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'Pathway To Success' is published every other Sunday.
Next Issue is supposed on 19th Nov 2006.

Today's Feature Article

Picking A Small Business Accounting Program
Stephen L. Nelson, CPA

A small business accounting program should accomplish three tasks: track income and expenses, generate business forms, and keep detailed records for other assets and liabilities.

Tracking Income and Expenses

The task of tracking a business’s income and expense is really the most important job of an accounting system. If you own or manage a small business, obviously, you need some tool for measuring your income and your cash flow.

Although checkbook programs like Quicken and Microsoft Money does little more than keep a checkbook, you can actually keep financial records for a business right out of a checkbook. To do this, you simply categorize deposits as falling into some income category. And when you write a check or make some other withdrawal, you categorize expenses as falling into some expense category.

One problem with using a checkbook program, however, is that by using a checkbook program, you are implicitly using cash-basis accounting to track your income and expenses. Cash-basis accounting counts income when you receive a deposit and counts expense when you write a check.

Cash-basis accounting is easy to understand, and that means you are less likely to make errors in implementing it. However, cash- basis accounting is generally too imprecise for more complicated businesses. If you use inventory in your business, for example, cash-basis accounting isn’t very accurate—and the Internal Revenue Service does not allow it.

And there are other circumstances, too, in which cash-basis accounting produces serious and usually unacceptable errors in precision. For example, if you often receive money before you have actually earned it or if you often incur expenses long before you actually have to pay for them, you need to use a more sophisticated accounting program than a checkbook program.

Generating Business Forms

The second task that a small business accounting program should help you with is the generation of business forms. The most common business form is simply a check. Any checkbook program help you do this. Other business forms that small businesses commonly need to produce include invoices, credit memos, monthly statements, purchase orders, and so forth.

If you have a small business with very simple form requirements—perhaps you need only checks—then a checkbook program may work very well for you.

However, if you have extensive or complicated business form generation requirements, a more full-featured small business accounting package, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks, Peachtree’s Complete Accounting, or Microsoft Small Business Accounting will do a better job for you.

If you produce more complicated forms, but you produce these other forms with a word processing program, then a checkbook program may still work for you.

Detailed Record Keeping for Other Assets and Liabilities

The third task that a small business accounting program should help you with is detailed record keeping of your most important assets and liabilities. A checkbook program lets you keep good detailed records of cash, and for some businesses that is the principal asset. But many small businesses have other significant assets and liabilities they need to track, for example, accounts receivables, inventory, and vendor payables.

Whether or not a particular software program’s accounting tools provide adequate asset and liability record keeping depends on the situation. However, no small business accounting program does everything you need it to do. Any accounting program that provides an extensive list of features, by its very nature, becomes a challenge to use. For example, moving to the accrual basis of accounting adds an entire layer of complexity to financial record keeping, and keeping detailed records of inventory adds another layer.

For these reasons, even when a particular program doesn’t do everything you need it to do, your best choice still may be to use the program—and then simply live with its shortcomings.

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Stephen L. Nelson provides tax preparation, accounting, QuickBooks help and business consulting services in Redmond, WA. Click here to check Stephen's Books!

Today's Motivational Reading

How Memory REALLY Works
Dr Jill Ammon-Wexler

Memory is the ability to retain and to recall personal experiences, information, and various skills and habits. But although memory is easy to define there's little agreement among researchers about how memory really works.

Harvard psychology professor Dr. Daniel Schacter believes that the process of remembering involves three important aspects:

The Part Played by Emotions

Many researchers have observed that the more traumatic or emotion-packed an experience, the more likely you'll remember it. Your memories are encoded into actual physical neural connections in several parts of your brain. The more powerful the images accompanying an event, the more your brain is stimulated, and more likely it will become one of your long-term memories.

As recent as 1996, a survey revealed that 84 percent of psychotherapists and psychologists were convinced that all of the details of every experience a person undergoes throughout his or her life is permanently stored in the mind.

However many current studies suggest that this is only partially true. Recent memory research indicates that every bit of sensory data experienced by an individual throughout the course of their normal day-today life is NOT retained by the brain, or is not able to be recalled.

The evidence is that memories are stored as fragments of an experience, and that these are actually encoded within your brain's neural network.

The process of memory then involves a conscious act of 'uploading' a significant or emotional event, and the event is then recalled as an episodic montage or collage of images, rather than as a complete and accurate recall of your actual past sensory data.

Why Some Memories are More Permanent

Long-term memory requires an extensive encoding by your hypothalamus and subsequent storage in your brain's temporal lobes. Most potential memories are lost in less than a minute because they were never successfully encoded. We simply tend to remember things that are important to us, or are packed with emotional content.

Lasting encoding depends on your individual interests, perception, and needs. Thinking and talking about an experience at the time it occurred also seems to assist in more easily recalled memories.

Can Memories be Changed?

It's a mistake to believe that once your brain has recorded a memory, it remains forever fixed.

According to research conducted at New York University by Drs. Karim Nader and Glenn Shafe, every time a memory is consciously recalled, your brain reassembles it, updates it, and makes new proteins before placing the memory back in long-term storage. This changes and strengthens the neural network the memory is stored on.

This provides a neurobiological explanation of how your memories may be updated, or even re-created.

False Memories

Some studies show we often create a memory after the fact and are susceptible to suggestions from others as to the 'truth' of what actually occurred.

This can create false memories which we believe happened to us when actually the 'remembered' events never occurred.

The ease with which false memories can occur was demonstrated in a 2001 study by University of Washington memory researchers Jacquie E. Pickrell and Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus. About one-third of the 120 subjects in a study who were exposed to a fake advertisement showing Bugs Bunny at Disneyland later said they 'remembered' meeting Bugs when they visited Disneyland, and had even shaken his hand.

This could never have occurred because the cartoon character Bugs Bunny is owned by Warner Brothers, and would therefore never be seen at Disneyland walking around with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

This study suggests we might also create many 'false' autobiographical memories based on nostalgic advertising, films, and TV.

A 1998 report by the British Royal College of Psychiatrists accused its own members of having damaged patients' lives by implanting false memories as they delved into their childhood events. According to the report, nearly 1,000 parents claimed they had been falsely accused of sexual abuse after their adult children allegedly recovered such memories during suggestive psychotherapy.

Source Amnesia

The mind can play some funny tricks. Closely related to false memories is 'source amnesia', in which we accurately recall an event but forget the source of the memory.

We may recall the details of a terrible storm our grandmother told us of as a young child, then later actually recall the story as one of own memories as if it had actually happened to us.

And today's children seeing realistic dramatic portrayals of hardships or disasters in theaters or on their television screens may later remember these images as their own memories of enduring difficult times or violent acts.

The Exciting Conclusion

From all this we can conclude several things: First, memories may not be reliable depictions of what happened, and second, if we recall them and place new emotional material on them, we can actually change the memory in our brain's neural networks. Now that's interesting and empowering!

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The Quantum Brain Gym is the first online brain gym to offer professional brainwave training right on your computer. Click here: http://www.quantumbraingym.com/

Today's Subscriber Article

Top Nine Essential "Hot-Selling Points" To Pre-Market your Book for Big Sales
Judy Cullins

Every part of your book can be a sales tool. When you include the below tips, you will have a roadmap to follow to keep your writing organized and compelling, and you'll sell more books than you ever dreamed of!

1. Write for your one preferred audience. Not everyone wants your book. Find out what audience wants/needs your book? What problems does your book solve for them? Create an audience profile and keep your audience's picture in front of you as you write. Ask yourself, is my topic narrow enough? The Chicken Soup For The Teenager, For The Prisoner, and other specific groups sold far more copies than the original Chicken Soup. To start, write a short letter to your audience telling them why you wrote the book and what it will do for them. This letter becomes part of your book's introduction.

2. Write a sizzling book title. Make it short and clever to sell best. Long titles are hard to remember. Your title must compel your audience to buy. You want your book's title on everyone's lips. Those people become your 24/7 sales team because they are so impressed. Today people want short titles, short chapters because they don't have a lot of time to read. This is the number one "Essential Hot-Selling Point" as laid out in Chapter Three of the Write your eBook or Other Short Book Fast book.

3. Write your book's thesis if it is non-fiction. Write your book's theme if it is fiction. Your thesis usually makes a judgment and tells your book's number one benefit. Or answers the number one question or solves the number one problem your readers have about your topic. Sometimes your title is your thesis--the best of all worlds. If fiction, you need to know your theme before you finish your book. It also is expressed in a sentence and makes a judgment. Perhaps your message is one of a general human condition. . For example, "Women who persist and stay open to adventure and opportunity can create a happy, satisfying life."

4. Make your front cover fit your book content. You have 5-10 seconds to hook your potential buyer. The cover and the title sell more books than any other part. Bookstore buyers buy mainly by cover designs. If you want an agent or publisher your title and subtitle are vital. Use four-color and get professional design help. For business, use colors like red, blue and maroon. For softer subjects, use softer colors. Women like aqua, red, yellow, so include those for their books.

5. Write a thirty-second "tell and sell." You only have a few seconds to impress the media, the agent, the bookseller, and the individual buyer. Include your title, a few benefits, and the audience. Include a few sound bites that grab attention. You may also want to compare your book to a successful one. "Passion at Any Age" is the "Artist's Way" for seniors.

6. Write your back cover before you write your book. This is the second most important sales tool your book has to offer. Here you put compelling ad copy, benefits, testimonials, and a small blurb about you, the author. If your potential buyer likes it, they will buy on the spot. If they want more information, they will look inside at the introduction and table of contents.

Reach out to opinion molders. After an initial contact of asking for feedback, resend them the same chapter, the "tell and sell," and the table of contents of your book. Ask for a testimonial then. These influential contacts' testimonials will make your back cover an important sales tool.

Your back cover becomes a precursor of your Web site sales letter.

7. Write your book's introduction. Include the problem your audience has, why you wrote the book, and its purpose. In a few paragraphs include more specific benefits, and how you will present it (format). Keep it under a page. The biggest mistake authors make is to tell their story in the introduction. Your readers want to know how you can help them.

8. Create a table of contents. Each chapter should have a name, preferably a catchy one. If your reader can't understand the chapter title, then annotate it. Add some benefits or a sub title. In Passion at Any Age, the author put the word "passion" in each title to help brand the "Passion" title. Which attracts you more? "Open Your Mind?" or "Attracting Passion?" Often fiction doesn't name chapter titles, but for the reader, it helps a lot.

9. Know your book's benefits. That's what sells your book. After you create a list of 5-10 of them, keep them handy for the outside sales copy--the stuff that gives people enough information to make an intelligent decision to buy. Omitting these words and phrases costs new authors book sales. Remember that features such as the tips, quotes, side bars, and stories help explain what's in the book, but they aren't strong sellers like benefits are. After you know your benefits, you can quickly write your back cover, your "tell and sell," and your web site or email sales letter.

Designing every part of your book to be a sales tool and a beacon to writing a focused, compelling, understandable, and enjoyable book is a must, before you write a single chapter. If your book is already done, be sure to rethink these hot selling points for the promotion you need to sell your book.

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Book and Internet Marketing Coach, Judy Cullins, can help you build credibility and clients, sell a lot of books, and make maximum profits. Author of 11 books including Write your eBook or Other Short Book Fast and The Fast and Cheap Way to Explode Targeted Web Traffic" Get her free eBook"20 High Octane Book Writing and Marketing Tips" and two free monthly ezines at:
http://www.bookcoaching.com/

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