tools – Getentrepreneurial.com: Resources for Small Business Entrepreneurs in 2024

Article Contributed by Samantha Morse

In the new world of smart devices, businesses are trying to get on top of the tech world in all facets of their operations. One of the last places consumers and businesses might think of as tech savvy is the mail industry, but they are finally jumping on board as well. FP Mailing Solutions has released Mailone™ which is a mailing, tracking and accounting software that allows businesses to save money.

This new software makes postage meters extra smart and easy to use. It allows all businesses to easily take advantage of significant cost savings every time they place a package on postage scales without needing to do any calculating. It is software that is easy to use for most businesses of all sizes. Kevin A. Pietras, the Director of Marketing for FP Mailing Solutions says, “Software with this kind of performance typically is priced for only the largest mailers, but mailone™ is priced so it can pay for itself in just months, even for small- and mid-sized operations.”

Mailone™ offers percent savings for a multitude of shipping criteria. The process is all electronic eliminating wastes, it also allows for free discounted and delivery confirmation. Commercial-Base Pricing offers discounts up to 9.9 percent on Priority Mail and 5 percent on Express Mail. Detailed reports can be generated in graph or table form, and can reveal new opportunities for savings and efficiencies allowing for even more cost savings that already present. Also, cost figures are easily exported to financial accounting software.

Mailone™ allows for cleaner and easier accounting/documenting. The accounting feature automatically records detailed data on an unlimited number of transactions, accounts and customers. The process is appealing because it can track expenses by department or customer, bill back accounts and automatically add a handling fee if necessary. This makes Mailone™ extremely attractive for businesses that ship a lot of product. It’s only a matter of time before businesses go completely electronic with the release of new innovative products

About the Author

Samantha Morse is a writer and pet lover based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as phone systems & voip service at Resource Nation.

Part of running an efficient and organized business is making full use of the technology and resources available to you. It’s great to set up systems and processes and have them work for you, but in order to fully automate your business you also need to know which technologies are going to work best to support you in that.

Over the years I have worked with many different automation tools (either in my own business or for my clients) that have helped to support an online solo business owner, and today I’d like to share my top five favorite ones with you. All of these tools I use in my own business today – and they’re a huge timesaver as well as creating a more streamlined and automated business for me.

1. 1ShoppingCart – this is my shopping cart, autoresponder, broadcast, and database management systems all rolled into ONE system. I especially like this service because everything is done in one place which really does make for a more streamlined business. It is possible to use one service for your shopping cart activities (i.e. product sales) and another service for your autoresponder/broadcast (i.e. sending out your newsletter) but the danger with this is that you are running two different databases and at some point it will become cumbersome and may even start to become unmanageable.

2. TimeDriver – this is probably my favorite find and is such a huge timesaver for me; I’m so grateful to one of my clients for putting me onto this service. It’s a system whereby you can get your clients to self-schedule their appointments with you, avoiding the back and forth of emails that happens when you’re trying to arrangement appointments and, of course, the time spent doing this. You simply give your clients/colleagues the special link that’s generated by TimeDriver and they are able to see your availability (which you have pre-determined) and therefore schedule accordingly with you. It works with both Outlook and Google calendars.

3. Submit Your Article – this service is an article submission service (notice I said ‘service’ not ‘software’) that submits your articles to hundreds of different article directories and ezine publishers on your behalf. You simply upload your article to your account and they do the rest. It’s a really great way of getting your articles out to a lot of places in the shortest amount of time possible, and again is another huge timesaver.

4. BYOAudio – as well as using this service to record and host all my teleclass audios, I make full use of their Podcast feature. You can record your podcast episode directly into your podcast, and they will share and syndicate it with the top podcast directories – even iTunes – immediately it’s published! Those directories, in turn, come and get your podcast, index it, and make it available to their visitors. All this takes is about 10/15 minutes of my time to record my podcast episode and publish it to my podcast. Another great strategy for building my list that really takes no time at all to implement!

5. OnlyWire – this is the service I use to create social bookmarks for my blog entries – they even post to Twitter and Facebook. Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages. It works in two ways: i) When someone stores a bookmark to one of your blog posts they have an easy way to access your information again; and ii) because these bookmarks are stored on the website’s of the social bookmarking sites, i.e. Technorati, Digg, etc. etc. they provide backlinks to your blog/website. If you wanted your bookmarks to appear on each of these social bookmarking sites you could do it all manually, i.e. create an account, log in to your account, post your bookmark, and repeat this process for every social bookmarking site you have an account at. Where OnlyWire comes in is that you provide your account login details at the various social bookmarking sites, submit your blog post URL for bookmarking, and OnlyWire will do the publishing for you! One or two clicks and you’re done!