Seventy percent of consumers say online search is their preferred method for finding information about local businesses, so it’s critical for small businesses to manage their online presence.

As consumers become more Internet savvy, it’s imperative that businesses take ownership of their Internet presence and manage it. Your company can show up in various places on the Internet without your knowledge through public records, directory listings, personal blogs, etc. No matter who put your company information out there, you should take it as an opportunity to increase awareness of your company.

The following are five steps you can take to increase awareness of your company.

1. Do an online search for your company.

Your first step is to understand where your company information is on the Internet and to take ownership of it. Search for your company name in any search engine. Be sure to search for common misspellings and possible abbreviations. Check listings for accuracy and completeness. Many sites, including Manta, encourage business owners to “claim” or “own” their business listings. Take advantage of that. You should always be in control of how your company is represented online.

2. Remember to NAP.

The most important information you put online can be abbreviated as NAP: Name, Address, Phone Number.

If you want to be found, you must have this information listed, and it must be consistent in every occurrence. That includes spelling, abbreviations, formatting, and phone numbers. Search engines look for clusters of reference information that are consistent.

When displaying your address, make sure paste it into a map website to make the correct address is displayed. This is what your customers will do and if mapping websites cannot locate your address, you will lose customers.

Although these tips may seem very elementary, they can make a big difference in optimizing search engine results.

3. Know your business’ vocabulary.

Search engines look for common words when matching websites up to searches. So understanding what words or terms your customers use when they talk about you or your product or service is a critical component of SEO. That’s because these are likely the words customers will enter into the search engine to find products and services.

There are several free online tools that will provide you with statistics on what words or terms people most often use when searching certain topics. For example, an animal hospital might offer day care services for pets. In order to understand what customers are searching for, you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to search “dance school”, for example, and find similar words and phrases and their frequency of use. In this case, you’d find that others may search for “dancing school” vs. “dance studio.”

Once you know what words and terms are common in your line of business, use them on your website, especially on your “About” page. Search engines will look for those terms and match them up to what people are searching for.

4. If you choose to invest in an SEO provider, shop around.

When selecting an SEO provider, you’ll find there are a lot of them, but not all offer the same services nor provide the same results. Look for an SEO expert who fits your business model (maybe with a focus on small businesses or consumer-focused businesses). Be sure you understand what services they will provide and what results you should expect. One key thing to understand is that you should not expect immediate results. SEO is a process that builds upon itself and can take time to show value. If someone promises you immediate results or guaranteed rankings, be concerned.

5. Look at your competition.

Look up your competition online. What are the results when you search their name? Their location? What words and terms are they using? Are they effective? Look them up on online directories. Are their profiles more comprehensive than yours? If you were a shopper and you came upon their profile and your profile, which looks more impressive? Why?

Take in all you learn from the competition and apply it NOW to your web strategy.

Lucky for Terilynne, she uses Jackrabbit.

Jackrabbit was designed to be flexible because co-founders Mark Mahoney and Mike Carper knew that their customer base included owners who would want to offer different and unique options – in the way they price and discount their classes, the way they offer and accept registrations or an endless list of other original ideas.

Terilynne prices her classes by the hour and reduces the rate as the number of hours per family increases. This gives multi-student families a significant price advantage.

Think of the older student who takes two classes a week with the younger sister who is just beginning her dance experience with one class a week. Or the advanced student who spends several days a week in classes. The hours add up quickly, but Terilynne doesn’t want to penalize those whose children are interested in dance and excited about learning.

“When you do the math, the per hour system is more generous to families than a straight multi-student discount on monthly class prices,” says Terilynne. “I love to see my students excel and offering their parents a way to watch this happen without breaking the bank keeps my conscience clear.”

With all of the reasons for doing this aside, Terilynne had to figure out how to do this in Jackrabbit. With the system’s flexibility, she felt like there was a way to make it happen.

After her first unsuccessful attempt to figure this out alone, Terilynne reached out to Jackrabbit’s support team with her special pricing needs.

“There are several ways we can help clients work with the system’s flexibility to do unusual things. As we approached Terilynne’s hourly pricing request, we realized that methods we had used with some other unique pricing requests just didn’t apply to her hourly pricing model. But now the challenge was on!” comments Customer Support Manager, Jorine Jones.

“After working with Terilynne on a couple of options, the breakthrough finally came and now Terilynne has a method for calculating and billing her customers with her tiered hourly pricing structure that works beautifully,” Jones explains. “We’re always thrilled to find solutions for our customers’ unique requests and to see that our system allows them to get creative in setting themselves apart from their competitors.”

QuickBooks supplies you with a wide variety of pre-formatted reports whose modification options can help you do focused, critical analysis of your financial data. The right set of numbers will help you understand your history and plan for the future more effectively.

Note: The reports discussed and pictured here shows only one possible set of customization options. There are many variations.

Check your preferences

When you created your company file in QuickBooks, you chose between reporting on a cash (income and expenses are recorded when money changes hands) or accrual (recorded when you invoice or receive a bill) basis. This affects summary reports, but not those that break out individual transactions or are simply lists.

If you want to change this, click Edit | Preferences | Reports & Graphs | Company Preferences and click the desired button:

Figure 1: You can establish a preference for your summary reports’ basis here. 

You can set other preferences in this window that will affect your report output here, too, as you can see.

Altering the display

Open the Income by Customer Summary report (Reports | Company & Financial). Change the dates to reflect a range you’d like to see. Want the data displayed by different time increments — like week or quarter — instead of just the total? Click the arrow next to Columns and select Four week.

Figure 2: You can do some report display alterations from this toolbar; the options it offers vary by report.

By default, your report rows display alphabetically. If you want to view a column by total in ascending or descending order, select the column by hovering over the top number until the magnifying glass appears, and click on it. Click the arrow next to Sort by and choose Total, then click the AZ [down arrow] icon (in some reports, there will be other options here).

Additional options in this toolbar let you:

• Memorize the report
• Print, email or export      it to Excel
• Hide or Show the Header
• Collapse or Expand      the columns
• Refresh the report if you’ve made changes that will alter data

More display options

Click Customize Report to open this window:

Figure 3: This window outlines your report’s content options.

Some of the options here duplicate what you saw in the toolbar. In addition, you can switch between Accrual and Cash for just this report, and add subcolumns in some. The latter is a complicated operation, one that you must understand well in order to glean any insight from it. We can help you with this.

Sometimes the subcolumns are generic, as shown in the screen above. In other reports, they’re very specific to that group of data.

Clicking on Revert takes you back to the default format, and Advanced opens additional options specific to the current report.

More customization = more insightful results = more informed financial choices

Transaction reports have many similarities and two major differences: You can change the column order by hovering your cursor over the column label until a hand appears. Click, hold and drag the column to the desired spot and let go. You can also add or delete columns by clicking Customize Report and checking or unchecking labels.

Figure 4: In transaction — or detail – reports, you can alter the column structure.

Learn the mechanics of report display modification well, and your company’s finances will come into much sharper focus, improving the wisdom of future choices.

If you have questions on this or any other QuickBooks feature, call or email us. We’re your partner and we’re here to make your business better.

This information provided by Sean Dever CPA. Sean provides personal service and expertise at affordable rates for business owners, executives and independent professionals.

The following are 25 words/phrases on the best practices lists as some of those that should NOT be used in the Email Subject Line. Using any of these words or combinations of them may cause your Email to be blocked, filtered or marked as spam. In addition to these words, you should never use punctuation (especially $$ and !!), all capital letters, numerals or gaps between letters in the Subject Line text.

act now

amazing

apply now

avoid

call now

dear friend

discount

don’t delete

double

for you

free

hello

information you requested

instant

limited time

notspam

now only

offer

open

opportunity

promised you

stop or stops

teen

undisclosed recipient

winner

February 17-18 – U.S. Swim School Association Spring Workshop in Houston, TX

March 14-16 – Jackrabbit East User Conference in Charlotte, NC

May 6 -9 – 3^rd Level Consulting’s BrainTrust in Las Vegas, NV

May 17-21 – Jeff Metzger’s Small Business Boot Camp in Cincinnati, OH

June 22-23 – JAM U in Louisville, KY

June 29-July 1 – USA National Gymnastics Congress in San Jose, CA

July 1-3 – Martial Arts SuperShow in Las Vegas, NV

July 27-29 – Dance Teacher Summit in New York, NY

September 22-23 – United Dance Merchants of America in Long Beach, CA

October 6-7 – United Dance Merchants of America in Atlanta, GA

October 10-12 – U.S. Swim School Association Annual Conference in Waikiki, HI

October 13-14 – United Dance Merchants of America in Chicago, IL

October 20-21 – United Dance Merchants of America in Secaucus, NJ

October 24-26 – Jackrabbit West User Conference in Las Vegas, NV

Jackrabbit Technologies, leading provider of web-based solutions for youth sports & activities centers, was recently recognized as the 15^th fastest growing among companies owned or operated by University of Georgia alumni in The 2012 Bulldog 100: Fastest Growing Bulldog Businesses. The Bulldog 100 honored entrepreneurial alumni in the third annual event hosted by theUniversity ofGeorgia Alumni Association. The rankings are based on a compounded annual growth rate of revenues for the past three years. This is the consecutive year that Jackrabbit has been ranked in the list, illustrating the company’s commitment to growth, innovation and culture.

“I’m very proud of this award as one of the founders of Jackrabbit and as a University of Georgia graduate. The diversity of our businesses and the success of our group of honorees is quite impressive and it is an honor to be part of the celebration,” said Mark Mahoney, Jackrabbit’s President and CoFounder. “Entrepreneurs play a vital role in our business ecosystem and I’m proud to see that fellow Bulldogs are as committed to their dreams as our team has been in founding and growing Jackrabbit.”

Mahoney, class of ‘83, was presented with an award at the Bulldog 100 celebration held January 21^st at the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta.

The 2012 honorees were treated to a keynote by Deborah Norville, UGA Class of ’79, Anchor of Inside Edition. Ms. Norville shared her journalistic experiences as well as her entrepreneurial exploits in recently launching her own line of knitting yarns with almost 700 who were in attendance.

“I want to congratulate Jackrabbit Technologies. Being among the top 100 Bulldog-run businesses in the country is a great honor. With hundreds of nominations from across theU.S., it is truly an achievement to make the list,” said UGA Alumni Association Executive Director Deborah Dietzler.

Information about the program, including a complete list of the Bulldog 100 Class of 2012, is available on the UGA Alumni Association website: www.uga.edu/alumni/bulldog100.  Nominations open for the 2013 Bulldog 100 at the end of January.

“By implementing first through Jackrabbit’s free trial, we were able to understand the system’s basics before we made the final decision to change and to migrate all of our data to a new system. It was really beneficial and gave us tremendous confidence as we made our decision to change and began our complete system change,” comments Sean.

In addition to using the free trial process, Sean’s staff used Jackrabbit’s online training videos to become familiar with specific aspects of the system. This validated their decision to switch to Jackrabbit and gave them a head start so they could hit the ground running as their data migration to Jackrabbit was completed.

After implementing Jackrabbit, the Cheer Force One staff has realized efficiencies that are incredible to them. Using their previous software, it would take at least 15 minutes just to figure what was going on with a customer account. With Jackrabbit, each account’s key indicators are obvious at a glance.

Cheer Force One has also received overwhelming response from parents. They are thrilled with the portal because it gives them complete account access online. Cheer Force One offers automatic payment features that gives them worry-free, automated options.

Sean adds, “Automated online processes have been game changers from our parents’ perspective.”

Read the Cheer Force One case study.

Tax Receipts:

To send Tax Receipts to families that show a summary of all classes paid for and the tax paid on these classes, you must use the Statements function.  Within Statements, there is Search Criteria that determines what transactions will show on the statement. These statements can be emailed or printed.

For example: If you want to show all payments that a family has made in a year, you would set the Transaction Date as Jan 1 2011 – Dec 31 2011. Transaction Type= Payments. Show Paid Only =yes.  Additionally, Show Transaction notes=yes.

This will produce a statement of all PAYMENTS and the Tax portion will be totaled in the Tax column.  You can also change the Statement Header to state “2011 Year End Tax Receipt” so that clients are aware of the purpose of the document.  The Statement Footer can also describe the transactions selected.  These areas are changed on the Statements screen. 

Save a Tax Template for Next year!

We have added an exciting new feature to “Statements-Print” and “Statements-Email” called “Templates”. Templates saves you time by remembering your search criteria and field settings for you. A template can be “Public” and shared with others or “Private” and only visible under your User ID. We have provided a sample template called “2011 Year-End Statement” as an example. There are 2 new buttons in the upper-right corner highlighted in yellow. Select “Templates” to view and select an existing Template, and choose “Save” to create a new or update an existing template. Click the “?” Help Icon for more information.

Reports including Tax:

Jackrabbit’s Paid Fees Summary Report is an excellent revenue report that will give you a total of all Tax Received.  The benefit of this report is that it will break down all your revenue by your Category 1 values and also isolate the Tax by these Category 1 values.  This allows you to break down totals if necessary.

Keep your search criteria simple for this report.  If you start by running it with a Date Paid of 1-1-2011 until 12-31-2011, this will provide you the overall revenue totals by Category for your organization.  The Tax Column is displayed next to the revenue totals.

As with anything in Jackrabbit if you have questions or concerns regarding how to run these statements and reports, contact Support!  Support is happy to answer your questions and address your concerns.

Those resolutions are fine for most people, but as Jackrabbit users, you are special so we would like to suggest a few resolutions that pertain to Jackrabbit that you can add to to your own list from New Year’s Eve.

You may want to consider:

1. Moving inactives to the Unlimited Lead File

2. Trying out new features with Test Families or Test Students

3. Implementing or Enhancing Online Registration

4. Using Reports to Better Understand Enrollment and Attendance

5. Double-checking your User ID settings to ensure that sensitive data remains confidential

The World’s 10 Most Popular Resolutions for 2012 were:

1. Lose Weight

2. Spend more time with friends and family

3. Stop smoking

4. Quit drinking

5. Minimize stress

6. Save money

7. Get more sleep

8. Get involved  in community service work

9. Return to church

10. Travel the world

Jackrabbit’s support staff can help you with your Jackrabbit-related resolutions! If you do not understand how to go about using Jackrabbit to reach your 2012 business goals, please contact Jackrabbit.