Custom Software & Databases   |  Web Applications   |  Website Design   |  Graphic Design   |  **** 396 911

Let your client's login online to see their project progression

A lot of businesses provide a service or product that takes time to produce. If this is you, you’re probably receiving calls from all your clients wanting to know, “is it completed yet”, “what stage of completion are you up to?”, “Can I see some progression photos?” etc.

Do you have a website? Why not tap on a section that allows client's to login and view their projects current status. All you have to do log in yourself and update the information as you go or better yet get someone else on your team to do it for you. :)

At Flexi IT Solutions on the Gold Coast we can custom develop a web application that allows you to manage your projects online, upload progress photos, leave comments on where a clients project is at, mark off milestones, what ever project life cycle suits your business we can do it.

If you don’t want to use a website to do this, we can develop software that automatically fires off similar information via emails when certain milestones are reached etc.

The main aim here is to keep your clients informed of their projects process without them having to call you, saving you time!

If you store Address data read on.

When inputting address data there a two main things you want to cover. If you intend on using your address data for reporting or searching, I.E. show me a list of my clients that live in this street of this suburb, you will need to store each part of an address separately. Ideally you should have an input box for, Pre, street no, street name, location, State, Postcode. From experience with large databases I’ve found this format covers 99.9% of situations. Here is an example address that uses all the fields “St Martins Hospital, 126 James St, Gold Coast, QLD, 4350” If you were only storing address line one, address line two it would be very difficult to query your database with address criteria

The second thing is you want to validate your addresses before saving them to your database. When writing custom software, we always lock down the location, state, postcode fields and require the user to open a location search screen and select a valid location which then populations those fields with 100% correct data from Australia Post.

If we are working with a web site, like an online shop check out facility, we can integrate an address validation with Australia Posts API, so before an order is finalised, the user is forced to enter in a correct address.

When it comes to creating reports from your database, it is crucial your database is accurate. It’s no good if you have multiple user entered versions of one location, say Brisbane. Someone might enter it as, “City of Brisbane”, “North Brisbane”, “Brisane” etc, you get the idea. When your data is like that it will prevent you from generating accurate reports on your data. If you did a search for clients in “Brisbane” none of those clients would show in your results.

Now if you’re validating your addresses with a database like Australia Post’s downloadable csv file. Be aware that location / postcodes update all the time, new ones are created etc. So be sure to have a facility for your software users to update their address look up database easily when needed.

One last thing, regarding screen design for postal input, if you’re storing Postal and Residential addresses, always include an option to auto fill out the postal address with the residential. And, make sure users can tab between the address fields in the correct order.

Websites need Search Engine Optimisation to succeed

The internet is a great marketing tool for your business. However just having a website is not enough. Some people are under the impression that they will just automatically pop up for Google results. After a while of your site being online, you might pop up for search terms that match your business name because for example, “Flexi IT Solutions” is not a competitive keyword search and unless someone knows your business name and searches for it, that’s the only time it will be found. Clearly you want to be found for your service or product, “Gold Coast custom Software development” etc. The same keywords all your competitors are going for as well. This is where the second part of having a successful website comes in. It’s called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

SEO is a whole another kettle of fish, a speciality in itself. It’s a wide range of marketing techniques that brings traffic (people looking for your services) to your website. They also specialise in sales conversions, so when someone lands on your website they are much more likely to purchase or pick up the phone and call you. 95% of SEO companies SEO is performed by offshore monkeys working for peanuts and trust me you don’t want to be using them. The quality of the work is not good enough and it may be negative for your website. There is a lot of poor gramma and spelling which looks very unprofessional.

At Flexi IT Solutions we have Gold Coast Search Engine Optimisation, SEO geniuses. We believe they are the best team in the country, and they can prove it to you on the spot. In summary, if you want to succeed online, you first need a website and secondly SEO marketing.

IT Developers and Designers there is a difference.

When it comes to IT development, typically you’re after something that requires some design work and some development work. Example, you’re after a website that looks nice (Design, Designer skills) and does stuff (Development, Developer skills). Unfortunately nearly all the time, the one person cannot naturally perform both at a high level. You need a designer and a developer.

Generally a web designer is great at “Arty Farty” type work because they are passionate about it but the programming type work they can just do enough to get by. Often a web designer is limited by the tools created for them by programmers, tools that do programming tasks for them as they generally only know the basics. The reverse is often true for a developer, software, web.

Developers are great at programming, making functionality, features, getting your IT project to work. However the design part they often lack in and generally don’t want to do or get involved with if they don’t have to. Often they’ll know the basics to get by but I wouldn’t expect anything awesome graphic design wise from a programmer.

My advice to you is if your looking at getting a website, iPhone, Google android app or any IT work developed that requires custom functionality you should use a development firm like us, Flexi IT Solutions on the Gold Coast, as we have the “Freaky Geeky’s “and the “Arty Fartys” to work together on your project.

Auto login into your custom software.

Did you know, if your business is using small business servers Microsoft exchange for emailing, (Most are, ask your network guy to confirm) we can automate the log into process into your custom software and database by using your windows log in credentials? So in essence once you’ve logged into your computer that’s the only logging in you’ll have to do. We can also set the user access levels for your software using your windows login information because your network administrator, or us, can put your network users into security groups.

Don’t loose your source code! And make sure your own it!

When you have any development work done like software or web programming there is source code involved. Source code is what us developers create which we use to produce your finished product. You will not see the source code in the product delivered to you, it is a separate set of files. So with that being said, if at some stage you need some further work done on your website or software the developer will require the source code. Without the source code you’re screwed really, you will have to get the website or software rebuilt. It shouldn’t cost as much to get rebuilt as you paid to get it built the first time because we would have a visual of the final product that will help speed up development for us a lot.

A trap you need to watch out for is code ownership. Before you contract someone to do programming on your behalf you should sign an agreement on who owns the source code. Sometimes IT companies will create your program and maintain ownership of the code so they can sell it to you at lower price but able them to resell the product as many times as they like, you’re kinder buying a licence to use it in that case. However I’ve known of many occasions where a company pays tens of thousands of dollars, the full cost of their softwares development and unknowingly not owned the source code. When this happens you’re forced to either purchase the code from them separately plus always use that company for any updates you require until then.

In summary, you should always get a copy of your source code after any development work and determine source code ownership before you proceed with any software / web development. Documentation, well that’s another trap. I’ll cover that in my next article.

A client database, do you have one? A CRM? Can you quickly pull up information on clients, previous jobs/projects?

Ever phoned a company like Telstra and they punch in a few details about you and it brings up your customer record. From your customer record they can look into anything they need quite quickly. Your account history, what services they have been provided you over the time, what payments you have made, what they spoke to you about last time you called, and the list goes on.

Database, Software, CRM services like these are not limited to just big companies; they can be quiet affordable for small to medium businesses, the best things about them is that they are tailored to your business. If you have a lot of clients or process lots of jobs then some sort of a database, CRM system really is a must, how else are you going to keep track of your business? Plus you get the bonus of being able to produce sales and statistical reports.

At Flexi IT Solutions we built systems like these all the time, business owners are just so oh so happy once they are implemented, it takes much less time for them to manage their business, they have data at their fingertips. Any software, database, crm software like this can easily be customized or have functionality, reports etc added to in the future as well, which is awesome!

Provide an online quoting system for your potential clients?

Instead of spending your valuable time answering phone calls all day calculating quotes, answering those same questions, asking those same questions, why not provide an online quoting calculator on your website? And some links to those frequently asked questions? A lot of people use the internet to find businesses these days. This would help cut back on those calls.

You might think your quoting system is too complex to computerise, however if you talk with a systematically wired brain person like our developers, I’m sure we can help figure out the logic behind it and then computerise it. We can build your quoting calculating into some custom software for your office or into a webpage and integrate it into your website. We can even make it editable by yourself or one of your team.

What if you have an online quoting system that once the user fills out their details, and the calculator information, clicks the calculate button and then the quote is displayed on their screen and emailed to them, and an email is sent to your sales team with the details. That would be cool hey? Interested? Speak with one of our web designers and software developers today. **** 396 911

Automatically process your bank statements

If your business involves direct debiting your clients on a regular basis then I hope you have some sort of a system in place to process your bank statements

Do you really want to be combing through your statement looking for the reversals, fees, part payments, full payments and cancellations etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just log into your banks website, download your daily statements and hand them over to your IT system and it let do the work in a split second for you?

It could present all the things you particular want drawn attention to then automatically generate a letter ready to be sent to the client and an email to your customer service department telling them whom and what to follow up. Best of all you’ll save all the time and there’s no human error.

We can built a program / software solution that will process your statements, present you reports, assign payments to your clients record and deal with any events that aren’t just that.

If you have a lot of reversals, we can even tailor a solution to really automate the handing of your associated business processes in regards to those.

Back up your website - random hacking does occur!

So you’ve invested in building a website business maybe an online shop and it’s all starting to pay off for you. You’ve been actively marketing your website online and Google is ranking your site well, extra sales are coming in and its happy days. Then one day Mr Hacker comes along and infects your website, Google crawls your site and black lists you and you don’t even know it’s happened until someone, maybe a potential customer calls you to let you know Google says your site is dangerous. Goodbye search engine rankings and all that cash you spent on search engine optimisation and hello nightmare of spaghetti virus through out your website code.

You may be thinking as if that would happen to me. Well, I thought that and it happened to me, my hdmi cable online store website was hacked, despite having all strong passwords on everything and it was on the damn weekend, prime selling time! It took our web developers about 15hours in total to comb through all my pages and pull out the nasties. I then had to work out how to get Google to review at my website and lift my “this site is dangerous warning”. Now if I was backing up my website and database like I should have been I could have restored my site back to working order without any developer time pretty much straight away, not after the weekend. Much less down time, missed sales and the Google ban would have been removed much sooner.

Personally I feel I was very lucky that our developers here could actually fix my website in the first place, otherwise this would have been incredibly much worse. Religiously now I back up my website once a week minimum and I recommend you do too. If you log into your website cpanel you should be able to find a back up tool. Contact us here are Flexi IT Solutions if you can’t work it out.

Sending Letters via Snail Mail - "The fast way"

If at any time your business has to send out a repetitive type letter with data driven from your database / CRM then read on. There is no way you’re stuck manually typing these out. You should expect a click of a button and all done, ready for printing.

A common scenario I’ve come across in the field when working with Medium & Large Businesses is where the business has a database of client data and they wish to send a bulk mail out when a particular event occurs.

A typical event would be something like. Each week the business would like to send out a letter to each new client they have gained during that week. Now, if you’ve got even 10 plus repetitive type letters that you send out you really don’t want to be manually typing them out hey! Never fear, the business automation specialist is here

Now there is a few ways in which I’ve personally gone about implementing an automated letter generating solution. The crux of it pretty much breaks down to this, you have to create a template with a mix of fixed and data driven sections, query your database for the required data and link the two together. An example is: You want to send a letter to your new clients, so create a template with fixed sections being things like your business logo, address, and the body of the letter and data driven sections like client name, address (”the text that”’’s going to change on each letter”). The linking together, you’ll probably have to leave to a tech head or do some Googling.

Now depending on what level of business you’re playing at will depend on the level of sophistication your best solution will be. If you have a small business with an Excel database you can achieve bulk letter mailing though using Ms Word and mail merging via linking your database fields to the Ms Word document. With an online tutorial you can probably figure out how to do this yourself without hiring a tech head, though they will probably do a better job.

For businesses that are using a “proper database” like Microsoft SQL, ORACLE, MYSQL etc you can do better than the above solution however you’ll need a programmer / software developer. What they should be able to arrange for you is a seamless process from a click of a button “Make my Letters” to the letters appearing complete on your screen ready for printing. They’ll usually do this through custom software development of your existing CRM or creating you small program just for it. You can even ask them to put some tracking facility in of things like “who was sent what letter when”. Just ask!

I hope this article has helped! I could really go into some nitty gritty of the programming solutions but that would be just for the tech heads and I could probably write for the next 5hours, which I certainly won’t be

Online shops – eCommerce stores, some cool things you can do!

From experience a lot of clients are unaware of just how much an online store can replace other associated business tasks. At Flexi IT Solutions we build totally customisable shopping websites. With that being said here is some cool things we can do.

If your business has difference prices for different people or businesses, no problem, we can set this up how ever you like. No more trying to keep track of different price lists for all your wholesalers and retail customers; let your online shop do it for you in one centralised location accessible from anyway. Any logical set of rules you want your pricing structure to follow we can arrange. I.E when my buddy Nick logs in I want all jewellery items to be 10% discounted except certain ones which I specify and if he buys a more than 10 watches the unit cost is to be only $5.

We can set up more cool things like coupons on check out that will do what you want to the price or what ever? What about if you have salesmen working for you and when their wholesaler customers place an order maybe you want your salesmen to be able to log into your website and see what their clients have been ordering and their associated commissions? Why not, saves them calling you.

Downloadable price lists? Exporting of your sales data or product catalogue? Integration straight into MYOB? What if you have an in house products database, we can rig your website up so it uses it for the product display? That would save you from updating both your in house and website product list. How about automatic notifications, email or sms? What’s that? You want to be SMS’d order details when a sale is made, and you want an email to auto send off to your supplier, you name it we can do it.

If your thinking about developing an online store “web application”, give us a bell, we can help identify all these time saving possibilities for you, it’s our speciality. We are based on the Gold Coast and if you're not too far away we'll come to you in person for a free consultation. A word of warning, if you’re planing on using a open sourced “free” shopping cart, let me tell you, you can try set these up yourself…….good luck though there is actually often a fair bit of time involved in doing a professional job.

Remote accessing your business. “Don’t feel like driving to your office today?”

Thanks to the internet, nowadays the burden of having to travel your office to check up on your business is over. If the computer tools you’re using to manage your business like a database, custom software, reports are only available from your physical office then you’re missing out. I know your probably thinking, oooohhh the internet…… I can’t risk my data; trust me there are ways to securely remote access it.

Software that we develop here for our clients on the Gold Coast can be made so it is available for them to use where ever they go, at a friends house, another office, their home. You don’t need to carry it with you either. In fact you may not even need an office with this sort of technology; you could have all your staff working from home or where ever. Everything they do can still be monitored if you choose. What time they log in, log out, what data they inserted, updated etc.

Sounds interesting hey, the possibilities are endless. Give our team a call **** 396 911. I’m sure we can work something awesome out for your particular situation.