Programs Help Make Documenting Easier
Creating paper documents can be a chore, but software is available to make the task less onerous.
Need a contract, financial statement or debt collection notice? Small Business Fundamentals ($49.95) can provide sample documents and sound advice.
This CD-ROM from ModelOffice (https://www.modeloffice.com or [800] 801-3880) offers help spanning the life cycle of a small business. It goes from starting a business to managing it to selling it.
The advice sections don’t just tell you about the documents you’ll need, the way a book would. They link you right to them, so you can open them with your word processor, tailor them to your needs and print them out. The program also comes with spreadsheets that you can open with Excel to do your own number crunching.
The product comes with its own browser that makes it easy to find the document you need among its more than 2,000 spreadsheets, tools and guidelines.
Click on the Retail Business Plan folder, for example, and you’ll find information and sample documents to create a business plan and help with such topics as protecting your assets, copyrights and trademarks.
In many cases, the documents are based on an imaginary business, and you can rewrite them to suit your needs. It’s not as easy as filling in the blanks, but it allows you to see how an expert would write the document before you try to tackle your own document for yourself.
Each chapter or section comes with a set of Excel spreadsheets for number crunching for determining gross profits, evaluating data for a business acquisition, figuring out business indebtedness and other matters.
Each spreadsheet file includes an explanation, a model spreadsheet and an area where you enter your own data. I didn’t go through every file (that would take weeks), but the ones I looked at seemed competently written and useful for many business owners.
ModelOffice also publishes other self-help small-business programs that use the same browser as the Small Business Fundamentals program.
2,001 Sales & Marketing Letters provides advice on how to sell yourself, your business and your products, and it also includes sample letters.
Another product, 8,005 Quotes, Speeches and Toasts, can help you become a more effective speaker. The program has quotes on a wide range of topics, from “the human condition” to “the nuclear issue,” and it offers sample speeches for anniversaries, benedictions, farewells, sales and marketing events and even funerals. It also offers advice on how to deliver a speech and increase its impact.
I would never recommend that you use a canned speech as is, but this product might give you some ideas and help spark your imagination. The speeches can easily be copied into a word processing program, so you can customize them to fit your needs.
In addition to these programs, there are plenty of sample business letters on the Internet--some available for free. Intuit’s small-business Web site (https://www.quicken.com/small_business) offers a number of free documents, forms and spreadsheets that you can use for business planning and management. You’ll also find sample letters and other documents at the American Express Small Business Center (https://www.americanexpress.com/smallbusiness), along with lots of advice on how to buy, sell and manage a business. And there are resources available from the Small Business Administration (https://www.sba.gov), including a directory of shareware files (https://www.sba.gov/library/sharewareroom.html) that includes a number of useful business programs, sample documents and spreadsheets.
Finally, consider something really radical--using your own words. Canned letters, speeches and documents are fine starting places, but if you know what you want to say, maybe you should just say it. If you’re unclear about format, punctuation and grammar, run your letter by someone whose opinion you trust. Be concise and make sure your documents are nicely printed on good paper. If you have something complicated or formal to say, say it in a printed letter rather than by fax or e-mail. E-mail is great for notes and short messages, but it lacks the impact of a formal letter.
Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX 1070. He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com or keyword “LarryMagid” on AOL.
