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Running a home-based business is a valued opportunity for employees to start working independently and create their own ventures. Today more and more American workers look at this opportunity. According to one of the IDC's reports issued in late 2012, there will be 14 million home-based freelancers and independent business ventures in the United Stated by the next coupe years. One of the main reasons why we have this tendency is that owning and managing a small business from home is made easier with home business solutions. With a single software solution installed on your computer you can plan, do and analyze your business activities.
Plan Your Business Tasks and Time
Home-based business management starts with task planning. Tasks represent the smallest pieces of work, they are easy to measure, manage and control. While your business plan provides a high-level representation of what your business is and what activities it involves, detailed task hierarchies and todo lists give you an idea of what actions you must carry out to do each of the activities, what business goals to achieve, and when it is the best time to do your tasks.
Task Breakdown
First, you need to plan out larger activities of your business and then break down each into multiple tasks and even tiny subtasks. The more detailed and task-rich your activity breakdown will be, the easier it will be for you to start acting right away after your todo plan is created and ready for implementation.
It is recommended to keep related tasks dependent on each other. In particular, high-level (parent) tasks get dependent on their low-level (child) items or subtasks. Related tasks that do not belong to the same level or sublevel in your hierarchy can be also linked to each other. In such a way you can create a kind of activity network in which each element refers to other element(s), so you always know what task to do next after the previous one is done.
For example, in CentriQS's task management solution you can set predecessor-successor relationships for tasks to create dependency and sequence your jobs. Each task can be divided into multiple subtasks. Links will let you relate different tasks to each other or even to other entities (such as files, projects, schedules etc.) within your database. Your task breakdown can be planned according to how you are going to do your business.
Priority and Scheduling
Even after the activities of your home base business are broken down into smaller tasks and subtasks, still it is not clear what task to do first and when. Certainly, some tasks can be organized and sequenced logically, for example the task "Call client" comes up after the task "Get client's phone number". Other tasks, however, need to be ranked and scheduled, so that each hour or day you will know what items in your todo list go first and when they must be started and completed.
 CentriQS solution provides you with several priority types for ranking your tasks and also allows you to set time estimates. You can set priority levels (from Lowest to Highest), organize tasks by numeric priorities (from 0 to 999), and also rank items by A, B, C or D (Urgency-Importance Matrix). In the "Estimate" field you can enter the time you estimated for task completion. Besides, you can add your tasks to the Scheduler to set start and finish time (duration), create daily agendas, and manage appointment calendars.
Set Your Home Business Budget
Budget represents an estimate of costs, revenues and resources your home business will deal with over a specified period. When your budget is accurate and complete, the business will less suffer from uncertainty and risk. Planning for an accurate budget estimate requires you to focus on three key points, which are Costs, Revenues and Resources. And home business solutions allow you put all of your budget and accounting data together in one place, so you will always know how much money you really earn, what expenses you need to cover this month, and plan for future spending.
Keep Costs, Revenues and Resources on the Right Track
Costs represent the amount of money you need to cover in order for your business to operate. Taxes, electricity, equipment are some examples of cost accounts you need to consider for paying. Revenues represent the income generated from your business activity, for example working as a freelancer you generate the revenue from selling your articles online. Resources reflect your knowledge, time, finances, and physical abilities and skills that let you do business from home.
Project Budgeting and Tracking
When you begin to carry out a project or task, first you need to make sure that this project is budgeted sufficiently, that is the costs, revenues and resources are estimated and considered. With help of home business software, you can get a list of your ongoing projects with the details on their budgets. In the Project view in CentriQS software, all items are provided as a spreadsheet with multiple columns. You can create the fields "Costs", "Revenues" and "Resources" for your projects and then get them displayed as columns on the spreadsheet. In such a way you can keep track of your projects' details and compare them with your original business budget.
Build a Client Base
Any kind of business deals with clients (buyers, sellers, contractors etc.). The way how companies organize and manage the data on their customers determines the accuracy and speed at which they deal with the customers. Usually organizations use complete CRM solutions to create and manage all information on their clients.
Your Client Records Wrapped Up in a Database
When you run your business from home, you also need to keep record of your clients. A customer base needs to be built and updated on a regular basis in order to help you manage your client records. If home business solutions are in place and you look at actively using them for managing customer relationships, then creating a solid client base won't be a challenge for you. Specialized software solutions let you wrap up your client records in a single database. You can use your laptop or desktop PC to access the database, make updates and generate reports.
A Complete Home Business Solution
CentriQS lets you create and manage the records on your customers in a single database. Actually in this database all of your business data can be stored, organized and linked the way you need. CentriQS offers a complete home business solution that helps you plan, do and analyze the activities of your venture.
Detailed Customer Profiles
In the Customers view of your database you can create a profile for each client and specify it with a number of properties, including Name, Photo, Email, Phone, and more. Client profiles can be related to other entities available in your database. For example, you can relate your profiles to entity 'Product', so that when you open a client profile a list of products ordered by this particular client is displayed. Besides, files, web pages, and email addresses can be attached as hyperlinks to this profile.
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