Reporting


Hide Menu

The method of Reporting or the profession of Accountancy is the method of communicating financial information about a business organization. Generally in form of financial statements, such information aids managers, investors, tax authorities and other decision makers to make resource allocation decisions between and within companies, organizations, and public agencies.

Accounting involves the process of recording, verifying, and reporting of the value of assets, liabilities, income, and expenses in the books of account to which debit and credit entries are chronologically posted to record changes in value.

Types of accounting

Financial Accounting involves the processes by which financial information of an organization is recorded, classified, summarized, interpreted and communicated in accordance with legal, professional, and capital market requirements.

Management Accounting is a branch of accounting performed within an organization to provide information only accessible to its decision-makers.

Open-book Accounting is a principle that aims to improve accounting transparency of organizations.

Tax Accounting is the accounting needed to comply with tax regulations within a jurisdiction.

Best Practice for a Good E-Reputation


E-Reputation is about how people look at you or your company, and what they believe. Today almost every business organization has online presence. Social media networks have become the backbone of success for businesses. However, owning a website is no longer enough to be successful in business.

Here are some recommended best practices needed to have an attractive e-Reputation.

Best Practice #1: Digital Life Reflects Company Success

We live in a digital era. Not being part of social media and owning a website is bad for business. Unless you have online presence, there cannot be an e-Reputation. Therefore, it is important to own a website and become social through social media. Use digital technology to stay current and sophisticated. This improves communication to a great extent. Make use of mobile devices because communication is the key to success through social media and internet networking.

Best Practice #2: Own a Website

Transparency is the key to winning the trust of potential clients and customers. The ‘About Us’ page tells a lot about the person with whom clients will be dealing with. Before vendors decide on whether they can hire your services they will need to know whether your company really exists. Besides, they will have questions they may need answers to. Therefore, it is important that you own a website.

Best Practice #3: Blogs, Press Releases and Articles

The more information is available, the better for your e-Reputation. Write blogs and articles to keep your followers up-to-date. Provide visitors to your website with informative and well researched articles and blogs. Publish online press releases that will reflect the progress and achievements of the company.

Best Practice #4: Use Latest Online Tools and Gadgets

Put photos, videos and audio multimedia. Be trendy and current with technology that supports sharing and downloading information from your website.

Best Practice #5: Get on Social Media Networks

Online businesses need to socialize in order to provide potential customers or clients with transparent information. It has become a best practice for vendors to go know about the company’s reputation before finalizing their deals. Social media allows business people to create a good e-Reputation online through long-term business relations. Through direct communication using feedbacks and comments, companies earn a good reputation very quickly.

There are a number of social media websites where the presence of your company will be beneficial. For example, LinkedIn is a business social media website. Similarly, Twitter is where most businesses share information. Often, through social media interaction new business partnerships have been formed.

Best Practices in CRM via Social Networks


Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has become the most spoken about internet best practice for business organizations. We all know that social networking has been the most important business strategy in recent years. Through social networking you can attract as many customers as possible. The larger the traffic or followers you attract, the more financial success.

The main trick here is to be able to ensure compliance with best practices involved in CRM. Therefore, implementing the following best practices in social CRM via social media is mandatory.

Twitter Social CRM

Twitter is the fastest growing social media network. It is the most recommended place where millions of people connect, share opinions, seek help and pose questions. Getting masses of followers on twitter is quite easy and exciting. With a single statement, thousands of people can be informed about business updates within minutes. Twitter CRM is an opportunity to use effective communication tools and strategies. Hence marketing using twitter is very effective through sharing of advertisements and business updates. It is important to emphasize that the choice of words must be polite.

Direct communication is very important to succeed in making sales through social media. This best practice allows business representatives to promote products through real-time interaction with customers. Twitter has become popular as the ideal Social CRM platform. It also offers an opportunity for branding your products and services with people who were otherwise out of reach.

Facebook Social CRM

Facebook is the second largest social media network and keeps growing at exponential rate. It works almost like twitter but is not as famous with business people. Creating pages on Facebook is one of the many ways of ensuring social CRM best practices. This allows marketers to increase customer awareness with a more personal and friendly approach.

Facebook also offers a platform where program develops integrate applications and other websites. This allows access to Facebook through various devices, e.g. notebooks and smartphones. For example; the combination of Force.com with Facebook created new opportunities for socially driven businesses. Hence, business people can keep in touch with customers wherever they are by commenting on feedbacks.

Adapt to Changing Customer Dynamics

With the coming of social media, there has been a shift in power. New rules for marketing strategies have come into play due to social media. So also, new trends for advertisement have developed. In order to cope with these changes on social media, businesses have to adapt to customers’ demand through compliance.

Other than B2C (Business-to-Customer) and B2B (Business-to-Business) interaction, now there is excessive and unlimited C2C (Customer-to-Customer) interaction. Businesses have little choice now. Either they succumb to customer demand, and gain good reputation in masses of potential customers on social media, or lose customer patronage. Those businesses that resist adapting to changes lack best practices. The consequence of failed compliance with this is financial loss and even shutdown of the business.

These best practices in CRM via social media are inevitable. Resisting compliance with these recommendations can slowdown or even put an end to chances of financial success.

Best Practices in Content Management for Social Networks


The backbone of any business institution is the process of information management, known as Content Management (CM). It involves the use of a set of technologies that facilitated collection, publishing and management of information. Information can be sourced from various mediums and platforms.

Why Businesses Need CM

Social media has become one of the most important marketing platforms of recent times. Through the use of digital content like texts, multimedia files and other kinds of applications businesses share information easily. This information is targeted at customers and sometimes at other businesses. The effect of this is that there are new rules and trends governing how, where and when information is shared.

When information is shared Business-to-Customer (B2C) there are different rules to abide by. Likewise, when information is to be shared Business-to-Business (B2B) the rules have to be more corporate. Similarly, as goals and objectives of business enterprises vary the approach to content management differs. Whatever the case may be scrutiny of the content before publishing is a crucial best practice. That’s because the content influences the progress of the business.

Businesses on social media must make sure that there are no slipups and misuse of language. There have been cases where offended customers have sued businesses for abusive behavior, racist comments and even fraud. Therefore it is a recommended best practice that business people pay special attention to the content they share on social media. To ensure this, sharing responsibilities is an important best practice.

Some basic roles and responsibilities that implement various best practices include the following:

  • Creator of Content: Writes and edits the content.
  • Editor: Tunes the content and style of delivery. This includes paying attention to interpretation and localization of the content.
  • Publisher: Releases the content on social media.
  • Administrator: Manages permission to data (files and folders).
  • Customers: The guests or viewers of the content read and share the information with friends on social media.

Plagiarism of Content

One of the most dangerous aspects of using web content is the risk of plagiarism. Google picks any content available on the World Wide Web. This includes information on websites and social media as well. Businesses must make sure the content they share is authentic and completely original. If care is not taken, other companies with copyrights can sue businesses for stealing content.

Ignoring situations where other businesses steal your content can be a bad thing for the business. Customers will mistake the other business for yours. This will lead to losses in your business due to lack of best practices. Moreover, there have been fraudulent websites that have created scandals and disgraced some businesses by abusing their content. Once reputation is damaged on social media recovering it is almost impossible. Therefore, using tools to ensure that content is free of plagiarism is a very important best practice.

Reading guides about social media is very important before one begins to use them for business.

Best Practices in Brand Management on Social Networks


More than $1 billion was spent by companies on social media in 2010. By 2011, the importance of social media for consumer branding companies became undeniably obvious. More and more companies worldwide have increased their social media activity with hope to improve their business. This has proved to be beneficial for those companies that implemented best practices in brand management.

Social media is for every business institution that needs branding. It can be a manufacturing company, fashion industries, music industries, Photography Industry (Kodak), technology oriented businesses and healthcare facilities etc. Social media networks to pay special attention to for business purposes are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flicker, Blogs and YouTube. Some best practices recommended for brand management on social media networks include:

Track Keywords: There are companies that monitor and list keywords people frequently type in social media channels. They use a platform that is integrated with the Google Analytics. This allows users to track target keywords and grow their social media campaigns by tracking their revenue stream.

Listen, Engage and Act: It is important to listen to what people have to say about your product or services. If possible use platforms or applications that can allow you to take snapshots of comments as a best practice. Track the number of times those keywords have been used, to help you decide whether action is needed.

Discuss with people on social media networks by engaging them in a conversation. Find out what they want and need. In order to succeed in engaging customers, you must have sufficient insight into the niche. Make sure you don’t lose ground when you are engaged in a discussion with people on social media. Additionally, practice some caution with your choice of words on social media. You can easily lose your reputation with a single slipup.

Finally, take an action. If you are convinced that the masses share the same opinion, make adjustments in your brand or services to oblige customers. You will be surprised at the increase in revenue. It is recommended best practice to spend at least 5 minutes per day to manage your social media website.

Keep Enemies Closer: On social media, wise business people don’t just monitor their customers. They also keep a keen eye on their competitors for best practices. Whenever customer behavior changes, the competitor is the most probable cause. Business is a fast moving world; in order to lead you have to be apt and swift in action. It’s a simple rule; those who slack and are not up-to-date cannot survive. Through social media, business people spy on their competitors to know what they are planning and make the first move.

Avoid Pitfalls: Some pitfalls to avoid include:

  • Compromising quality for quantity
  • Excessive self-promotion
  • Not understanding social media trends and requirements

With these best practices, you can reap the fruits of success through effective brand management on social media.

Why Businesses Choose LinkedIn


LinkedIn is the most famous social media among business people with best practices. It is the only network that offers users the facility to market their products and service. Advertising is an essential best practice that is highly recommended for small businesses. LinkedIn offers its users free tools for marketing online as a best practice.

LinkedIn Advertising Tools

Business people can create their own advertisements to target audience according to age, gender, industry, company title, job title and other criteria. When advertisements are created, they automatically appear on the profile or home page of other members. This increases B2B opportunities and increases best practices. Advertisements contain texts, images and links to other URL’s.

There is a price for using LinkedIn for advertisements, just like other social networks. It can be CPC (Cost per Click) or CPM (Cost per Mille). However, using LinkedIn has greater benefits because ROI (Return of Investment) increases drastically. Therefore, using LinkedIn serves as a business best practice.

Business people on LinkedIn have to take advantage of white space. Put display images of your products, services and other best practices. Otherwise share videos or put blogs, articles and links to other affiliate websites.  You can also share your company web page or employees profile pages. Most business people have a “Like” tab to share LinkedIn pages on Facebook. This best practice helps people and the business at the same time. Customers get more information while you advertise (or get advertised) when customers share your page.

Exploit Advantages of Your Company’s Web Pages

When business owners share their company page on LinkedIn it serves as a window for outsiders. Customers can see inside your company and know about your products, services and best practices. If the company is hiring, LinkedIn has a ‘Career’ tab that allows member to know that there is vacancy. They can also find out what positions are available and apply. In addition to this best practice, LinkedIn also allows business people conduct regular analytic evaluation of success and failure rate. The ‘Service’ tab provides this option.

So far, it has been estimated that LinkedIn has as many as 150 million members. The social network keeps growing, and connects people looking for opportunity to make more money. Ensuring compliance with best practices however, cannot be compromised.

LinkedIn Mobile

Now there is a mobile version of LinkedIn available for business people who are constantly on the move. It was launched in 2008 February to give people access to LinkedIn on mobile devices. LinkedIn is accessible by business people from 200 countries. Therefore, the mobile application is available in six different languages to assist with best practices. These are English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and German.

In 2011, LinkedIn introduced the new application ‘CardMunch’ that allows business people to scan their business cards. The scanned card can be saved as a contact list for business best practices. Since then the use of LinkedIn via mobile devices has increased to 400%.

This has makes it the best business social network.

Five Best Practices for Businesses on Social Media


When businesses people use social media there are some best practices that become obligatory. They help business owners evaluate the progress and improvement of the business. These practices also increase the trust of customers in products and services. Moreover, these best practices assist in decision making.

In order to simplify the process of gauging the success of a business on social media, there are five recommended best practices.

Best Practice 1: Dedicate Time

Those who keep a ‘To-Do List’ know that it is a never ending list of things. There never seems to be enough time to attend to social media. That’s only half of the problem. Perspective also matters. Unless one thinks about social media as the key to success, it won’t work. Business people need to think about social media with a new perspective. It is an opportunity cost rather than strategy to promote. Therefore, it is important to understand that social media investment will require more input. One must dedicate more time to social media.

Best Practice 2: Overcome Fear

There are some misinterpretations about the use of social media that have implanted fears in business people. Healthcare professionals for instance fear social media; however that is changing. The truth is that there are some risks associated with social media. However, there is some extent of risk associated with every decision we make in business. Therefore, not overcoming the fear is absurd. In order to succeed with branding, social media is very important.

Best Practice 3: Listen, Research, Learn and Contribute

You have to work with the right keywords. Search for them and create a list. The key words must represent your product and services in the market. Check conversations and comments that people are sharing about your brand. Use all social media platforms if possible.

Best Practice 4: Make an Impression

It is true that for social media content must be captivating and quality rich. However, ignoring the appearance for the content will be a mistake. Your representation and presentation of information shows customers you ability to offer a lot. Share pictures and information about the products and services you are marketing.

Best Practice 5: Engage Your Audience

Customer perspective matters a lot on social media. What they think about your business influences success and failure of the business. Communication is the most important best practice on social media. Therefore businesses must use blogs, articles and videos for customers. Some blogging best practices are recommended for communication on social media.

Make sure to reply comments customers leave on your web page. Remember also that customers rely upon information they receive. Therefore, it must be authentic and genuine. From the business perspective, the new approach of marketing has been very effective since the coming of social media.

Following these best practices will make your brand one of the best one within a short time.

5 Simple Steps to Determine ROI via Social Media


Return of Investment (ROI) comes as a surprising development to most business people who are new to social media. That’s because the results are often astounding. This is particularly applicable to those business CEOs, Managers and Marketers that implement best practices effectively. To appreciate the importance of social media and its influence on ROI there in need to understand what ROI means.

What is ROI?

Return of Investment is a means to measure the efficiency of investments. It can be a single investment or multiple investments. To calculate it, divide the return (profit) from the investment by the cost of investment. The ratio obtained can be expressed as a percentage for best practice purposes.

Therefore, if an investment has a negative ROI it is an indicator that investors should not undertake the investment. Similarly, if other investments have a higher ROI, those should be favored over one with less ROI.

It is a best practice for business people to remember that the definition and method of calculating ROI can change. This depends on the circumstances and form of business it is implemented in. However, there is a major con of the flexibility with ROI calculations methods. That is, the result can be expressed in many ways. Therefore there is need for extreme precision in the use of inputs. One must understand what metrics are being used in best practices.

Therefore, Social Media ROI will be calculated as:

ROI on Social Media

Here are five steps to know the actual ROI businesses earn on social media with best practices:

  1. Evaluate Expenditure on Social Media: This involves determination of cost incurred on hardware and software. Of course, access to social media is via the internet that is not absolutely free.
  2. Evaluate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Most company owners ignore this best practice without realizing how important it is. Having this knowledge helps one to make better decisions knowing what keeps customers engaged with the business.
  3. Find Out How Many New Customers Social Media Provides: This requires you to track conversions and use Google Analytics and other applications available. Although this is a time consuming process, it is a required best practice that cannot be ignored.
  4. Establish Impression Value (IV): To know how well your brand is known on social media, there is a simple calculation involved. Obtain the number of impressions visitors have made on your social media page. Add the impressions on every social media network you are on (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc). The formula is as follows:
  5. Evaluate the Customer Service Value: Using social media reduces cost of customer service. No matter how little it may be; it accounts for something. Once you have evaluated the cost use the following formula:

These are the best practices required for determination of RIO via Social media. They are recommended for every kind of business on social media.

How to Gauge Your Social Marketing Strategy


Social marketing depends on much traffic you are attracting. The larger the traffic you attract, the greater the success. That means you have to check how well your relations with people are on a regular basis to monitor best practices. However, it’s not always about the traffic. There are other aspects of social media that play an important role in marketing. Most business people do not know how they can gauge the influence of social media on their business. There are some simple best practices that can help gauge effectiveness of social marketing strategies.

Input Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric scale that was established by Fred Reicheld in 2003.  It represents customer loyalty and must increase. An increase means that you are building good social relations and winning the trust of the customer.

The best way to evaluate this figure is by using applications designed with best practices to detect customer loyalty.

How to Calculate NPS

Before one can calculate the NPS, customers have to be classified into three categories. These are:

  • Promoter Customers: These are those customers who share your information on social media. By hitting the ‘Like’ button on Facebook or ‘Follow’ button on Twitter they are promoting your business.
  • Passive Customers: These are customers who visit your website, but don’t do much. They read, buy and move on.
  • Detractor Customers: These customers are dissatisfied and don’t like the best practices offered. They criticize the products and services if they are disgruntled.

An effective way of using social media to find out more about what people think about your brand is to ask them. You can do this by posting a poll question on Facebook, “Do you like the brand? Rate it for us to let us know”. Use applications to get ratings to your questions. It works like a voting system and provides a measure of the company’s performance. Customers respond by entering a response on the scale of 0 to 10.

Promoters Customers: These people rate the business between 9 and 10. By referring your company to others they add to the growth of the business.

Passive Customers: They rate the brand between 7 and 8. These are people who are happy with the brand but are not enthusiastic enough to recommend to others.

Detractor Customers: These customers rate the brand between 0 and 6. They are unhappy with what they got, and can harm your reputation. They can impede growth of the business through negative word-of-mouth.

The Net Promoters Score is calculated using the total percentage of promoters and percentage of detractors.

NPS        =             Promoters % – Detractors %

Consider the picture below showing a question and the polls received.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) in this case will be: 21.4% – 75.2% = – 53.8%. This means the brand is not doing well with regards to best practices in social marketing.

Therefore, there will be need to improve the products and services to get a positive NPS.

Best Practices to Increase Speed and Performance of Your Business Website


Website management is a crucial best practice for every business enterprise. Potential customers visit business websites to get information about what they need. If web pages load very slowly, or fail to load, it increased the risk of losing potential clients.

The secret every online business must know is that the first thirty seconds of a visit on your web page is the key to success. Within thirty seconds, a potential customer will decide whether to leave and search for another business or stay. Therefore, you have to make sure that you web pages are not just captivating, but they work really quickly. Here are things you need to make you website efficient.

Limit HTTP

Approximately 80% of response time (by end-user) is spent on downloading content of the web page. This includes images, music, style-sheets, flash and scripts. Limiting HTTP requests is the key to making web pages work fast. Keeping the web page design simple is important. Therefore, use practices that allow use of rich designs and content without compromising speed.

Apart from this, combining files is also a helpful strategy in limiting HTTP. The best way to accomplish this is to combine all CSS data into one style-sheet. This improves response time to a great extent. Implementing the “CSS Sprites” method is the most recommended best practice for IT professionals and web developers. This means combining all background images into one, to display the image segment you want. Moreover, using image maps and inline/embedded images also help limit HTTP requests.

Content Delivery Network

Setting up multiple servers dispersed across various states is also helpful. The user’s immediacy to the web server also affects the speed at which web pages work. Best practice to achieve this is to implement geographical dispersion of content. Redesigning the content is not as helpful as building a network of servers. Once this is achieved, synchronizing the data will make user interface more effective.

Cache Control

Using a cache control header is an important best practice. There in need to ensure compliance with two rules:

  • Apply “Never Expire” as the policy on expiry of headers for static components.
  • Apply an appropriate cache control for headers of dynamic components.

Caches reduce the size of images and rich web content.

Use Gzip Components

Implement the use Gzip compression reduces the time taken to transfer HTTP requests across a network. Of course, the end-user’s bandwidth also plays an important role, but compliance with Gzip components reduces time taken for servers to respond to HTTP requests.

Use Stylesheet in Headers

Compliance with this best practice ensures that the page loads progressively and quickly. Even if the end user has a slow server, web content can load. It generally improves user experience without wasting time.

Use Scripts in Footers

Java script is better when it’s at the bottom of the page. Scripts often obstruct parallel downloads. This allows end users get more than one download at a time. The script loads quickly and the server can manage multiple hostnames at the same time.

These are some IT practices that increase speed and performance of websites used by businesses.

In this section we will discuss:


Contact Links
Copyright 2009 Best-Practice.com. All Rights Reserved.