Author Archives: Ben

Glass Louvres that Complement Traditional Buildings

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In these times, in which the newspapers carry a new story on the prevalence of cancer almost daily, we are fully aware of the need to wear sunscreen, particularly in summer between the hours of 11am and 3pm. We are less aware, meanwhile of the need to screen the buildings we live in from the sun – though there is a whole variety of brise soleil specially adapted to this purpose. And, while buildings are obviously not at risk from cancer, they should be causes of concern: careful upkeep of our buildings exteriors can help keep the insides running well. Energy efficiency, for example, can be greatly improved by controlling external factors such as heat and light. A building that uses glass louvres will normally require less internal heating and use of fossil fuel. And buildings with external louvres can act simultaneously as blinds and as air vents for the intake and discharge of cool or hot air. The latter, in hot climes or seasonal temperature highs, will perform much the same function as an air conditioning system – only at a much lower long term cost.

External louvres come in many different guises and can even be custom-designed and fitted to suit individual buildings. This is because their fabricators are sympathetic towards the hugely divergent styles of architecture in existence these days, but are also knowledgeable of their common requirements when it comes to heat regulation. To give an idea of what external louvres look like, it might help to imagine a heavy slatted blind or a set of narrowly overlapping sails. Given their erection outside, these sun-shading devices are always weather resistant with little maintenance required after their installation. This might be welcome news if the façade of your building now looks shabby or is in constant need of repainting due to weather-related cracks and peels; external louvres will protect whatever lies underneath them, behaving much like defensive shields.

glass louvres are more modern in appearance: think of the Louvre of the Parisian art gallery and you’ll have a good idea of their look. Clearly, some more traditionally minded home and building owners will not desire these sorts of extensions in their midst. But, given enough space such as a courtyard or green space, these louvres can truly come into their own. Brise soleil perhaps tread a middle ground: more conspicuous than external louvres they are useful in the creation of walkways between buildings, jutting out like awnings from the wall.

Please visit http://www.maplesunscreening.co.uk/ for more details.

Minibus hire avoids the difficulties of group travel

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With diesel prices set to increase even further, travelling independently is growing ever more expensive. Unfortunately, public transport is suffering from a lack of investment at the same time, meaning that for many people there is no decent alternative to filling up the car and driving themselves. There are numerous ways around these trends, such as lift-sharing and home-working. For group excursions, minibus hire or coach hire London are ways of spreading the costs between a number of people, whilst still taking a single vehicle – something that has several advantages. Luxury coach hire is another option, since the money saved in the economies of scale enables better vehicles to be hired.

Clubbing together in such a way has a range of benefits. Not least are the upsides for the environment: instead of a dozen or two dozen individuals or families travelling separately, they can all go together after meeting at a local rendezvous point. That means a fraction of the carbon emissions and other pollutants associated with driving. There are financial savings to be enjoyed, too. Although a single large vehicle like a bus or coach is more expensive to run, it moves many people. The larger the vehicle the more proportionately cheap it tends to be, as the unit cost falls. Minibus hire or coach hire London can therefore be a significantly more cost-effective way of organising corporate travel than many of the alternatives – including driving separately or taking public transport, which is often just as expensive.

A further benefit is the logistical side of things: there’s no need to think about getting everyone to the same destination at the same time. Instead, the provided driver (or drivers, for long journeys) will take everyone – meaning that there’s not necessarily a designated driver in your group, so everyone can relax and enjoy the journey. This is particularly welcome in the case of excursions to the continent, where luxury coach travel really comes into its own. Coach hire London offering this as an option will have some outstanding vehicles, packed with all the conveniences and entertainment you would usually expect from a flight. Even in the case of minibus hire, it is often far more convenient to have everyone go together. That means no one gets lost, and if you are following an itinerary there will be no waiting around if one or other car breaks down or takes an unexpected detour.

Please visit http://www.goldenboy.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.goldenboy.co.uk/

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Eliminate Duplicate Payments…

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If you’re concerned that your business is losing money through fraudulence and error, then turn to accounts payable audit systems to ensure that you are safeguarded from these unnecessary overpayments. Hazardous duplicate payments can add to up to costly amounts for many medium and large businesses. Recovery audit software can provide a affordable solution to avoid duplicate payments and are an low-cost alternative to expensive recovery auditing.

Implementing recovery audit software has many business benefits, and is cheaper and easier than you may think. First of all, recovery auditing software chiefly and crucially saves you money because it avoids unnecessary payments. This is no small benefit. Recovery auditing software acts quickly to recover duplicate payments, which is vital as the possibility of repossession diminishes every month as your suppliers go out of business, merge or get bought. The older your invoices are, the more they’ll cost to recover, so it’s advisable to get on top of them as soon as you can. Accounts payable audit systems enable you to act rapidly.

Secondly, recovery auditing software is low-cost compared to calling in recovery auditors to identify and recover duplicate payments. The software is capable of eradicating invoicing errors, compliance issues and supplier fraud, as well as duplicate payments. There is a significant risk that medium and large organisations pay their supplier invoices twice. These are the most recurrent and expensive overpayments in the accounts payable process, amounting to a non-trivial percentage of your organisation’s annual spend during the process from purchase to payment.

Thirdly, recovery auditing software requires no costly training, contrary to what you may think.  It is easy to use and free online training is often offered by the provider. This software empowers your own Accounts Payable teams with the right tools to prevents overpayment, so expensive auditor fees are cut and internal processes are improved. Auditing software supports your Accounts Payable team in their efforts to control and improve processes. With these tools at hand, you can respond your business’s specific needs, reducing fraud and risk and increasing productivity. Once installed, the software halts duplicates before a payment run and therefore avoids the high expense of recovering money externally or internally.

It’s simple to health-check your business first to verify whether overpayment is a concern for you. Most providers offer an AP health check for free if your organisation qualifies. The evidence produced forms a sound business case for implementing the software. To make a substantial difference to the cost-efficiency of your AP systems, consider recovery audit software. All past payment data is processed by accounts payable audit systems, so that not only are your previous duplicate payments accounted for, but you can look forward to compliant and accountable payments in the future. Protect your valuable working capital – at such a low cost of ownership, it makes excellent business sense.

Please visit https://www.fiscaltec.com/uk for more.

Presentation Creation & Presentation Training – Your Best Option…

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Powerpoint presentations are here to stay.

Whatever the nature of the business meeting, you’ll find they are almost always accompanied by a slideshow. It’s particularly true of sales presentations, where winning over the audience is absolutely critical. However, Powerpoint is now treated as mandatory, which means that it’s used whether or not it’s helpful – a case of the tail wagging the dog. The problem is that Powerpoint design is frequently fairly shoddy, and serves only to put off your listeners, not win them over to your way of thinking. Thus something that can be a fantastic asset can all too often become a liability. How do you avoid this happening?

People communicate in different ways. There are those who want to convey and receive large amounts of information; they are noticeable by their habit of going into great detail and giving you more data than you typically need. There are those who tend to communicate on a more emotional level, interpreting a situation by the way they feel about it. They tend to be more emotive in their own communication, too, using means that resonate on that level – colourful language, stories and intense descriptions of their feelings. And there are those who are far more instinctive and straightforward. They tend to want to get to the root of a matter and make a decision quickly, and are interested in only the most salient details. Bear in mind that when you are communicating with a group of people, it will likely contain one or more of all of these types. Therefore you need to cater for their needs. Otherwise, you will find that you lose two-thirds of your audience, simply because you’re not communicating in a way that they find easy to engage with.

In terms of Powerpoint presentations, that means you need to tailor your slides as well as your talk. You should make sure you cover all three bases in your Powerpoint design. For your talk, give the information you need, of course. But you should mix it up with illustrations and personal stories. You should also provide a summary for those who want little more. For your slides, you can do the same. Charts and graphs convey large amounts of information. Photographs and pictures appeal to a different part of the audience and will register emotionally, giving them something to remember. For the final group, a brief list of bullet points will give them what they need. Make sure you cater to everyone’s preferences and you’ll find your sales presentations have a higher degree of success.

Visit http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/

External Louvres: Design feature or function?

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When a climate is uncertain, oppressively hot or cold, or when a building is located in a polluted area such as a large city, external louvres are often used to provide ventilation and a regular circulation of fresh air. These are built from several slats placed at precise angles to ensure the best possible circulation for fresh, temperature-controlled air. Large structures, such as brise soleil, its name taken from the French (‘sunbreaker’) can also shade those around the building from either stifling sun or light precipitation. Smaller louvres control sand or dust from entering the building, as well as ambient echo. They are an extremely efficient method of reducing emissions from heating and from air conditioning, and for this reason have gained distinction as an essential feature of a ‘green building’. Air conditioning in particular is one of the most notable culprits in carbon dioxide production.

Some louvres have even more advanced and specific environmentally friendly uses. For instance, glass louvres actively and retain heat, leaving buildings cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Some are even built in conjunction with solar panels: the slats are wonderfully placed to support frail photovoltaic cells, and the glass maximizes the amount of sunlight they attract. Many famous buildings, such as Paris’ Institute du Monde Arabe, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Chandigargh city at the foot of the Himalayas, designed by the father of brise soleil, architect Le Courbusier (‘the blackbird’), use louvres to create modern and efficient buildings.

However, architects are artists, and when placing external louvres on a building, they’re not thinking only of the functionality of efficient temperature and pollution control systems. It’s the indisputable beauty of external louvres that has made them a backbone of all kinds of architecture projects, from airports or entire cities like Chandigargh, to private homes and small offices. Louvres are found everywhere in unobtrusive forms made out of steel or aluminium, and many are designed specifically not to be noticed. But on the other extreme, an attractive structure made of wooden or glass louvres combines functionality with a design .

When sitting out in the garden, approaching the pool, or simply approaching a building, a louvre structure is fantastic way of providing a cool, quiet and relaxing space while also enjoying the serenity for inhabitants, workers and guests that comes from gorgeous architecture. It’s increasingly rare to find a shaded outdoor space attached to a well-designed building that doesn’t involve an attractive brise soleil structure €“ and with louvre installation becoming cheaper and more accessible to the average homeowner, the trend is only set to become more ubiquitous.

Please visit http://www.maplesunscreening.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.maplesunscreening.co.uk/

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Recovery Audit Software and Accounts Payable Audit

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Accounts are complicated at the best of times. What should at one level be easy addition and subtraction turns into an intricate tangle of complex maths that, in the right hands, can say just about anything about your firm’s finances. At another level, the job of collecting money from clients and paying suppliers should be easy. But it’s not. In fact, problems creep in every day. The average invoice has around twelve fields, and if one of these is wrong it can result in a missed or unnecessary payment. An accounts payable audit helps you discover what is going wrong – who owes you money, whether fraud is occurring at any level, whether duplicate payments and other kinds of overpayment are happening, and so on. The frequency of errors is something like 0.1 percent. This means that one in a thousand payments is going to be wrong in one way or another. Recovery audit software finds those wrong payments and deals with them.

These accounting problems are at their worst when you’re dealing with high volumes of transactions but a low turnover. If you are working hard to make ends meet – making a large number of sales but just about breaking even, for example – then overpayments will have a major effect on your bottom line. They could even make the difference between staying afloat and sinking.

Then there’s fraud. Many organisations’ accounting systems aren’t set up to see this when it occurs. But what happens if someone purposely submits an additional invoice – perhaps identical to one they have already sent? Without the appropriate checking procedures it could easily result in a duplicate payment. It happens all the time, but all too often it also goes totally unnoticed.

Recovery audit software can end the haemorrhaging of profits that can result from accounting errors. It can pay for itself the very first time you use it, getting back the cash you’ve unnecessarily paid to suppliers and collecting it from those who are late paying. Since you might have several years of accounts to correct, this can result in a tidy lump sum. In any case, an accounts payable audit is well worthwhile, since it can discover where you are making duplicate payments and allow you to protect against fraud and other errors in the future. When so many businesses are struggling to get by, every little extra bit of help is welcome.

Visit http://www.fiscaltec.com/ for details.

Community broadband – for independent learning and personal progress

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Next generation access refers to the higher speeds at which we can connect to the internet, and studies have revealed that 8% of UK households now benefit from a super high speed of connection. But, while this super high speed news may sound brilliantly progressive, we really should be aiming to spread this rate of access beyond just a twelfth of homes. Because if we compare the rate of connection at the highest rate – 30Mbps or higher – with the UK average of 9Mbps, it is easy to see that the improvements in connectivity are far from inclusive. Indeed, it is especially important in a climate of economic austerity that a reliable and fast connection to the internet does not become the preserve of the wealthy: news articles reporting on the higher speeds being accessed in the UK have also taken trouble to note that ‘In the current economic climate, spending an extra £10 a month to get faster broadband is simply not a priority for most households’. And this is certainly true in regions where ICT infrastructure leaves much to be desired. Now is really the time then to look deep into the problem of how Britain can avoid creating a new category of social inequality based on technical computer skills and access to information. Investment in community broadband is happening too slowly.

Philosophers and theorists have been writing recently about how our economy is shifting from an economy of production and consumption to an economy of contribution. Put simply, this means that the future might see fewer global corporations in control of the goods the rest of us rely upon and a greater number of the general population might also be producers and consumers of a wider range of specialised services and goods. Obviously, things might not work out this way but, if we can look forward to greater independence and an end to a rigid top-down economic model, we can be sure that the internet will have a big role to play.

Internet users with next generation access are in a really strong position at the moment: there is so much open source software available in places where ICT infrastructure is established that we can use to educate ourselves, produce artwork, write music, and even develop our own products. However, we must not get too enthusiastic about all of this, at the risk of forgetting about the under-developed countries and even the poorly connected areas of wealthy nations who have an unreliable or non-existent level of internet access. Improving community broadband is an urgent issue.

See http://www.broadbandvantage.co.uk/

Bacs payments: pros and cons

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bacs has now been around for nearly 45 years and offers a smooth and relatively painless way to transfer money from one account to another. Bacs software can be integrated with your existing accounting systems, taking a lot of the time and worry out of moving money around. But if you’re thinking of making the update from more traditional payment systems to bacs payments, you’ll no doubt have a few questions to ask. Is it worth the trouble that always comes with change? In an age of cyber-theft, is it really secure? In general, do the advantages outweigh the problems and potential pitfalls?

1) Speed. The first advantage of bacs is the speed with which transfers are made. Although three working days is generally the stated time frame – still faster than a cheque – most payments today are made with the Faster Payment System (FPS) which is all but instant. This means almost all of your payments will appear in the target account on the same day, if not sooner.

2) Security. Although many people have concerns about the safety of transferring funds electronically, bacs has many levels of security and is an extremely safe way to move money. In the highly unlikely event that you do run into problems, there are measures in place to recover your money, anyway. In times past employers and businesses would have dealt more in cash, meaning that they would have to keep large sums of money on the premises – itself a security risk. Cheques, too, can get mislaid – meaning you’re never sure if or when they’re going to be cashed.

3) Cost. Transfers are free within the UK, so there’s no cost to your business aside from that of installing the new systems.

There are arguably one or two downsides to using bacs, but these are negligible. Bacs payments are free within the UK but there are charges for transferring money to other countries. Bacs software is extremely convenient and powerful, but you may not receive notifications of money reaching your account – hardly a problem in most cases, and not something you’d enjoy with a cheque either. Also, if there is a mistake with an account number, it can be hard to reclaim your funds – assuming it’s a valid, if mistaken account number. In almost every case, though, the advantages far outweigh any downsides and so moving to bacs will rarely be a bad move for a business.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.bottomline.co.uk/

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How document processing can help you

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With the purchase of any new technology there has to be a reason to justify the expenditure and the trouble of training personnel and moving systems. In the case of document management that purpose is efficiency, which has many impacts elsewhere – not least in terms of reputation, as well as your bottom line. Invoice processing, for example, allows you to pay suppliers and clients on time (whilst not overpaying or duplicate paying); whilst this has financial benefits, it is also an important courtesy to those you work with and will do much to strengthen the relationship between you. That, of course, has knock-on impacts for the long-term arrangement between you. Cost is so usually not the sole criterion for changing provider or supplier; poor service is a more common reason. People often don’t mind paying a touch more so long as it’s worth it. Remove that incentive and you can find their loyalty is (rightly) short-lived. document processing can therefore be an important tool in your customer retention, with all that means for other aspects of your business.

The overall idea is simple: all of your physical documents are converted to electronic ones. This is carried out by various means. At the bottom end of the scale a scan-to-pdf may be used. More sophisticated systems use optical character recognition and are capable of turning handwritten notes into files.

These files can then be saved centrally, where they can be accessed by anyone who has the necessary permissions. That means documents cannot be lost or destroyed, and photocopying certain papers is no longer required. It allows you to treat all documents the same – letter or email, paper or virtual invoice. Businesses can often unwittingly employ a two-tier system depending on which medium they are more familiar with; either they will deal with paper first and leave the electronic communications, or vice versa. The danger is that some clients may get left behind this way.

document processing cuts out this hierarchy, and a good document management system will mean that your staff do not have to distinguish between paper and electronic copies. This will be particularly important for your accounts department, since ignoring invoices or being slow to process them is a sure way to upset clients and suppliers. Consequently you should find that invoice processing enables your organisation to run more efficiently – something that those who use you will appreciate.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.bottomline.co.uk/

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Bacs payments to satisfy partners

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The first concern of most companies is far more than just financial. Obviously, commercial success will assist the growth of any enterprise but it is rarely the sole aim of a business’s founders. Rather, many entrepreneurs would rather their finances took care of themselves while they attended to the more creative tasks of formulating new products, providing new services and attracting new clients. Unfortunately, many business’s existing systems of accounting leave them bogged down in the long process of balancing the figures, seeing that all expenses are accounted for, taxes paid, employees’ salaries calculated fairly and any work outsourced to external freelancers rewarded in a punctual manner. But fortunately many of these problems and much of the time they take can be cut greatly when an old manual arrangement for making and receiving payments is swapped for the latest bacs software. bacs payments is a quick and accurate way of transferring money from one account to another – all you need is the payee’s banking details, which should be provided as standard in any invoice. Bacs really is the way forward and in an age of fears about the safety of information it offers optimum security.

Security should be a priority for any firm. It is not just money but also ideas that can be lost when banking systems are left open or as easy targets for fraudsters. Therefore, when starting up a business it is advisable to get one’s accounting systems in place and understood from the very beginning. There is too much to lose if the right systems are missing or remembered too late: it is not only the business that will suffer but its clients as well.

The ideal situation for a business to be in is one in which their clients do not even notice what kind of payments systems are in place. Customers will be loyal if they see a confident company that concentrates on delivering its products and services. They will leave and turn to the nearest competitor firm if they are aware that the company they put their faith in is floundering with the basics of making and receiving payments. This is where bacs software makes life so much simpler. Clients will feel at home with a company that uses bacs, and so will a company’s employees whose pay, received via bacs payments, arrives safely and promptly in their account every time.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.bottomline.co.uk/

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