Let’s Talk Small Business

Jan262020 by Kathy DrungilasNo Comments

New Year’s Technology Resolution 2020 – Put down your phone

New Year's Technology Resolutions for 2020, technology

Rick Broida CNET.com I'm as bad as anyone: I use my phone when I'm standing in line, when I'm sitting on the throne, when I'm eating alone and, occasionally, when I'm eating with others. Pitiful. Make no mistake, I think phones are incredible tools. But they're sucking up all our spare time -- they may be reducing the time we spend with our friends. (They may also be making us sick: There's some evidence that excessive phone use can cause anxiety and depression.) I just turned 50. I need time to slow the hell down, not continue to evaporate. So I'm going to work -- and it's going to be hard -- to use my phone less. One tool I'm hoping will help is Moment, an app that tracks overall phone usage and teaches you…

Jan232020 by Kathy DrungilasNo Comments

New Year’s Technology Resolutions for 2020 – Be nicer online

New Year's Technology Resolutions for 2020, technology

What would your mother say if she knew what you were typing? You may need to be nicer online! We all know how toxic the internet can be. The question is, are you part of the problem? I get the need to vent. I get how irritating it can be when someone ranks all the Marvel movies and totally gets it wrong. (Seriously, Ant-Man ahead of Iron Man 3? Are you kidding me?) In 2020, resolve to just let that stuff go. No author, no video blogger and certainly no fellow commenter deserves to be called fat, crazy, stupid or worse just because you have a difference of opinion -- or even if he or she gets something wrong. If you must weigh-in, think before you type. Think about the…

Jan212020 by Kathy DrungilasNo Comments

New Year’s Technology Resolutions for 2020 – Detox your Inbox

New Year's Technology Resolutions for 2020, technology

Detox your Inbox! This could be one of your best New Year's Resolutions ever! How much time every day do you spend swiping away junk email? (Answer: Too much.) Let's make this the year you banish the junk altogether. One option: Every day, unsubscribe from five unwanted legitimate mailing lists. In any given email, look near the bottom for an "unsubscribe" link. If you're an iOS user, you can also look for an "unsubscribe" option at the top of the email -- though that merely shoots an unsubscribe request back to the sender, which doesn't always work. Yep, just five per day. Each one should take all of about 20 seconds, so you should be able to knock them out in under two minutes. After a few weeks of this…

Feb12019 by KathyNo Comments

Refresh Pivot Table Data – Excel Tip

accounting, Excel Tip

If you are an intensive pivot-table-using business, slicing and dicing data into meaningful chunks, you may need to refresh the data often. When you are working with data in Power Pivot, from time to time you might need to refresh the data from the source, recalculate the formulas that you have created in calculated columns, or make sure data presented in a PivotTable is up-to-date. Per Microsoft Support, you can refresh the data for PivotTables connected to external data, such as a database (SQL Server, Oracle, Access, or other), Analysis Services cube, data feed, and many other sources. You can also refresh data from a source table in the same or a different workbook. And you can set your workbook to refresh its PivotTable data automatically when you open it. By…

Jan262019 by KathyNo Comments

Wildcards in Formulas – Excel Tip

accounting, Excel Tip

I learned a new trick last week – using wildcards in Excel formulas. I’ve always known you can use wildcards characters such as the asterisk * or ? when searching for items in windows explorer, but I wasn’t quite sure how to use them in Excel formulas. For example, many times I want to calculate a formula if a certain condition is present, and usually using a =IF(condition..) formula works just fine when looking at numbers. It can become more complicated if you are looking at text and want to make a calculation based upon it or other criteria. COUNTIF is a function to count cells that meet a single criteria. COUNTIF can be used to count cells with dates, numbers, and text that match specific criteria. The COUNTIF function…

Sep192018 by Kathy DrungilasNo Comments

#DIV/0! Error -> Remove it – Excel Tip

accounting, Excel Tip

No one likes to see that demented #DIV/0! Error in Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables! We know that dividing by a 0 value will equate to zero, so why does Excel not return what we want to see? To fix #DIV/0! in a worksheet – Change your formula. In our example below, we are using the formula =M36896/L36896 to calculate a number formatted as a percentage. Since our numbers in columns M and L are blank, we get the #DIV/0! Error. If we change our formula to use the IFERROR function, we can replace the error with our choice of 0 or a blank or even another word. The IFERROR function in the form of =IFERROR(M36896/L36896,0) will return a 0 instead of the error. If you want…

Apr32018 by Kathy DrungilasNo Comments

Why Do I Need a Financial Report?

accounting

Kathy Drungilas A friend recently said, "I have a small, home-based business so I don't need, or even understand, why I need a financial report. I buy items and resell them for a profit. It's pretty simple. I made over $900 last month!" "Great!" I said but knew to ask a few simple questions. "How much did you spend on your business last month?" "Well, I bought $350 worth of product and have a couple receipts at home, but that is $550 profit," said my friend. "Do you pay any licensing fees, purchase product catalogs, or have a website? Do you collect sales tax from your buyers?" My friend answered, "Yes, all of those, so maybe I didn't make $350?" Every business, even the smallest, needs a good system to track…

Feb162018 by Kathy DrungilasNo Comments

Remote Workers Are Outperforming Office Workers–Here’s Why

business

By Brian de Haaff Co-founder and CEO, Aha!@bdehaaff Have you seen any of these gimmicky office designs? Candy dispensers in conference rooms. Hammocks and indoor treehouses. Tech companies tend to be the worst offenders with the startup favorites: beer taps and table tennis. Maybe there is fun for a moment when the candy bar drops -- but does all that money spent on gimmicks deliver anything meaningful for the people who work there? I have to wonder why company founders are trying so hard with these in-office "perks." I get that the goal is to create collaboration and fun. But I think this is doing more harm than good. And research shows that the problem is only getting worse. In fact, one study found that the number of people who say they cannot concentrate at their desk has increased by…

Nov302017 by Kathy DrungilasNo Comments

Don’t Waste All That Good Content: How Repurposing Keeps It Alive

business

What You Need to Know About Repurposing Your Content A Guest Blog courtesy Bob Dunn [BobWP] There are so many ways to repurpose your content. I will cover several of them as well as offer some strategic and specific tips on repurposing. There really are two things you need to know. The More Content, the Better It is obvious that the more content you have produced, the more you have for repurposing. That only means that you need to be more careful about how you change it and send it back out. If you are pushing it out to other platforms via various mediums, then it can be a bit easier. But if you are doing it to generate more content on your own site, make sure that you give…

Sep152017 by Kathy DrungilasNo Comments

Is Your Business Data Secure?

business, technology

Kathy Drungilas In the news again - another major company, Equifax, has been hacked and personal data stolen. 2017 has been dominated by high-profile data breaches. As more and more information is stored online, the responsibility to protect credit card and personal information from hackers increases. Is your business data safe? The most recent major incident resulted in personal details of millions of Equifax customers being exposed. Earlier in 2017, millions of voter records were exposed, and phone numbers, names and pin codes of of six million Verizon customers were left online for over a week. (See 2017 hacking headlines.) And just in case you don’t think a data breach could happen at your small business, think about this. In 2010, the U.S. Secret Service and Verizon Communications Inc.'s forensic analysis unit…