Working for a living - The manager

In recent years in Britain and other parts of Europe, there has been a considerable change in the nature of industry. As a result, many of us have been forced to leave large companies and start our own businesses. This means that many people have had to add management skills to their existing technical and practical ones

There are many PC based 'management assistants' however one of the problems of running a small or single person company, is that you need to combine the jobs of Manager, Salesman, Accountant and part or even full-time worker. This means that you are often away from your desktop P.C. and some portable means of staying in touch with your company is needed.

Managing contacts and appointments is an important requirement for any manager. In an large corporation, every manager would have his (or her) secretary, who would organise their diary, make travel arrangements and relieve the manager of many of the mundane tasks of his office.
In most small companies however, the manager is on his own, and in these days of mobile phones and instant access a Personal Digital Assistant can pay dividends.

Often a client or other contact will call when you least expect it, and you need to sound knowledgeable about their requirements, scrabbling through papers to find their details appears unprofessional. The contacts application on the Psion allows instant access to client details, at just a few key presses. Further data about the client - the current state of their project or any problems with their order can be stored in the database's freeform 'memo' files for instant access. More importantly that information can be with you all the time in your pocket. Ideal for when that important call comes whilst you are waiting in the airport lounge, or driving to another appointment.

Beyond the built-in software, there are commercial and shareware contacts managers, which not only store more complete information, but can also keep track of your communications with, and the tasks you need to carry out for, each client.

Anyone managing a small company will soon find that there are often simply not enough hours in the day to carry out all the tasks they have to perform. It is all too easy to spend too much time on, for example, overseeing a project, only to find that you have missed the opportunity to phone an important client, or that vital appointment with your Bank Manager. Some form of time management system therefore becomes essential. The Psion's built-in Agenda application, can provide many of the requirements, with it's ability to store your appointments, remind you with alarms, and the excellent to-do facility to remind you of the tasks you have not yet got around to completing.

There are also plenty of shareware utilities available which enhance the Agenda by improving the to-do facilities, add other views and link it in with other applications.

If you employ staff you also need the ability to keep track of their working hours, leave, salaries and expenses. If you employ temporary or casual staff you may need to allocate the costs against specific projects. There are several utilities available which will help you in this task. I will admit a vested interest here, as my own program Facilities Manager was written with much of this is mind. Started whilst I was a head of department in a medium sized company, it is essentially a multi-layered Agenda which allows you to schedule staff or equipment and monitor the time spent on different projects. It allows freeform data in the form of memos to be attached to entries and labour or contract costs to be calculated where appropriate. There are several views covering a day to a month and showing events lasting from 15 minutes to a full month. The program can also show staff leave and public holidays.

Facilities Manager running on a Revo

An alternative option to keep track of staff leave is RMRsoft's Vacation Planner - VacTrac, which has a similar interface to Facilities Manager but keeps track of staff leave and days off to ensure that they stay within their entitlement.
Staff expenses are another problem to track, and Palmtop's Expenses Manager is one option, although it is best when used by the staff members themselves. RMRsoft's RMRCar is available to similarly log the use of company cars.

Small companies often cannot afford their own dedicated accountant, and use the expertise of an outsider. Although, as in my case, the accountant is only a 'phone call or an e-mail away, the 'donkey work' of keeping the accounts still has to be carried out internally, and this often falls to a manager or 'the lady that comes in on Fridays to do the books'. If, like me, you are not a 'natural' accountant, good accounting software is essential. There are plenty of PC options, but I find that Palmtop's Money is as good as most. I particularly like the way that VAT is handled, making VAT returns simply a case of copying over the figures from the appropriate VAT account. Money can create reports and extract data in Quicken format which can then be sent to your accountant to complete the processing. Of course the portability of a Psion can have it's problems as the consequences of losing the machine or having it stolen would be disastrous. You must therefore make absolutely certain that the data is regularly backed up to another format. In effect I keep my accounts twice as I also use a PC program linked into my bank's on-line system, but the cross-checking of the two systems is useful, and I still find it easier to get the information that I need from the Psion program than from the PC.

Invoicing and Credit control are another area on which a manager needs to keep a close check. I have known of companies who only discover at a major audit that there is a large invoice which has not been paid, simply because everyone has been too busy to chase the client.
There are a few 'plain paper' invoicing systems for small companies which run on the Psion, such as Company Accounting from Pythia Information, which generates invoices in HTML. I however have developed my own system which uses a combination of my Psion and my desktop computer and which allows me to quote or price a job on site, then transfer the details onto my desktop PC for printing the final invoice. Although the full system is quite complex, I simply create the initial invoice on the Psion in the spreadsheet and it is transferred across to the PC for printing and permanent storage. Both the PC and Psion keep copies of the invoice which enables me to check on payment and issue follow-up statements as required.

An invoice produced with Company Accounting

Normally, when doing work for a company (rather than the general public) the client will request an account with you, and invoices are normally issued on a 30 day basis, that is, they should be paid no more than 30 days after the end of the month when the invoice was issued. Unfortunately, large companies stretch this credit period to it's limit and beyond, so some form of effective credit control is necessary. My own system does this automatically, but another simple way of keeping track is to create a to-do list in the Agenda especially for invoices. The entry preferences should be set so that entries have a due date, and are shown 0 days before due date in other views. When each invoice is issued, enter it into the to-do list with the date by which it should be paid. Then delete or cross out each invoice as it is paid. Overdue invoices will then be automatically displayed in your other Agenda views for you to chase when required.

Entering a reminder about an invoice in Agenda

Keeping a company afloat means keeping an eagle eye on finances and cash flow. Spreadsheets are an effective means of achieving this and data can be displayed in many forms. I find the graphing facilities on the Psion Sheet application an ideal way of seeing the progress of my business, in an easily understandable form. This is an fictional example of a real graph I use. Using data derived from Money, it shows monthly income and outgoings as a stacked graph. The total height of each column above the baseline is that month's income, whilst the red section is the month's outgoings. The green section is therefore the gross profit, and where the graph drops below the baseline, the company made a loss. This graph was prepared on the Series 7, but the principle is similar on the S5 and Revo, with various forms of shading replacing the colours.

The spreadsheet is also useful to make 'what if' decisions. You can assess the long term advantages of buying a new piece of equipment, or estimate the effect of seasonal variations in trade.

Finally, your Psion can not only help you with cope the financial side of your company, but it can also improve your management skills by giving you access to e-texts. E-texts are simply electronic books, published on the Internet rather than on paper. The advantage is that they take up no extra space in your briefcase and are generally a lot cheaper than conventional books. Several e-texts have been written on management subjects. A selection formatted especially for the Psion are available from Pocketmanager.com with some of their recent titles being dedicated to marketing and time management. These can all be downloaded for a small fee.

References and URLs

Contact Managers

RMR Contact - http://www.rmrsoft.com

nOrganiser - http://www.neuon.com

Time Managers

Facsman - http://www.bainb.co.uk

Timelog - http://www.user.xpoint.at/tnemec/

Logit - http://www.pelicansoft.com

Vactrac5 - http://www.rmrsoft.com

Expenses Managers

Expenses manager/Expenses reporter - http://www.palmtop.nl

RMRCar - http://www.rmrsoft.com

Invoicing and Accounts

Money - http://www.palmtop.nl

Company Accounting - http://www.PocketIQ.com

E-texts

Pocket Manager - http://www.pocketmanager.com