Here are a few articles about office operations in a business that you might enjoy.

Selecting a good copy/printer for office use

One of the most overlooked areas in managing expenses is the costs associated with your copier. Chances are you went through a simple price comparison and then went with the low bid.

Let me suggest a more detailed method of selecting the right copier or copiers for your business, a method that will work to analyze your existing copier arrangements as well.

Deciding which paper to buy for your copier or printer

How do you decide what kind of paper to use in your copier or printer?

The machine’s manufacturer has some great suggestions. Somewhere in your user manual the manufacturer has spelled out what kinds of paper will work in his machine.

The paper’s weight range is given. Most ordinary copy paper is 20 pound. High quality stationary might be 24 pound. If the paper is too heavy or too light it will not feed properly or it may jam the copier / printer.

How to organize your office efficiently

An office is not just a place to work. It is an example of how you work. Organizing your office efficiently will speed up your work process. It will ensure that priorities are easily seen and actionable. The act of organization will reinforce organized thinking habits that will aid problem solving.

Start with a blank slate, an empty room. What furniture do you need in the office to perform the day to day tasks of your job? As you decide on each piece of furniture to place in your office, evaluate how it adds to your ability to work.

Advice for setting up an office filing system

Your office filing system is dependent upon two key issues. The first is that there are papers that you and your employees will need to access on an hourly or daily basis. The second is that there are papers that you will need to retain for a period of time, for legal or tax purposes.

One of the keys to office efficiency is to limit the handling of any given piece of paper. Invoices to your business that will need to be paid should go to your accounts payable person, or to the spot you have designated for accounts payable. The same holds true for all of the paperwork that comes in or is produced in the office. Put it where it belongs.

Paperwork organization tips

Organizing paperwork is a major factor in managing your job, your household or your business.

Above all is rule number one: Handle a piece of paper once. In real life that means handle paperwork as few times as possible. Don’t spend your time managing stacks of paper; do something with them.

Set aside some time every day to organize paperwork. Open the mail, look at the memos, take those pieces of paper into your hands. Then, take action.

Advantages of going paperless

For three thousand years people have been writing information down and then filing it. From clay tablets to papyrus to linen to paper made from wood, people have been producing, using and storing information in hard copy form.

The modern business runs on paper. Time cards record employee working hours. Copiers churn out reams of printed material for distribution, comment and filing. Accountants print spreadsheets and balance sheets and worksheets.

There are several approaches to doing business in modern America. You can find examples pro and con for each, and your specific needs should be the determining factor.

I’m talking money.

As a business, you can leverage yourself to the hilt. You can refuse to incur debt. Or any degree of financing in between these extremes.

In order to function in business, though, you will need banking and financial relationships, even if you choose not to incur debt. You will be surprised at how much money you can save for the bottom line by astute use of these relationships.

Banks have this whole bi-polar thing going on with their approaches to business. The longer that you deal with banks, the more you will come to recognize this fact. Banks want your business except when they don’t want your business. It’s some sort of cyclical thing governed by the orbit of Ceres or something. I cannot explain it any other way.

On any given day, any given bank whether large or small may be receptive to doing business with you. This is no guarantee that in weeks, months or years that policy won’t change. Banks have a lot of ways to make money that do not involve doing business with you. You, on the other hand, have to have a bank if for no other reason than as a place to keep your cash.

A bank that wants your business may agree to just about anything. No fee checking. Lines of credit that are not asset based. Term loans at or below prime. Everything that a bank does for you and all the charges that they may normally charge are negotiable.

The beauty of America today is that your bank does not have to be down the street. It can be in another city or another state. Your bank may have offices worldwide or just one office in a small town in Idaho. The Internet, telephone, fax and the Federal Reserve system make this possible.

Here’s a short list of things to negotiate with your bank right up front.

• Float. Your bank controls how long it takes for deposits to be credited to your account. There are banks that will give you immediate credit, or next day credit. You don’t have to settle for 2-3 days or longer.
• Fees. Your bank has a list of fees that are all negotiable. A fee for each check that is deposited? A fee for each check you write that clears? Nope and nope. In fact, the only fee I accept these days is the NSF check fee, because I’m going to collect that plus my charge from the guy that wrote the bad check.
• Compensating balance. You can always get a lower one or even do without. Put up a fight and see how low you can go.
• Web access. A must. Most banks have it. It should be free of charge. It should also allow statement downloads that will make your bank account reconciliations much easier. You can do your own stop payments on line, obtain check copies and transfer funds between accounts. Ask to see their product demo. If it sucks, think about another bank.
• Interest. You should get a reward for a cash balance.
• Hours. Your bank can be open whatever hours it chooses. There’s no law about “banker’s hours”. Look for one open late, into the evenings at least one day a week and open on Saturdays.

I’ll address credit issues in the next post. For now, remember that your costs to have a banking relationship can be minimal, even zero, if you shop around. You’re the customer. If they don’t want you, another bank will.

You can’t run a business without people. It’s sounds simple but way too many business owners and business services employees forget this maxim.

Because, your customers are people. Your co-workers are people. Your bosses and your subordinates are people. Your vendors are people.

Cripes, you say. Not another whiny paean to the Sixties theories of peace and love and togetherness. Nope. It’s not like that.

You see, to be successful in business, you just have to work with people. You don’t have to party with them, or golf with them, or even like them. You just have to work with them, be productive, and allow them to be productive.

Don’t hire a salesman to be your accountant. With the very rare exception, he won’t do his best work there. Conversely, please do not expect a person with clearly limited social skills to be your company’s representative. Different positions in the business require differing personalities and finding the right personality for each position is important

You don’t have to like the guy to hire him.

Far too many managers make hiring decisions based on their reaction to the personality of the candidate. You will almost never be presented with two equally skilled and knowledgeable candidates. The candidate with the best skills and knowledge is the right candidate for the position. It doesn’t matter if he plays golf, too, or knows every movie made in the last thirty years unless those skills and that knowledge is required for the position.

A business is not a family. It is not a sorority or a tribe or a community. A business exists solely to make money for you and everyone else related to the business. Including your customers and your vendors, by the way.

There are a host of business gurus who will take every dollar that you or your employer is willing to fork over to tell you and your fellow business people how to act, how to work, and how to feel. Their business makes money. They make money off of you.

No guru can change the culture of a business. Time spent with such gurus is lost forever. The only way a business culture changes is with the recognition that everyone involved is different. Everyone involved does not have to like the same things, think the same way, behave in the same manner. A company full of clones has a greater chance of failing than of succeeding.

It’s a simple concept. Do your job well. Earn respect from those you work with. Don’t be them and don’t expect them to be you.

Titles are a dime a dozen in business. All your title really is, is a bit of ink on a card. I do not care if you are the president of the company or the most junior stockroom employee. The respect you receive from those you work with is earned. It doesn’t come with the title.

People who work in business services, the back end of the company, aren’t normally seen as providing value to the company. I’ve been in hundreds of offices. The furniture is usually old, the computers last generation, and the lighting dismal. We “get no respect”.

Think about it for a moment. The people in accounting, in human resources, in all of the business services areas deal with customers, vendors and employees. On a daily basis they have more contact with the PEOPLE who make the business possible than do salespeople, managers, production line workers. By treating business services as an appendage of the business, management fails in its first obligation. Management is obligated to do its best to make money. You make money when the people involved with the business are working well and doing their jobs. When business services people are working well and doing their jobs the customers are happy, the vendors are happy and the employees are happy. Perhaps that suggests the necessity to invest more in the back office.

So, here are some short lessons about people:

• We don’t all “just have to get along”.
• Respect is earned. It isn’t issued with your business card.
• Golf is a game. Business is business.
• Hire for skills and knowledge. Smiles and short skirts aren’t worth a dime.
• Salesmen don’t make good accountants. Accountants make lousy salesmen.

Having spent nearly thirty years working in and supervising business offices, I’m beginning a series of posts about the business office. Do’s, don’ts, buying tips, money saving tips, and general information that I’ve learned over the last three decades.

What sort of background enables me to write this series? I began as accounts payable coordinator at Elmira College in 1981. I moved to become business manager of the auxiliary services corporation at Alfred State College in 1985. In 1996 I became business manager for Bishop Kearney High School and in 2001 I was hired as controller for GLC Business Services. GLC provides outsourced back office services, primarily for law firms. I have a BS degree in management from St. John Fisher College. For 18 months I served as President and Captain of my local ambulance corps.

So, I’ve been around the block.

Nothing I write is set in stone. One of the primary points that I would like you to consider is that things change. What may have been good practice in 1984 is lousy practice today. Some of my tips will be outdated or plain wrong in another decade. You must be able to adapt the operation of our business office to changes, and borrow [read that as steal] best practices as you find them. Never stop searching because you will never run out of fresh ideas to consider.

Whether you are the only person in the office, or the office has a hundred employees, certain things will always be important. You will want the job to be interesting and important to those working there. You will want to save money in an area commonly seen as not being a revenue generating part of the company. And you will want your office to be the best, customer friendly, timely, accurate and helpful. The business services area of any company cannot exist without all the other branches of the company and in return the company cannot exist without business services.

At the top of this post, and all other posts in the series will be the category Business Services. Click on that link and you will have the entire set of posts. Please feel free to comment, correct or suggest by using the comment link at the bottom of the post.