BizAlert

First Time Here? About BizAlert

Welcome! BizAlert is the Weblog (or blog), for BizActions and BizConference. The objective is simple, to provide you informative articles on how to utilize our products more effectively. We'll also feature client success stories, samples of how our clients are using our products, and analysis of industry trends and best practices. 

BizActions BizAlert Blog moving to new home

Significant changes have been taking place at BizActions over the last 6 months.  We have released a new web site and several new information delivery systems, along with social networking applications.  As a result of all that activity, we purposely stopped posting to this blog.

BizActions new blog system and all content will now be accessed via: http://bizblog.bizactions.com

BizActions entire staff will be regularly contributing blog posts to this forum according to their department specialty and focus.  We hope you bookmark the page or pull the RSS feed fom this new site.

Thank you.

Translating the Twitters and Warbles

By Steve Willey

Let’s see if you can understand this sentence without having to give it any real thought:

All transactions effected pursuant to this instrument shall be effected for the account and risk and in the name of the undersigned; and the undersigned hereby agrees to indemnify and hold you harmless from, and to pay you promptly on demand, any and all losses arising there from or any debit balance due thereon.

Still scratching your head? How about this, then:

You'll be responsible for anything you owe on your account.

When writers come across source material, they often run into gobbledygook like the above example of jargon, which is sometimes a condensed, efficient means of communication between individuals working in the same field. Doctors will know right off that ESRD is short for End Stage Renal Disease. BizActions writers will say Timely Op to mean Timely Opportunity. Wall Street Journal writers will know that the Ten Point refers to the What’s News column on page one that is printed in a ten point font.

Everyone in those situations understands everyone else. No harm, no foul. (Oops, I slipped into jargon there.)

When we write for our sponsors, however, the situation turns more complicated. We need to avoid gobbledygook and jargon, a word that derives from a 14th Century word meaning the “twittering or warbling of birds.” As writers, it’s our job to translate the twittering into plain English that can be readily understood by readers from divergent backgrounds. We want to be certain they have no doubt about what we are writing and what it means.

An example of how avoiding jargon and gobbledygook is helpful: A local office of the Veterans Affairs Department rewrote a standard form to make it more clear and found that the number of telephone calls about the form dropped to 200 a year from 1,200.

So, if we are writing an article on getting a mortgage, there is no point in using the term conveyance fee. Few will know what we mean. Much simpler to simply say a person could be charged money to cover the costs of handling the paperwork involved in transferring ownership.

In an investment article, we would avoid saying a company is full franked. We’d say simply that it has paid full corporate tax on its dividends.

That’s not to say we don’t use any jargon. Some is necessary. An accounting article may require the use of, say, the term zero-based budget. Fine, but be sure you immediately define it. Of course there, too, you can run into a problem. Which of these two definitions do you think works best?

1. A method of budgeting in which all expenditures must be justified each new period, as opposed to only explaining the amounts requested in excess of the previous period's funding, or

2. A budget where total income minus total expenses equals zero dollars. In other words, you assign every dollar or of income to an expense or savings category. This method forces you to spend your monthly income on paper before you spend it in real life.

Use plain English in your writing and your speech and you can avoid a situation similar to the one in 1985 when former President Ronald Reagan, describing some tax law revisions, said they didn’t improve the system and instead made it more like “Washington itself: complicated, unfair, cluttered with gobbledygook and loopholes designed for those with the power and influence to hire high-priced legal and tax advisers."

Here are four examples of my least favorite jargons often found in daily conversations:

Dynamic solutions
Take ownership
Paradigm shift
Holistic approach

Send in your list of favorite and not so favorite pet-peeve bits of jargon and gobbledygook. Some families even have their own jargon. Share it with us so when we meet your relatives we’ll know what the heck they are talking about.

How One Firm Eases Tax Season Stress

If, by the end of February your car is overdue for servicing, your favorite chair at home is coated with dust, and your dog is convinced you’ve moved away and left him… congratulations! You may be a tax accountant, or at least work for one. It’s no secret that for a few long months each year, CPAs cease to exist as surely as if they were in the federal witness protection program … except of course, to their clients. That’s why one Alabama firm has brought in a doppelganger… well, sort of. How many times during tax season have you said, “I wish there were two of me?” At Barfield, Murphy, Shank & Smith PC (BMSS) the partners recognized this problem and decided it was past time for a solution. That’s why they hired Betsy Nolen.

Nolen is a personal valet, and her services are available to everyone in the firm, from the partners to the receptionist. She takes cars for servicing, does personal banking for coworkers, shops nearly every day for them, buys birthday presents for the mothers of busy CPAs… she even wraps them. She picks up prescriptions, pays bills… gives rides to the airport. Whatever BMSS employees need, she handles it with a smile. They even trust her with their credit cards and the partners say that Nolen’s services more than pay her salary. 

You get what you pay for.

In this struggling economy, it would serve both consumers and suppliers well to take a step back and give a little thought to the implication of the phrase “You get what you pay for.”

Unfortunately, we’ve heard the saying so often that its wisdom may be diminishing with the repetition – and that will cost you whether you are looking to purchase or hoping to sell.  We all understand that there is often a direct correlation between the price one pays and the quality of that purchase.  We all inherently believe that if we pay a high price for something, that object should be of a higher quality than if we paid a lower price for the same thing or something similar.   

Creative recruiting ideas!

If recruiting new blood for your accounting firm is on your agenda, you may need to get creative. A shortage of talent means that, whether you're scouting on college campuses or trying to woo experienced professionals, you'll need to offer them something they can't get just anywhere. That's why some CPAs are developing volunteer opportunities for their staff members and encouraging them to participate during work hours. Read on for details and to see how one firm strives to be a good corporate citizen.

A Free and Effective Explosion of Resources for Your Firm

When you hear the term "social networking," do you think of teenagers and college kids?   That is where it started. But if you think it's just a trendy place for young people to meet up, you're missing a powerful marketing tool that your competitors may be taking advantage of. In the U.S. alone, social network advertising is expected to jump 169 percent between the end of 2007 and the end of 2008.  By 2012... it is expected to increase by 450 percent. 

And no... we're not just talking about advertising to Generations X and Y. Two companies with names you might recognize, Del Monte and New York Life, are using social networking to tap into an exploding method of marketing.  They do it by providing information that is useful or fun for their target markets, in the form of interesting Web sites, white papers, links, blog sites. Here's an example: Del Monte has established a "Moms Online Community," where mothers can interact and exchange ideas and information. And of course, it also provides a platform for Del Monte to advertise... perhaps adding interesting new recipes built around Del Monte products.  CPAs can use social networking to do the same thing, such as providing simple tax tips or publishing items of wide interest to the public, like the 2008 list of best and worst 529 plans.

Then again, CPA firms looking to recruit will find a compelling venue for advertising their firms to members of the younger generation.  Find out more about using social network marketing as a significant recruiting tool for kids who are looking for career guidance, as well as their parents and grandparents who are hungry for financial guidance.

Find out more about social networking and your business by reading BizActions article: Don't Ignore Today's Version of Watercooler Marketing

Teresa Ambord
Assistant Editor
BizActions LLC

Going Green

Going Green is Not Just a Tree-Hugger Fad. 

The Right Shade of Green is Good for Business.

Are you growing weary of seeing the admonition "go green" everywhere? Many people suspect that businesses that put "green" on their product labels, their ads, and their Web sites are merely jumping on a popular trend as a way to increase revenue.  Whatever your beliefs about global warming... there are ways to conserve that are good for your business, not only because you save money on resources, but also because they can greatly increase your productivity.  In fact, here is one way you can bump your productivity by 10-50 percent while you slash your use of paper and ink. Warning!  If you try this, you may never go back to the old way.

Install a second monitor on your computer. Sound bizarre? Maybe. But if your work requires you to go back and forth between documents, you not only waste time but you increase your chances of making errors.  Many people try to solve the back and forth problem by printing one of the documents... sometimes stacks and stacks of paper that are not otherwise needed and that end up in the shred pile.  Dual monitors eliminates the toggling, the errors, and the wasted paper and ink.

Find out more about greening up your business and your bottom line by reading BizActions article:
Going Green: Using Dual Monitors Saves Paper and Increases Productivity

Teresa Ambord
Assistant Editor
BizActions LLC

 

How to get more e-Newsletter email addresses

Use the Web site e-Newsletter sign up option to generate leads and increase the size of your database.

There are many great ways to tie the BizActions newsletter in with a company’s web site. Not only by matching the look and feel of the website with the color scheme on the newsletter but also making various connections between the two areas with masthead links, banner links as well as content.

A very important feature that all BizActions users with a web site should be taking advantage of is the newsletter sign up form. The web site sign up option provides an easy tool to help generate new leads and increase database numbers. BizActions users can grab the exact HTML code to place on their web site to implement a sign up form for their newsletter.

Once implemented, the system allows a user to pull a list of any members added via the sign up form by running a search based on wording automatically placed in the Memo column, “Web site sign up”. This is a great way to help increase the number of members in the system.

In addition, web site sign ups are very good leads because they show that a person has taken an active interest in receiving news and information from that particular firm. The member has taken the steps to physically sign up for the newsletter on their own just after visiting the web site.

Leslie Self
Customer Support Representative

Target Marketing

Suppose your accounting firm targets three distinct niches: manufacturing, high net worth individuals and real estate prospects. You would like to get your corporate message out to these unique groups, but because they are unique, they each need specialized content to make the newsletter relevant to their market segment.  Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here (not very far out) and assume that you don't want to purchase and manage three different newsletters. Yet with only one newsletter you are doomed to having a manufacturing specific announcement being delivered to the high net worth individuals and the real estate article going to a manufacturing prospect or client. On the other hand, there are certain messages you want all groups to get. An example might be opening a new office or promoting a partner.

What can you do?

BizActions has recently completed version 2 of an enhancement called Master Accounts. This enhancement allows sub-accounts within one Master account. There are many ways to strategically design a Master account. One method is to create sub-accounts by target market and send selected messages to each target market while still having the ability to send messages to all accounts. You could even send to a target market by partner. Additionally, you can have unique mastheads and other attributes for each target market. So ... as an example: the masthead for the manufacturing division could say, Friedman and Company, CPAs - Manufacturing Division.

The strategic design possibilities are endless with Master Accounts - it all depends on how you go to market. What works for your company and your strategies? Here are a couple of examples:

1 - Sub-accounts by office location
2 - Sub-accounts by sales rep or partner
3 - Sub-accounts by independent reps
4 - Sub accounts by member type - client, prospect, referral source
5 - Sub-accounts by department
6 - Combinations of the above

One other great opportunity with Master Accounts. Suppose you go to market through independent reps.  You now have the ability for each rep to have their own branded account within your Master Account. You can send announcements that will appear in each reps newsletter and the rep can add their own content about their services. This would be very effective for real estate brokerage companies, financial brokers etc.

Hopefully, you see the advantages of target marketing through Master accounts. It is a major step forward in sending the right message to the right target market. It will increase readership and click-activity which should generate more warm leads.

How do you get started? Just talk to your Customer Support Rep. They can help you analyze what works best and the process for managing the sub-accounts.

Barry Friedman
CPA, CEO, Co-Founder BizActions LLC

Can You Hear The Clang?

Sometimes we get in a hurry and forget to “hear” the words we write. I don’t know about you, but I can be enjoying a book or an online article or proofreading my own work, then suddenly I hear a “clang.” That’s the sound that happens when the words just sound wrong or are used incorrectly. It’s easy to forget sometimes that written words and the way you put them together have sounds just like spoken words.

A pet peeve of mine is when consecutive sentences end with the same word or words. It sounds clunky and dull.

"BizActions can save you money. Get great tips that can save you money.” Clang!

Sometimes writers do that to make a point or even for a comedic effect. That’s different.  I don’t know about you, but I kind of like that.

“That would be the wrong thing to do. Because it would be the wrong thing to do.”
“The good news is, I’m going home for Christmas. The bad news is, I’m going home for Christmas.”

Another clunker… starting sentence after sentence with the same word.

“You should consult your accountant. You shouldn’t wait till the last minute. You could end up in trouble with the IRS if you do.” Clang! Clang! Clang!

Then there is the switch-up in the middle of the stream, when singular becomes plural or vice versa. I know… I sound like an old English teacher, but this one really bugs me.

“Each employee turned in their time card.” Clang squared!

People hesitate sometimes to say “his or her,” and it’s hard to blame them because it can seem cumbersome. But if you want to avoid the clang, don’t switch up. If the gender of the person is unknown say, “Each employee turned in his or her time card,” or make both plural and say “The employees turned in their time cards.”

Any grade school child knows the usual rules for when to use “a” or when to use “an.” But in a world where we use so many abbreviations, the rules get tossed. That is, listen to how the words sound when read aloud.

You would never say, “The President has an Masters of Business Administration degree.”

But if you use the abbreviation MBA, you should say, “The President has an MBA,” even though “an” comes before a consonant, because “M” sounds likes it starts with a vowel.

The moral of the story is, written words have sounds too… at least as long as somebody is reading them. If you want to avoid irritating your audience, read through your copy, listen for the clang, and silence it.

Teresa Ambord
Assistant Editor
BizActions LLC