Category: Blogs

One of the best ways to promote and sell a product is to let it speak for itself by using images that sell products. While some people will read the copy created and placed on an ad, many more will look at the images you chose. In fact, the photographs and images you chose are the elements that determine whether people will read your ad further and research your company more — or not.

When selecting images, you will often be selecting one of two types of images: those that show your products or services, or those that help create a mood that supports your brand, products or images.

When choosing the first images, make sure they are accurate. Don’t display images of flowers in vases if you are selling bouquets of flowers without vases, or people will be confused and disappointed when they receive the final product. If you use On Site software, you can manage and store your advertising images directly in your company system.

If you are choosing images from the latter category, make sure they are dynamic, cleanly shot, and strongly contribute to the mood and brand you are actively trying to create. These photos should challenge, inspire, provoke, entertain or enrage. Essentially, they should create an emotion that helps you reach your final goal.

Whichever images you select, though, it is important to be sure that you have reliable software solutions for businesses, like sign business software or Apparel ERP, where you can store them and reference them at a later date.

Creative Ways to Increase Business

Business can be difficult in a slow economy, and business owners and managers often have to get creative to keep pulling in new customers and orders. Here are several creative ways to drum up business, even when the economy is sluggish.

• Everyone is putting on sales and advertising more to try to attract business. As a promotional products company, you can take advantage of this by taking out classified ads that advertise the marketing and advertising benefits of using your products. Business will see the opportunity for mutual growth and come to you with orders.
• Make sure you have good software solutions for business, information services and a strong onsite system, so that you can respond to customers in a timely fashion, provide a professional front on your website and give the best customer service possible. Focusing on providing the best business experience around will ensure that customers will return with their friends even when business is slow.
• Get creative with direct mail, and target groups that take advantage of your services. Focus around holidays and other times of good feelings and light spirits. Spring is a perfect time to begin a new campaign, as people are beginning to brighten and spend more time outside interacting with the world.
• Network with your own vendors and contractors. You never know where you will find a lucrative connection, so make sure you are friendly and open with everyone with whom you come into contact.
• Find out where small groups meet by studying your local newspaper and bulletin boards. Attend meetings and begin building relationships that can then benefit your business.

How do you know if you are outgrowing QuickBooks?

Your business is growing. Like most small businesses in the apparel industry, you probably rely on QuickBooks to run your apparel industry business. You’ve been tracking your expenses, staying in sync with your bank, emailing professional invoices, and paying your employees with QuickBooks for some time now and all is balanced. Even syncing with your accountant for taxes.

Still, you have that aching feeling that something is not quite right. Maybe. . .

•  You realize you need a better way to create consolidated financial reports and the flexibility to format reports to meet your requirements.

•  You just added more employees, product lines, production capability, or locations and you realize that QuickBooks is not providing the reports you need to keep up with your growth.

•  You will be adding offerings, new joint marketing campaigns, as well as a B2B online store for your key clients in the next six months, and you would like to be able to analyze sales based on a combination of location, size, and order — so some sophisticated, integrated spreadsheets would be great.

•  You know that your invoicing is too simplistic and needs to be upgraded to accurately reflect your new services, such as adding more printing types to your decorated apparel line.

•  Not to mention you just hired a couple of new managers to run some new profit centers, to implement systems that log transactions throughout the day, as well as keeping tight, detailed control of ramping production.

You feel loyalty to QuickBooks — even an appreciation. You launched your business with QuickBooks, but times have changed, your business has grown and you would like to adopt a more robust system designed to take your accounting to the next level. You may be outgrowing QuickBooks.

If that’s the case, then congratulations! You are ready for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). “Oh, but that’s only for medium to large businesses and it’s far too costly.” you might be saying. Not necessarily–ERP for Small Businesses is available in many industries, often designed and supported by folks who cut their teeth in your micro, niche markets.

ERP software applications help growing businesses manage and connect information from all core areas of the enterprise to improve effective decision-making and efficiently integrate accounting and related operational tasks. ERP software solutions promote visibility throughout the entire organization, allowing decision-makers to streamline accounting as well as inventory management, order management, human resources, supply chain, product life cycle, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and more.

With an advanced ERP system, you can boost accounting and related business management processes through built-in visual process flows that allow for ease of use, and flexible personalization. You can establish a strong business management foundation with powerful core accounting and financial modules that streamline everyday chores into simple tasks. You can even customize options — streamlining your entire accounting and purchasing process from order to receipt.

Still Wondering if You Are Ready for ERP?

If any of the following sounds familiar and you realize that you are outgrowing QuickBooks and getting ready to move on:

•  You are tired of manual processes and basic spreadsheets that must be managed outside of QuickBooks for complex tasks. You would like a more organized way of automating accounting processes and reducing manual tasks, especially duplicate data entry tasks…thus gaining more accuracy.

•  You want greater efficiency — and control. It’s not enough to pull a separate Excel report that is not integrated with the accounting software…thus losing your analytics. You want a better way to analyze and track your data. You want quick access to greater information so that you and your team can be more productive and effective. You find yourself more intrigued by the promise of business intelligence.

•  You want to be able to import data from outside systems, like customized billing entries, and you need to enter more than a few transactions a month. A flexible, automated workflow for vendor invoices would be nice. QuickBooks just seems a little too small these days in terms of meeting your accounting requirements.

Outgrowing QuickBooks is a Badge of Honor — You are Successful

QuickBooks did a terrific job in organizing the early days of your apparel industry business. Now, you are ready for the path to ERP. Evaluating potential ERP solutions for your enterprise can be time-consuming, but essential. The best ERP systems are those with open module architecture and support for everything from purchase management to project management. The cost and time required to adopt an ERP system will be quickly justified when you realize the benefits of managing your business at peak efficiency — ready to face your next stage of growth.

Yes, QuickBooks offers what they call “enterprise systems” and uses third-party add-ons. But a quick look at these “solutions” shows that they are still way too general in scope, thus requiring much more cost to customize. Not only that, most of these add-ons were made specifically for the non-enterprise versions of QuickBooks, thus resulting in less-than-optimal integration with QuickBooks’ Enterprise solution. A proper Small Business ERP already replicates how the industry works…at no extra cost.

Shopwork’s OnSite ERP is business software specifically designed for the promotional products, decorated apparel, and related industries. Let’s prove it to you with a demo of ShopWorks OnSite.

ShopWorks originally grew out of Jam Graphics Inc.’s need for a reliable business management software program. Jam Graphics Inc. was rapidly developing in the 1990’s, but there wasn’t a program that could handle their growing business needs, so they decided to create a program themselves.

Eventually, this program evolved into a new company, later named ShopWorks, which still aims to meet the goal of developing the most efficient, affordable industry-specific software on the market. In the past several decades, the expert software developers at ShopWorks have combined computer know-how and years of industry experience to do just this.

ShopWorks’ programs don’t just offer some of the best software solutions for businesses; they also offer computer solutions and business solutions. The reason that the developers creating and perfecting the programs can create such perfect business solutions is that they themselves have worked manually in the industries that they are developing the programs for. Don’t combine three or four programs from software developers who don’t know your job as well as you do; trust people who have done the same work and know exactly what you need.

Biggest Business Mistakes Over Good Customer Relationships

The foundation of any good business is strong customer relationships. Just as your company can’t run without strong software solutions for business or good products, it also can’t keep its doors open without customers. The impulse to strive for the highest profits at any cost can seem overwhelming at times. Thus, one of the biggest mistakes businesses can make is basing customer relationships on prices and profits.

Every relationship is built on a foundation, and that relationship will only stay healthy as long as your relationship is strong. Building customer relationships on mutual benefit — meaning good quality products for fair prices — and good customer service and accountability means your relationships will be sustained for years to come and your company will flourish. If you base those relationships on getting the highest price possible, that relationship will wither and your customers will build new ones elsewhere.

One of the best ways to make sure you maintain healthy customer relationships and provide great customer feedback is to have a reliable on site system and information service. By investing in good business software, you are also investing in healthy customer relationships and efficient business practices, ensuring your company a long and steady future. The ShopWorx software system helps you manage customer correspondence, update customers on their order from the time it is placed until it is delivered, and set and monitor industry prices to ensure yours are fair.

For more information on how you can provide great customer service and sustain healthy customer relationships, call ShopWorx today.

Awards Management Software

If you are looking for the perfect software solutions for business for your company, we recommend you start by finding the perfect on site software to help consolidate your files and help your business run more smoothly. OnSite software was created with several industries in mind, and one of those industries is the award business. Here are a few features that make OnSite 7 the best software for award companies.

• Our software gives you the option of selling kitted items, such as trophies that have interchangeable items and plaques, or individual items that are completely finished and personalized beforehand in your factory. By diversifying your products and keeping all of your information on orders and products in one easy, consolidated location, you automatically diversify your audience and broaden your customer base.

• One of the main goals of the software is to allow you more flexibility in tracking and monitoring orders. This means you can see jobs that are being processed based on the individual machine that is completing the job, the department that is working on it or other factors. With more options, the control is completely in your hands, and you can focus on streamlining your business and better pinpoint problem areas.

• Instead of having to send documents that go with an order separately through emails, ShopWorks allows you to attach them directly to work orders and other transactions, helping you keep all of your information together and stream line your business. By cutting down on paperwork and keeping everything together, less information is lost and fewer mistakes are made.

Choosing T-Shirt Shop Software

When you’re looking for software solutions for business, you have many choices to make. Each type of software for business management offers benefits that may or may not help you. You need software for your t-shirt shop that is the right price and which will fulfill all your needs. Therefore, you need to be very selective as to what packages you consider. Keep these t-shirt business tips in mind as you go:

1. Always consider your budget first. Don’t consider software packages that would cause the company financial distress. There are many different types of management software options out there. It’s likely that, with some looking, you can find a package that meets your needs which also fits your budget.

2. Make sure the employees are trained in the new t-shirt printing software. If you do not give employees full access to the software, or fully train them to use it, they are wasting company time. You have to be able to take full advantage of the software to streamline the production, management, and customer service processes inside of your organization.

3. Look at the ROI of the software. When you implement a new software and the training that comes with it, you invest time and money into it. You ideally want to start seeing a return on that investment within a year of its implementation. If a software you review does not have a good ROI, it might not be the best type to use.

4. Always consider partnering with a vendor to implement the software changes. This ensures that it is installed correctly, employees get trained correctly, and your company implements the software correctly.

Click to view our Screen Printing Tips.

How to Grow Your Business

In our last blog, we gave you several tips for easily expanding your business. If you’ve already invested in apparel software, you currently reward customer referrals and you are able to delegate efficiently, here are a few more tips that you may be interested in.

• Look for ways that you can expand into new markets. If you currently only market to customers in the US, try to expand to another country, such as China or the UK. If you already have an international client base, look for ways to reach a new segment of the population.

• Develop new products. For instance, if you sell custom short-sleeved t-shirts, it would be relatively easy to add long-sleeved t-shirts or polo’s to your product list.

• Automate as much of the business process as possible. This helps free up your time to focus on more important tasks and also ensures that things run consistently and smoothly. Machines aren’t subject to making the same silly errors that humans are, so they are often a better option for conducting repetitive business tasks.

Learn about Three Easy Ways to Grow an Apparel Business.

How Software Improves Business Efficiency

Among the many different aspects of your company that business software can improve is the overall efficiency. How it does this is actually very simple.

By eliminating the number of steps involved in getting simple and complex tasks completed and by removing links in the chain of people that need to see and approve documents at different steps in the work process, things get done more quickly and with fewer errors. Business software not only consolidates documents and information so your archives are smaller and in one place, but it also consolidates the processes through which your employees complete their work. Through consolidation, there is less room for error, and time is saved.

Once time is saved, you and your employees can either move on to another similar task, quickly, or begin tackling more complex tasks that would otherwise have been pushed to the back burner. In the end, your business runs more smoothly and efficiency is improved.

One of the options for purchasing and using ShopWorks software solutions for business is to host your Apparel ERP or print estimating software onsite. To do this, you must be able to support a large operating system in-house, meaning you need the IT staff to maintain it and the physical hardware to allow it to run.

Here are some of the basic hardware requirements necessary to support ShopWorks’ OnSite software:

1. Workstation Operating System Requirements: Your computers must have an upgraded operating system that can support ShopWorks. Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) are no longer supported. Operating systems that are supported include Windows 8.1, Windows 8.1 Pro, Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 7 Ultimate, Professional, and Home Premium, OS X Mavericks v10.9, OS X Mountain Lion v10.8 and OS X Lion v10.7. The system may also work with more current systems that are certified by FileMaker Inc.

2. Workstation Hardware Requirements: Windows machines must have CPU Intel Pentium 4 / AMD Athlon 64 or newer with at least one GB of RAM. Two GB is recommended. Mac machines must have CPU 64-bit Intel-based Mac with 2 GB of ram, while 4 GB are recommended.

3. Server Operating Systems: The requirements here are similar to the Workstation Operating System Requirements, and do not include OS X Lion. The software is supported on Windows 8 Pro, Windows Server 2012 Standard Edition, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, OS X Mavericks v10.9x, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mountain Lion Server v10.8.5.
4. Server Hardware Requirements: The minimum requirements are a dual core, 4 GB and 80 GB or more on a hard drive, with a minimum of 10 GB free space; a 4-core, 8 GB system is recommended.