every month. Using your card is faster at checkout than writing a check these days, so you’ll save time on errands as well.

Opportunity #3: Automate

Put recurring expenses such as utilities, rent, accounting, and other monthly bills on bank draft or autopay if the vendor has that option. This will save you a huge amount of time, supplies, and postage. You can also be more accurate with the timing of the payment which will allow you to keep your money for as long as possible until the due date arrives.

Opportunity #4: Verify

We hope you never pay bills that aren’t yours, but it can happen. To avoid it as much as possible, implement a three-way matching process on all your payables, especially those related to inventory. The three-way part refers to the three documents involved in accounts payable:

• The purchase order
• The packing slip
• The invoice

Before any invoice is paid, these three documents should be matched line by line – for quantity, price, and description — to ensure you ordered and received what you paid for. Only then should your bill be approved. This will ensure that you don’t pay a fraudulent bill, you don’t pay for out-of-stock that didn’t ship and that you paid the correct price you agreed to in the first place.

Please feel free to reach out and ask us about this if you’d like to know more.

Opportunity #5: Tell Yourself a Little White Lie

There’s an old saying: “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” If you’re always moving money around form one checking account to another to cover bills and payroll, you’re not the only small business owner who juggles funds. It takes up valuable time to make all these transactions, and then it costs to record them and track them.

Reduce all that by telling yourself a little white lie about your bank balance. If your bank balance is $10,000, tell yourself it’s only $5,000 (or whatever amount makes sense for you). That way, you’ll always have a cushion in your account that will help you reduce transfers. There are several ways to set this “little white lie” up in your books.

More A/P Ideas

These are only five of many ways you can reduce your processing costs and save time on accounts payable processing. Give these five accounts payable ideas a try, and if you’d like to know more, please reach out and let us know.