Are You Covering Your Home Based Business With Homeowners Insurance? Many home based business owners rely upon their normal home insurance policy to cover their business assets. Sometimes, this will be ok, but very often, this is a big mistake. To understand why it could be a mistake, please take a moment to learn about typical homeowners policies.Personal Property vs. Business PropertyThe first problem that usually crops up is that the typical home policy does not have enough personal property coverage. A home based business may add supplies, equipment, computers, inventory, and records to the normal personal property in the home. Combine this with the furniture, TV sets, and appliances in that same home. Whatever coverage you and your agent thought was enough before you ran you home based business may be woefully inadequate now!Also be sure that your personal property is covered at the replacement costs, and not the real value. If your property is covered at real value, you will have to accept garage sale prices if your precious items are damaged. You laptop may cost $1,200 to replace, but would be unlikely to fetch more than a couple of hundred dollars if you sold it on eBay. You do not want to have to replace your business items that way.Do you even know how much personal property coverage you have in your own policy? Lots of homeowners have no idea. It is time to dig out your policy or call your agent or insurance company to find out.Home vs. Business Liability Insurance Typically, a home policy covers the home owner in case a visitor makes a claim for damages while they are visiting. This may not cover damages that happen in the course of business. Your normal policy will not contain professional or business liability coverage at all.Personal vs. Commercial Car InsuranceAnother coverage issue that many small business owners forget about is coverage for their cars. Personal auto insurance policies may not be adequate if you use your own car for business quite a bit. This can be especially true if you let employees drive it, carry inventory, or drive a lot more than you originally stated when you bought your policy.How Can You Find Adequate Home Based Business Insurance? It is no time to fret but just to take some action! It may be very simple to fix the problem with your homeowners and home based business insurance. Here are some of the solutions you may find.
If your business if fairly small, your insurer may be able to adjust your policy to cover business items by adding a rider. This is probably a simple and fairly affordable solution.
Business Owners Policies (BOP) are insurance packages that many small businesses purchase. They contain a package of coverage that are typically adequate. If your business is a bit larger, this may be the solution you need.
You may also be able to adjust your car insurance policy to cover some business use. If not, you may need to purchase a commercial vehicle policy.
Your auto and home insurance policies may be very simple and affordable to adjust. But if you ignore the issue you run the risk of having big financial problems if some essential business supplies are damaged or a customer claims damages.
Home Based Business Owners – Do You Have Enough Insurance?
Small Business Accounting Software – How to Buy
Small business accounting software / Small business bookkeeping software — How to buy.
There are lot of small business accounting / bookkeeping softwares out there. If you are a small business owner looking for a good software, you are bound to get overwhelmed by the endless list pretty quickly. Which one to buy? What features do they come with? Should I get all the features or just the ones I need? The questions go on and on without answer. If this is what is happening to you, don’t despair. There is hope. Read on. By the time you are done reading this short post you will be armed with all the knowledge you need to make an informed buying decision. First some questions about you.
How big is your business?
Small business as defined by Small Business Administration is any business that is privately owned and employs less than 100 employees. Good enough. If we analyze this definition a bit closely we will quickly see that 100 employees is a big number. Assuming that you are paying $3000/month to each employee you are paying out $300,000/month as salary. If you own a business this big chances are you will not be looking for an accounting / bookkeeping software via internet. Sales agents from software companies will be waiting at your door to sell their software to you. Going by the fact that you are searching for a small business software on the internet you probably own a much smaller business. How much smaller? I think you own a business that has less than 5 employees. Most probably even less. Just one employee. Yourself.
What are you selling?
Are you selling a material product? or just services? Do you make the product or just buy it pre-made? Do you have a real store or you are selling via your web site? How do you find your customers?
How much is your data volume?
If you have a thriving business then you will have good data volume. How much it it? How many orders per month? How many new customers per month? How do store the data? How much data? What is expected growth rate of the data
Do you have a web site?
Nearly all businesses, big or small have web sites these days. Do you have one? If not your should get one. Would you like your software to integrate seamlessly with your web site? Would you like to be able to access your small business accounting / bookkeeping software via the internet?
Your choice of small business accounting / bookkeeping software will depend upon the answers to above questions. Assuming that you have one person company you want something that is easy to use, some that can be accessed remotely form anywhere and it can grow with your company. Right? … Right!
OK, one more thing that we did not discuss. Underlying technology. Even though it may not be visible, it is very important to know what kind of technology your small business software is using. After all it is the bed rock on which the software is built. Things may get a little complicated here but I will try to make them as simple as I can.
Every small business accounting / bookkeeping software essentially does one thing. It store data. Data is information about your business. Customer names, addresses, products, orders, invoices … all are examples of data. So for a small business software to work efficiently it should be able to store data efficiently. Not only that, it should also be able to modify and retrieve data efficiently when you need it. After all what is the use of a black box software that cannot provide you the data when you need it. You still with me? Good.
There are two ways to store data.
Flat file
Relational
Flat file method uses flat text files, much like notepad files, to store data. It is old and archaic.
The reason: it cannot hold any relationships among data entities. e.g. you want to store customers name and their invoices. You know that one customer can have many invoices. So to store customers and their invoices you will have to repeat customer name each time you store an invoice. Just like below.
customer1 — invoice1
customer1 — invoice2
Problem with this approach is that you have to repeat the customer name every time you want to store an invoice. This is not efficient.
Relational method uses relationships to store data. It is more efficient. Look at the same example that uses relational method. It uses customer name only once.
customer1
– invoice1
– invoice2
Elegant isn’t it? You bet. It is much cleaner, more efficient and easier to read. If you are still with me we are almost done. The whole point of the above song and dance was to show you that relational storage method is superior to flat file storage method. It should be an important factor to consider when you buy your small business computer software. Now, there are five major small business accounting / bookkeeping software.
Quickbooks from Intuit , Simply Accounting, Peachtree (again from Intuit), Sage and Microsoft Small Business Accounting Software. Agreed?
Now the bombshell. None of these small business software use relational storage method! Can you imagine? Wait there is more. All these are propriety software written by the big companies who use large scale ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software that runs on unix (not windows or mac) and uses relational database (relational storage method) to run their own businesses. Did you get what I just said. Let me rephrase. All these so called best small business software companies DO NOT USE THEIR OWN SOFTWARE. They use relational storage software, but they sell you non relational storage software in the name of small business software. The reason? Relation storage method is very expensive. Well not any more!
Home Based Business Ideas For Everyday Moms
If you have recently had a baby, have children at home or simply in between jobs, you may have thought about starting a home based job. Even if you have a stable career in the workforce, many moms fantasise about the idea of being able to work from home.Reasons for wanting to start a home business for moms vary considerably, from wanting to be able to raise their own young children before they start school, to wanting to earn a passive income to help pay for some expenses or even because they just want to have flexible hours and be their own boss.All of the above reasons are common and very understandable. Where moms feel unsure about starting a home based business is finding an idea that agrees with them, their knowledge, market and resources available.Some moms feel that they are just an everyday mom that cannot come up with an idea that is achievable. This attitude must stop right here.I can tell you now, there is a home business idea very achievable for all people, even the most everyday mom! I believe that if you have some knowledge about something (or anything in particular) and own a computer with internet access, you can have a home business up and running within a matter of days.Put simply, billions of people search for information and content through search engines on the internet every single day. There are lots of different ways you can use information or knowledge you possess to create a income online. People will pay money online to acquire information you can provide.Creating a simple content rich website on a particular topic (niche) which also sells ebooks, has affiliate links and different advertising can create an ongoing, passive stream of income to your designated account, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.For example, if you are a great babysitter and obviously know a lot about children, you could create a website which provides customers and visitors with lots of interesting and fun activities for toddlers. Write an eBook to sell, or purchase one with resell rights and keep one hundred percent of the profits.Your babysitting website could target an audience of parents and fellow babysitters looking for child care ideas and tips.You simply need to think about your interests and skills (in any area at all, be it horse riding, craft, cooking, massaging or juggling) and share your expertise online.You may be surprised just how many people are looking for what you can offer.There are lots of online internet marketing strategies available to help you get a home business idea started online.If you are a mom who has an interest in the baby and child niche, visit the link below which provides lots of free information and resources to get your business online the easiest and most effective way.