Taxation With Good Representation

Provide New Insightly Users the Exact Access They

Insightly has several options available to you, but you’ll need to first decide which permission setting (“simple” or “advanced”) is right for your business. Here’s a quick recap of the differences:

Simple Permissions:

• Available on all plans, including the Free plan
• Users can be set up one of two ways: as “standard” or “administrator”
• Administrators have access to every record
• Standard users can only access records owned by them, assigned to them, or made public by other users
• There are no “read-only” users

Advanced Permissions:

• Only available to Professional and Enterprise Insightly users
• Roles can be created to build hierarchical record access
• Profiles serve as standard view/edit templates, which can be applied to individual users

Insightly profiles are particularly useful for companies with aggressive staffing ambitions. Unlike certain other CRMs, Insightly allows you to define common access profiles. As new people come onboard, you can instantly assign an existing access profile, thereby streamlining the onboarding process.

Standardize your user management with Insightly!

Streamline Your On-boarding Process

Big companies invest considerable resources into the onboarding of new hires.

The reason? Employee retention is an increasingly important metric that directly impacts productivity and profitability. Simply stated, it’s not cheap to recruit, interview, assess, train, and compensate workers. Therefore, providing a smooth onboarding process increases the likelihood of a successful, long-term hire.

Aside from working closely with your HR team (which might be you!), what else can you do to provide seamless onboarding? Technology can be your friend here, especially Insightly’s activity set feature. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, activity sets serve as prebuilt task templates, ensuring every step of a given workflow is accounted for in advance.

When it comes to your onboarding, you might consider building an activity set with the following tasks (among others):

• Set up the new hire’s email account
• Set up payroll
• Invite the new hire as an Insightly user
• Schedule CRM training session
• Add the new hire to the weekly company meeting

Each task within the activity set can be assigned to a team member at your organization. If, for example, your IT guy is always responsible for setting up new email addresses, configure the task to always assign to him (regardless of how many times the activity set is used). Or, you can choose to manually assign a task when the set is applied.

An automated onboarding process helps new hires hit the ground running – faster. And, you can get back to more important matters.

Make Tax Day Easier on Your Accountant

Did you know that tax day is not April 15th this year?

According to the IRS, “The filing deadline to submit 2016 tax returns is Tuesday, April 18, 2017…In 2017, April 15 falls on a Saturday, and this would usually move the filing deadline to the following Monday — April 17. However, Emancipation Day…will be observed on that Monday, which pushes the nation’s filing deadline to Tuesday, April 18, 2017.”

Despite the extra day or two to file, February is still a great time to get organized. By now, most of your 1099s and charitable statements have arrived. Likewise, you’ve closed out December’s sales and expenses. Everything is there waiting for you to take action.

Of course, you could put everything in a folder and hand it to your accountant. This might seem like the easy option, but it could create headaches later. Simplify the process for your CPA (and yourself) by considering the following:

• Compare 1099 statements to your general ledger. Does everything match?
• Compare your charitable statements to past budgets.
• Download important eStatements, such as interest statements from your bank.
• Organize your statements logically – one stack for business and another for personal.
• Create a summary sheet that explains your financial year. This will serve as a helpful narrative to your accountant (who is busy working on hundreds of other returns).

Finally, don’t just assume your accountant does flawless work. Be sure to double check his or her work!

Automate Your Sales Training

Good sales reps are hard to find. In the long run, they’re even harder to keep.

Headhunters and recruiters (even competitors!) are always luring away top performers. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to change this. Sales talent is in high demand.

Although you can’t stop reps from leaving, you can try to maximize their productivity while they’re on your payroll. One strategy for doing this is to consolidate your training process. Even the most experienced sales reps can take several weeks (if not months) to get up and running.

What can you do to improve your sales training process? Here are a few ideas:

Implement a Learning Management System: A learning management system (LMS) is software that hosts your in-house training materials. Look for systems that allow users to log in, view materials, and take proficiency tests.

Move to Video-Based Training: Scheduling time with the right people can be challenging for new hires. Bypass this issue by encapsulating important training into video format. Upload the videos to your LMS and turn new reps loose.

Update Your Battle Card: Who are your top competitors? Why does your company have the upper hand? What weaknesses do you have? Your battle card is a vital resource for new team members.

Organize the Chaos: You can further enhance any process by leveraging activity sets. With one click, new sales reps can be assigned several important training tasks to achieve. Include links to your LMS and other relevant documentation.