"Automating Your Records-The Right Way"- July 1995 Edition
Contact: Mike DiFrisco, Creative Services Director, Financial Independence
Network Limited,
310 Second St., Boscobel WI 53805 Tel:(608)375-3100 e-mail:DebtFree01@aol.com
In March's issue of Small Business Builder, publisher
John Cummuta discussed the importance of keeping accurate and organized
business records. Many computer novices see their PC as a panacea to their
record keeping woes; then they find out the hard way that PC record keeping
requires the same discipline as manual record keeping. You have to decide
on an organizational structure for your data, and then you have to make
sure the data gets keyed or scanned in. Fortunately, the interchangeability
of today's software means that by following a few simple guidelines, you
not only can have complex information at your fingertips, you can also create
information systems that grow in complexity as your business grows-IF you
organize them correctly in the first place!
The Questions only you can answer
What information do you need to track? What information do your customers
need ? What information will you both need tomorrow? If you can answer the
above right now, your task is easy! Any of the popular spreadsheet or data
base programs will allow you to create an electronic copy of you manual
records. For instance, I use Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet as a database,
a contacts manager, and an invoice and report generator. None of these require
any skill that can't be learned in a few evenings by a novice. Many packages
come with turnkey documents that can be used immediately. If your record
keeping isn't what it should be, do the following:
1.) Reflect on recent situations where inaccurate or unavailable information
has come back to haunt you. Have customers been demanding itemized bills?
Do they call wanting the status of their job, and seem perplexed at being
put on hold or being told you'll call them back?
2.) Take a look at your notes, your quotes, your job sheets, your to-do
forms, etc. What information keeps appearing on them?
3.) Take out a piece of paper. Take the above concerns, and create the forms
that would handle them. It should be a form that everyone in a small organization
can share between them (even if you're a one person show, other people will
be involved with your records someday. NOW's the time to make them understandable!)
4.) USE THESE FORMS FOR AT LEAST THREE MONTHS BEFORE USING THEM ELECTRONICALLY!
This is time tested advice that large corporations use when automating a
task. Some even run their old manual system in parallel with their new electronic
system for a time. The reason? It's easier to test and modify a manual form
than it is to modify a computer form. After three months of disciplined
use (there's that word again!) your forms should be refined and ready to
be automated. (No doubt somebody has wondered about the three months worth
of data that needs to be keyed. From experience, I can tell you that it's
far easier to key three months worth of records than it is to go back and
modify three months worth of inaccurate ones. Software consultants make
$100 an hour and more to fix these kinds of problems.)
The Mailing List Debacle-or, what you want to avoid
A while ago I was asked to create a mailing list of 700 addresses in one afternoon. I was told that the addresses were all typed and ready to go, all I had to do was create the merge list for the labels. When I opened the file, the addresses were indeed typed. It looked just as it would in your address book. Why, then, did I know it was going to be a long afternoon? One, because the list had to be alphabetized-and there were no separators between the salutation, first names and surnames. Two, there was no separator between one address and the other. Three, we had to separate out of town addresses from the others, and without delineating the town in the address line, this couldn't be done either. Fortunately, I was able to interface the list with Microsoft Excel, and after about three hours of subjecting the data to different algorithms, I created a mail merge file. The point? The "Fields", or individual pieces of information in your records, must be kept separate from each other. In our example, the name fields should have been broken up into Salutation, first name, and surname. The city data should have been broken into city, state and zip code. It would have taken no more time to key in, and concatenating the fields would take no time at all. Besides saving time and money (remember, I wasn't charging the $100 an hour a consultant would have) well delineated data is easily "exported" to other, more powerful programs, so its capabilities grow as your business grows.