Business policies are sets of principles that define how a business is run. This dialogue is context sensitive and its content is dependent on what you are doing.
Location: Various
Overview
There are essentially five classes of policy: Your Preferences, Policy, Business Network, Businesses and Start Financial Systems.
Your Preferences: These are the settings that are specific to you, and their values are your choice. They are settings that allow you say how Business Administrator works for you.
Among these setting, you can also define how you want Business Administrator write to people. In particular, you can set you valediction, load your a picture of you signature into Business Administrator, and so on.
Business policy: These are a set of settings that allow you to define what happens on Business Administrator and the way it works, and it forms policy business-wide. It is here that you can set grace periods for contact deletion.
You can define what ‘old’ means in terms of customers, suppliers and projects, which is important because you cannot delete these items: but you can stop them from appearing on lists.
You can set the default values for quotation headers and footers if your business provides quotations for work.
You can tell Business Administrator what you call your customers. Business Administrator largely thinks in terms of ‘customers’, but you might prefer it if Business Administrator called the ‘clients’, for example.
And there’s a variety of financial settings and system protection settings.
Business Network: Being part of the Business Administrator Network is an excellent way to find new trade and to socialise. To achieve this, your contact details can be exposed to the network membership only or we can expose it over our websites, thus, perhaps, attracting more trade for you. Note that we have no control of your information if it is broadcast over the website.
The description you provide should include a brief, hard-hitting paragraph about your business and the type of business you can offer, or are looking for. Further paragraphs should provide more detail.
You can allow any member, or surfer if you expose it to the Internet, to view your contact details freely, which may be beneficial. However, we suggest you grow to that, else you may be bombarded with contacts who want to sell to you. If you don't allow them to view freely, it would mean they would have to ask your permission first – in other words, they would have to pitch to you electronically in a way that keeps you contact details safe.
You can also allow other members of staff to expose their contact details to the network, which may be beneficial if you have different people focusing on different areas of your business.
Businesses: when defining a business, it’s important to be able to make statements about it, not least its name. But you can also say how your business came to be, what type of business it is and register statements about it, such as its company number, VAT registration number and so forth.
For multiple employee business, you can also start to develop the hierarchy of staff in the business: this is important because Business Administrator understands employee hierarchy and uses it a lot.
You can also state your favourite suppliers for a variety of services. When you’ve made this setting, Business Administrator will automatically assume that these are the suppliers you want to use, and won’t keep asking you every time it needs to know.
Start Financial Systems:
Quite often, when people first start Business Administrator, the financial systems will not be working. And it’s important that they don’t start until the business is ready for its finances to be managed by Business Administrator.
The critical issue of starting the financial systems is the timing, which you must think about carefully. If you choose the wrong time, then you are likely to get a mis-alignment of business information, as well as warping of reporting processes. Issues to consider include tax return time cycle, your changing economics, your readiness to use an electronic management system and your financial clock
If the time to start the financial systems is favourable, then start the financial systems. Click through the warnings as you see fit, complete the resulting dialogue and complete Business Administrators requests. The financial systems should start, and Finance Manager should appear on the Managers bar.
Finance Manager won't report anything at first – it has no data to report. In fact, it won't report much until you've been trading with Business Administrator for at least a month.