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To better serve the Hispanic community in the US and Latin America, inFlow have launched a Spanish language version of its inventory management software and website. You can now learn about inFlow “en espanol” by visiting http://www.inflowinventory.com/ES

The new, user friendly web site provides visitors the opportunity to learn about inFlow and download our software in Spanish. By translating the software and launching a Spanish website we hope to extend our commitment to better serve the Latino community.

Providing free, easy to use inventory management software to Spanish speaking businesses has been one of our objectives for some time. Requests from the Latino Community (in the US and Latin America) for a Spanish language solution have been coming thick and fast ever since we launched.

Talih Safadi, owner of Global Negocios 2008 recently downloaded inFlow and typifies our growing Latin American customer base. Determined to optimize his business, work smarter and serve his customers better he found inFlow just what he was looking for.

“inFlow is perfect for my sports apparel distribution and retail business. I found it incredibly easy to use and implementing it was a breeze. My business in Venezuela has definitely benefited since we installed the software. In fact, I’m so impressed I just installed inFlow at my company in Ecuador too”

Download a version of inFlow in Spanish HERE

As many of our customers in Canada will already be acutely aware the Canadian Government has approved a change in the manner that businesses in British Columbia and Ontario tax their customers and if you’re buying or selling to individuals in these provinces you may be affected.

You may have heard of the coming “Harmonized Tax” which is also already in effect in other parts of the country. It is essentially a combination of the provincial tax which taxes the total of your principal sale. Although the HST comes into effect on July 1, 2010 in both British Columbia and Ontario, it is important to consider changes you will need to make now, especially if you’re business tends to pre-sell to its customers (for example a painter who is pre-booking services to occur after the July 1st deadline).

What sales tax you pay on an order is determined by where your customer is and not where your business is located. Please visit the Canadian Government website for further (and more specific) information regarding how to change your taxation on sales orders etc. at this address: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/gncy/hrmnztn/pblctns-eng.html#transitionalrules

As to a basic overview of the tax changes, sales or services sold between May 1 and July 1, 2010 will need to be reported to the government by the business doing the selling (when completing taxes) however whether your customer is charged according to the new or old tax scheme depends on a few factors.

Generally speaking, services and payments rendered before July 1st are subject to the previous taxing scheme while services rendered and paid for after the deadline should be charged according to the new scheme.

If you are having trouble determining whether your customer should be charged HST you might try using the chart below. In addition (and as mentioned above) please visit the Government website for more information and to assess your business.

Canada Revenue Agency. GI-056 Ontario and Britiansition to the Harmonized Sales Tax-Services. Canada Revenue Agency Website. http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/gi/gi-…. Published January, 2010. Accessed May 12, 2010.

Now that you have an understanding of the changes in the taxing system the easiest way to make changes to your inFlow setup is to enter an additional taxing scheme via the Company settings in the Main Menu.

1. Click Main Menu > Settings > General Settings
2. Select the “Pricing & Tax” window and click the “Edit Taxing Schemes” window.
3. The Taxing Schemes Window will pop up, allowing you to create a new taxing scheme

4. To enter the new tax simple type in the fields provided. In the case of HST in Ontario you would enter your information as follows:

As you can see from the example above, the previous taxing scheme had 5% GST and 8% PST. The two taxes were charged together however listed separately as some products (for instance many services) were not charged PST.

With the new HST taxing scheme, we find that there is only a primary tax listed and since there is no information in the secondary tax column, inFlow will not show a secondary tax (as evident from the example at right).

You can make the sales process easier by setting your default taxing scheme to whichever scheme you find you’re using most often (i.e. if you do a lot of presales you may want to switch your default now instead of waiting until July 1).

One final item to keep in mind: product tax information will override your company defaults so be sure to pay extra attention to your product settings and visit the revenue Canada for a comprehensive overview of how this change will effect your business.

I bet you’ve heard of websites done in HTML or Flash.  But how about one made in YouTube?  Yes, YouTube, the video site.

Words can’t do this clever company’s website justice - go ahead and take a look: http://booneoakley.com


Brilliant, isn’t it?


Now, imagine you’ve never seen this site before.  Your company’s web developer suggests to you, “Why don’t we do our website in YouTube?”  What would your reaction be?

My guess is somewhere between “Interesting…” and “Are you nuts?!”.  Most people would come up with a list of reasonable-sounding arguments for sticking with the old ways.  And we wouldn’t be talking about them.


It’s easy to say you encourage creativity in your company, but it takes a leap of faith to actually go ahead with it.

A lot of small business owners might not give much thought to branding. It seems like an abstract concept that’s only applicable to widely distributed products backed by big marketing budgets from large corporations. But if you want to grow your business over the long term, then you should start seeding your brand into your customers’ minds even when you are still small.

Where should you start? Before we explore ways to build your brand, let’s start by looking at the question, “what is a brand, anyway?”

From Wikipedia, “A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service.” This might be a really good textbook answer, but chances are you won’t remember it in a week.

In essence, a brand is the images and ideas that people remember you by. The images are visual, like your logo, color scheme, mascot, etc. For example, you might remember Nike’s “swoosh” logo. For Fedex, you might remember the purple/orange/white color scheme. The ideas can be as simple as a single word. What do you think when you hear Wal-mart? Cheap! How about a Volvo car? Safety!

If you are able to get those images and ideas into your customers’ heads, everytime they see the images or think about those ideas, they will automatically think about your company and your products. Next time, we’ll look at some general guidelines on building your brand.

A common question asked by business owners is “how can other people find my website?”  After all, even if you have the best website in the world, if no one knows about it, your business doesn’t benefit.

One common way is to hope people find you through Google or other search engines.  But say, if your company sells cheese, how many results will turn up if they search for a “cheese company”?  Hundreds of thousands.  Chances are your company won’t even show up on the first few pages, unless you do some search engine optimization (SEO) on your website.

SEO is a big field that requires a lot of knowledge in both the web technologies and how search engines work.  If you want to learn more about SEO, there are plenty of tutorials out there.  But as a starter, if you just want someone to take a quick look at your website and tell you what you should change, you can take a look at WebSite Grader.

Website Grader is a free online tool for SEO beginners that tells you how effective your website is, and how you could change it to get a higher Google ranking.

It’s free, so give it a try.  What’s your grade?

You’ve probably heard of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia and the 8th most popular site on the internet.  The main idea behind it is that anybody can contribute knowledge by adding a new article or editing an existing one.  This idea has allowed Wikipedia to grow enormously quickly, with broader content and faster updates than traditional encyclopedias.

Have you ever thought of setting up a mini-Wikipedia within your company?  This is a great way to organize all sorts of information.  You can share it with other people, especially newcomers, and anybody can update it, so it’s easier to keep complete and accurate.  No more digging up old emails to find information that might be obsolete.

With an internal mini-Wikipedia, you can collaborate and keep information on almost anything:
- A checklist for the order-taking process
- Ideas for new products to carry
- A list of advertising opportunities
- Your quality inspection guidelines when receiving products
- A list of employee expenses to be reimbursed by the company
- A selection of customer testimonials for marketing purposes
- Phone numbers and email addresses for everyone within your company

Here are two websites that allow you to do this for free, while controlling who has access to the information:
- PBwiki
- Google Sites

Try it out, and enjoy improved information sharing within your company!

Compare these two sentences:

“In the author’s opinion, it is in most peoples’ best interests when excessive verbiage is avoided by people who are engaged in the act of writing.”

“Don’t fluff up your writing.”

They say the same thing, but the second one is much more direct and memorable.

Whether you’re writing website content, instructions, or an important email - every word costs your readers time and energy.  If it doesn’t pay off quickly, you will quickly lose their attention and potential business.

Pack a lot of content into a few words.

If you’re not convinced, here are some illuminating resources:
- Mark Twain said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
- Google cuts words mercilessly.
- If you add 100 words to your website, people will read less than 20 of them.
- A book On Writing Well

Most small businesses these days have a website up to share information and attract new customers.  If you don’t, you might want to consider getting one designed.

If you already have one, have you ever wondered what kind of people are visiting it?  Where are they from?  What do they click?  How did they get there?  How many come back?  Answering these questions helps you understand how people interact with your website, so you can improve on weak points and promote your selling points better.  Luckily, there are free tools online that can help you track how people use your website.

Google Analytics gives you detailed information on how your users browse your site.  It can tell you what time of the day you get the most traffic, which countries the users from, which page is the most viewed, etc.  The nice thing about it is that the graphs are all interactive, allowing you to drill down to find the exact information you want.

Quantcast shows you the demographics of your users.  Information like the age group, average household income, the gender percentage, etc.  How could you target your marketing message better if you found out that most of your visitors were women over 50?

Using these tools is very easy if you already have a website.  Simply sign-up for a free account, and follow their instructions to attach a small piece of HTML code on your website.  You might be surprised by how your website is being used.  We know we were when we saw Malaysia in the top 10 countries visiting us.  Time to go international, anyone?