Core motivations – profit and fun
There are two things we ask of our entire team to reach for within our organisation. To generate profit and have fun. Profits provide the resources to achieve our vision of supporting millions of small businesses. From sustainable profits we...
AccountingWeb discussion group
This is one for all you accountants using Clear Books because today AccountingWeb launched the Clear Books discussion group. We're building Clear Books to be the cloud accounting software of choice for UK accountants so we're really pleased that this...
Raspberry Pi, no female developers, why?
At the BASDA Software Thought Leaders’ Summit May 2013, I had the pleasure of watching a presentation by University of Cambridge lecturer and founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Robert Mullins. The catalyst for Robert setting up the Raspberry Pi...
Tim Fouracre elected to BASDA General Council
Clear Books Limited, the authors of cloud accounting software Clear Books, cloud payroll software Open Payroll and cloud HR software Staff Room, today announced that its Managing Director, Tim Fouracre, has been elected to the General Council of BASDA (Business...
Clear Books is ICAEW accredited accounting software
Clear Books is pleased to announce that we have received the stamp of approval from The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Clear Books is officially ICAEW accredited accounting software. The ICAEW's accreditation process involved a rigorous independent...
A single European VAT rate to solve impending chaos of software for 28 VAT regimes
At the BASDA Software Thought Leaders’ Summit May 2013 Tarlochan Lall, a Barrister from the Monckton Chambers and a member of The VAT Expert Group, provided an insight into upcoming VAT changes. If you sell goods to other European businesses...
The 7 roles of a team leader
The 7 roles of a team leader in an inter-webbed organisation are: Foster autonomous problem solving Encourage a ship often and iterate quickly attitude Inspire and innovate Coordinate rapid team decision making Align team goals and objectives Organise resources and...
Electing leaders rather than appointing them
An inter-webbed organisation still requires leadership. Given that in most walks of life we elect leaders with a democratic vote it is odd that in the business world we do the opposite. A select few, usually with a self interest...
An inter-webbed organisational structure
I am not a fan of a chain of command, line managers or bosses. All these words have connotations of self importance. As a company of 20 employees perhaps this is a minor consideration given the size of our team,...
Employee and employer salary and tax table
For the tax year 2013/2014 this spreadsheet provides some interesting statistics for employees and employers. Employee Salary Table (PAYE, NIC Employees, NIC Employers) For employees you can find out what your take home pay is based on your annual salary...
Being a parent and running a business – week one
Last Monday I took the first steps to joining an inspiring group of people in the UK who are both raising a family and running their own business. I am a week and a day into being a dad! Charles...
The key skills managers really want from their staff
Autonomous problem solving. An employee who raises a problem, issue or topic for debate is more valuable than someone who shies away or ignores a problem. This first step is to be commended. However, there is a second step that...
Musical chairs in the office
Including full time staff and contractors we have 21 people in our office. The table and seating layout is probably similar to the majority of small businesses in the UK, it's very departmentalised. We have a group of desks where...
Being the best versus making your customers the best
Clear Books has just been through the process of choosing software to project manage our development work better. It highlighted a really powerful marketing message. We did not seek the best project management software. We wanted the project management software...
2 important metrics to benchmark support
To begin with there was only one metric we thought the support team at Clear Books needed to track: customer happiness. If our customers are happy then that's all that matters, right? It means our support team are doing a...
How Clear Books thanks key customers for loyalty
Accountants are a key customer for Clear Books. If we successfully build a relationship and partner with an accounting practice they may sign up hundreds of their clients to our cloud accounting software. One of our initiatives with these key...
Lessons learned from spending £100,000 on Google Adwords
Clear Books has spent more than £100,000 on Google Adwords. It has been our biggest marketing expense. When we first started spending on pay per click advertising Clear Books was one of a handful of new online accounting software...
Customer happiness is a box of chocolates
Occasionally we fail in our mission to champion small businesses and a customer gets frustrated. At Clear Books when a customer has a bad experience we don't want them to dwell on that. We want to get them back on...
A curveball question to put a candidate on the spot
No calculator, pen or paper permitted. What is 49 squared? This is the question I ask interviewees at Clear Books. I particularly like this question because someone asked me the same question in an interview when I was at...
9 books every entrepreneur should read about leadership, teams, marketing and strategy
These books are sitting on the bookshelf either in the Clear Books office or at home. They are all well worth reading, covering topics on leadership, team building, strategy and marketing. Gung Ho, Ken Blanchard The One Minute Manager, Ken...
The brand building dilemma of multiple products
We want Clear Books to be known as brilliant cloud accounting software. So what happens to your brand when you launch a new product such as payroll software? Can a brand be two things? This is a tricky decision to...
Is a lack of focus killing my business?
There is an irony with me writing about focus - the jury is out as to whether Clear Books is focused or not. Cloud accounting software is our primary revenue generator at Clear Books. That should be our focus. But...
It took four years to write our mission statement
Our mission statement at Clear Books is to champion small businesses. It's incredible how much time went into distilling what we do into that one sentence. A lot of time would have been saved if, rather than trying to be...
Clear Books reprices Companies House reports to £0.95
Download reports from Companies House for just £0.95. That's cheaper than Companies House. For some time it has been possible to download reports from Companies House within Clear Books for £2.00. When we looked at the numbers it became evident...
14 books every budding entrepreneur should read about successful entrepreneurs
My wife enjoys reading 'normal books' on holiday. I like to read books about business. Does that sound familiar? I have only four and a half years experience running my startup, marketing to prospects and leading a team so I...
The pros and cons of working with your family
My second hire at Clear Books was my brother, John, who is our most experienced support agent. My fifth employee was my sister, Lizzie, who heads up our marketing team. The biggest advantage of having siblings work for you is...
One easy exercise to get your website to the top of Google
Google is an important source of potential customers for your business, so here's a quick SEO tip to help improve how your website performs in search results. Not sure what SEO means? Read this introductory article: New customers are not...
5 minutes every morning that will transform your team’s communication
I like to get on with things rather than talk about them so I've never been a fan of planning or meetings. That all changed with the "stand up". It’s a meeting format that is really quick, productive and is brilliant for...
New customers are not finding your website. Learn the basics about SEO and win more customers
Clear Books would not have the thousands of business customers that we do if we had not put in the groundwork with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Sure, your website can be useful to existing customers. However, as a marketing platform...
This is what really keeps business owners up at night
When I was in audit at KPMG one of the questions we used to ask business owners and managing directors to try and identify risk was, “what keeps you up at night?”. What keeps me up at night as the...