Improving the worst part first

On the Saasu blog this last week was an interesting comment about different ways to improve your business.

It’s funny where you pick up great insights. I was watching a national gardening program and one of the winners of their annual Gardener Of The Year prize was asked by the host how she succeeded in building such an amazing garden. Her answer floored me…

I just keep improving the worst part.

It is an interesting concept and one which I think has a lot of relevance for the tourism industry and for managing websites especially for smaller businesses.

Rather than try and fix all the problems at once why not start making a list of things which need doing whether it be replace the carpet in a room, update to a more online accounting system, take new photos for your website, SEO, etc.

A good way to manage this is using google docs or google applications.

Simply create a file and keep it updated with ideas. Then you can prioritise and work our which bits you want to do first and also see the benefits and cost.

When you are running a company like RainbowTourism.com there is always more to do. For example when we were developing our new website with Canz Design we made a file of future ideas. It meant we could keep working on the site but not loose sight of good ideas. Some of these still are to be implemented but by getting the things we needed first rather than getting distracted by lots of other issues our site was completed.

This along with other items will be looked at each month to decide which part needs to be improved first.

Of course there are arguments to fixing everything at once but if you are a small company this has lots of hidden dangers in that if you don't have the time you can easily have the changes take more time - so why not focus on the worst part first.

How Secure is your data

I read the following interest blog on Saasu's blog today called Winning The SaaS Security Challenge

Of particular importance are the following questions:

• Can you achieve better security than us?
• Is that laptop of yours (with accounting software on it) safer in your car, home or office than in our international data centre?
• Does your laptop have a guy with a gun standing in front of it to protect it?
• Do you back up your data as many times as day as we do?
• Do your store credit card numbers in your MYOB or Quicken file? What is your liability if you lose these?

You might ask the same questions about your online booking system.

So here is another reason to choose online systems compared to off line systems.

For example Rainbow Tourism uses Saasu accounting software and all our invoices and documentation is stored online safely and securely for a small annual fee. We email all invoices and receive all invoices electronically. This saves a large amount of money in paper, postage and printing and reduces our environmental footprint.

Similarly Rainbow Tourism uses the Seekom booking engine to manage all our bookings again storing all our documents securely.

So the question is how secure is your data?

Desktop versus Online software

For small operators one of the biggest issues is how to manage the paper work for the business.

Whether it be any of the following:

• Emails
• Brochures
• Accounts
• Bookings
• Rates
• or any other data

These all have different software which can assist in keeping track of all these.

Now the problem is what is the best software?

Will there is software from Microsoft and accounting software like MYOB but the big problem is they are tied to your desktop.

• What happens when you are away and you need to access these.
  
• How can you only share the documents you want and keep others secure

What are the alternaltives?

• What not try Open source software such as Open Office - this is an excellent product and is very simple to use. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office but do you really need them?
  
• What about Google Docs? A great way to share your documents and access them securely. Better still why not check out Google Apps The free version allows you to share data within your group, have an online calendar, access gmail and more all from a secure login. The paid version even offers back up deleted emails for 90 days by the adminstrator.
  
• For accounting why not check out Saasu - Software as a Service - keep all your accounts securely online. Manage overdue accounts and if you ever have a tax audit then all records are readily accessible.

The real advantages of using online options are:

• Accessible anywhere in the world
  
• Simpler to share access with other users
• Often better backup and more secure e.g. Saasu back up their servers and also store a back up in another location - but always check the back up policy of online services
• No upgrading of software required - it automatically happens

The main disadvantages are:

• If you don't have internet access then you can't access the service.
• A slow internet connection will make the software feel clunky and awkward to use.

What you can do though is decide for example to use gmail and also download your email to your pc, you might run google docs but download documents on a regular basis or work locally on your PC with open office then load the documents into google docs for future use.

As you can see there is no right or wrong answer just what works for you.

One thing to remember is check out reviews of software. Remember price doesn't tell you anything about how good the software is - it only tells you how much money the software provider wants for the product.

Why not use the comments section and tell us of your favourite software