Start Me Up! School for Creative Startups Showcase event 23/24 March

This month we are really excited to be a part of the School for Creative Startup’s inaugural event The Startup Showcase, the UK’s premiere startup festival for creative entrepreneurs.

MyCake’s founder Sarah Thelwall will be facing every creative person’s money nightmare, the issue of cashflow head on in her Saturday talk.

Further details on the website:

Cashflow – What you need to know, Saturday 23 March, 1 – 1.45pm

The School for Creative Startups, Startup Showcase

23^rd and 24^th March | Somerset House, London|

The beautiful embankment galleries at Somerset House will be transformed into a totally unique marketplace showcasing over 100 rising creative talents and industry stalls, running alongside an inspiring professional development talks series hosted by some of the brightest minds in the UK as well as a creative skills workshop programme.

Advanced tickets can be booked now at a discounted rate of £5 for adults and £3 concession on our website www.thestartupshowcase.com

SPEAKERS INCLUDE: Michael Jacobsen, Patricia Van den Akker, Sophie Cornish and other leading industry experts.

WORKSHOPS INCLUDE: Millinery, Activating your Business Mind, The Art of Perfumery,  Speed Portfolio Reviewing, Crafting Raw Chocolate and much more…

Tickets

Advanced general admission tickets can be booked now at a discounted rate of £5 for adults and £3 concession on our website www.thestartupshowcase.com or on the day for £7 for adults, £5 concession or £12 two day ticket.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

iZettle keeps cupcakes moving with Crumbs and Doilies

No cash on you but you really need a cupcake? We think what iZettle are doing for small businesses like London based cake bakers Crumbs and Doilies is pretty darn brilliant. Instead of a costly card payment machine iZettle offers businesses a portable solution that plugs into a mobile phone or similar device, it takes card payments via a card swipe app that just needs a wi-fi or 3G connection.

Crumbs and Doilies used to disappoint possible customers by saying they didn’t take cards, but using iZettle has meant they never have to miss out on a sale. This type of embracing of technology is so important to keep a small business moving.

”It’s so handy because it is so portable.” says Jemma Wilson, Crumbs and Doilies founder. “I can take it to any of our market stalls and, provided there is wi-fi or 3G, I can take card payments at last! It’s slick and stylish. And people always remark on what a good idea it is.”

Yes we think it’s a great idea too!

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Make Art Pay

Episode 1: Katharine Morling – 9 years In this new series of videos Artquest presents three artists and makers who, focussing particularly on the issue of money, funding and finance, look back at their careers and consider what has worked for them when investing in their businesses, getting commissions and selling work. In the first episode of Make Art Pay, visual artist Katharine Morling looks back on the past nine years since she has set up her business. Providing a wealth of advice for artists, she talks about the best way to approach galleries and how to make a portfolio career work. An episode of Make Art Pay will be released weekly, each focusing on a different practitioner at a different stage in their career.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Fashion for Profit

Fashion for Profit: Learn how to take control of your cashflow and profit margins

Thursday 19 April 2012 – 2pm to 5pm

At Cockpit Arts (Holborn). Tickets: £50 workshop only, £100 workshop & mentoring session

This interactive, practical workshop, delivered by Sarah Thelwall from mycake.org, is ideal for designer/makers and entrepreneurs  in the clothing, accessories, textiles or jewellery sector that want better control over their finances and an understanding of how cash flows in and out of their business.

SPECIAL OFFER!

After the workshop session, we are offering participants the opportunity to benefit from an additional two hour one to one mentoring appointment with Sarah to review  your own business’s financial forecasts.This session will be scheduled separately at a time to suit you. Booking the workshop and mentoring together represents a saving of £50!!

Register to attend on the Fashion for Profit eventbrite page

For more events and workshops listings from Fashion Angel http://www.fashion-angel.co.uk/events-and-workshops

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Client payments made easier with new Kashflow add-on GoCardless

Dawn Lane of Your Office Online, tells us about how the new GoCardless add-on in Kashflow and MyCake is going to make her business cash flow so much easier to control.

Have you seen the latest Kashflow Changelog sent out on 7^th February? No – you need to because it will make taking payments from your clients/customers so much easier.

Kashflow has started to use an additional piece of software called GoCardless, which allows users to ask clients/customers to set up direct debit payments for their invoices. This is going to make any business’s cash flow so much easier to control, the fees charged are considerably less than Google Checkout, PayPal and many of the other Merchant Account/card processing companies (GoCardless charges 1% of transaction up to £2.00 maximum), and it will make it easier for clients/customers to make payments – no more entering of card details, writing cheques or remembering when the payment date is to do BACS transfers, it will all be done automatically.

It is so easy to set up too. All you need do is send your clients a direct debit mandate to complete (a once only process), which will have a maximum monthly limit set on it.

How do you do this? First of all you need to set up your GoCardless account. Within the book-keeping part of MyCake go to Settings > External Services > GoCardless. Once you click on that link you will be taken to the Direct Debits set up page. Click on the ‘Create an Account’ button and fill in all your details as requested. Once you have done this, GoCardless will email you your account log in details and you can start setting up your clients’/customers’ accounts to take direct debits.

To do that you need to go into your Customers’ accounts. When you open up one of the accounts you will see under Invoices, Quotes and Stats a link to set up a direct debit mandate. Click on this link and fill in the required details and send to your client/customer via email.

The client/customer receives an email, with a link to GoCardless – this will enable them to complete the process with their bank details. They will then be taken to the Direct Debit instructions and guarantee page (the usual one you get when setting up any direct debit). Once they agree and click the continue button, they will be asked to pre-authorise monthly payments up to the amount agreed and asked to choose a password to access their own GoCardless account (this will tell them what you have billed them and what they have paid).

To finish off the process, they then confirm these payments and they will see a screen advising them that the payment has been set up. You will also get an email advising you the direct debit has been set up and what the limit it is set at.

From then on, when you invoice your client/customer each month, you will be able to take the payment from your end up to the amount agreed. Once you have taken the payment, your client/customer will also be sent an email advising them that this has been done. Simples!

For more information follow this link: http://www.kashflow.com/blog/simple-and-affordable-online-payments-with-gocardless/

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Better late than never: tired of waiting for clients to pay?

Waiting a long time for clients to pay you for your work could have dire consequences for your cash flow as the days and weeks fly by. I’m sure we’ve all had at least one client through the years who has avoided swift payment of our invoice. The UK government are looking at ways to introduce flexible measures to help improve small business finance, they are also being urged to look at doing more to create a culture of making prompt payment the norm.

A group of industry bodies unite to take on late payment by putting pressure on business minister Mark Prisk to address the issues of late payment culture in the corporate sector. A recent survey by Graydon UK confirms that late payments are a persistent problem and barrier for growth for SMEs in the UK and the government should be doing more to tackle this.

Back in March we gave you some advice on the Things You Need to Know about late payment penalties and interest, we hope that was useful and that having to navigate late payments will soon be a thing of the past if controlled and avoided properly.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Creativity + Money Skills = Success

Would you like a monthly injection of free ideas about money and finance for your creative business?

As you know Lateral Action and MyCake have teamed up to deliver the Money for Creative People course but if you’re not sure you’re ready to spend your hard earned cash on the course yet then why not dip your toe in the water and make use of the free resources?

If you click on this link you’ll be taken to the Lateral Action page to sign up for the monthly money tips and you’ll also be given free access to two other resources:

1) The eBook on the 5 Mistakes Creatives Make with Money – The story of Jay and Oscar, two creative people with the world at their feet, who discover that a few small decisions and actions can have big consequences — creatively and personally as well as financially — as the years go by. The book concludes with an explanation of the 5 Big Money Mistakes you need to avoid if you want to succeed as a creative business owne

2) The audio seminar on the 5 Essential Money Skills for Creative People – a 75-minute audio recording full of practical advice to help you achieve your creative and commercial ambitions, by showing you how to avoid the typical ‘money mistakes’ made by creatives (as described in the ebook) – and what to do instead.

Topics we cover include:

• How to earn a good living from your creativity without selling out
• What Mozart thought about money
• How keeping regular accounts can change your life (seriously)
• Why your reasons for charging low fees are almost certainly bad ones
• What to do about crap clients
• Why you shouldn’t try to sell to everyone
• How to keep your expenses in check

The 75-minute seminar is in MP3 format so you can download it and listen on your preferred media player.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Using benchmark data to help you set Key Performance Indicators

We’ve had quite a few conversations both with funders and other stakeholders such as Local Authorities and with individual arts organizations on this topic recently so we thought we’d open up the debate a bit wider.

Background

As the funding jam gets more thinly spread there seems to be a greater focus on the accountability of the funders and their responsibility to ensure that they are achieving the greatest/largest/best/most sustainable outputs for the funds (public or private) being made available. In some funders this goes as far as to become a set of contracts where the term is ‘investment’ rather than ‘grant’ as the former has a greater sense of expectation of some form of return on that investment.

There is increasing talk of ‘impact’ not just in arts funding circles but in academia and other sectors in receipt of public funds. We’d suggest this is part of the same trend. On one level this is nothing new, there has always been measurement. The difference this time around is that unlike the boom times the consequences of not achieving the KPI’s are less likely to be a discussion about setting more realistic/appropriate objectives and there’s a greater risk of disinvestment because the terms of the contract have not been met. If an organization is to avoid this scenario then clearly the task is to set targets they feel confident they can achieve whilst making them ambitious enough to be good value for money.

When we are talking about topics in which both funder and arts organization are experienced then setting KPI’s is not too tricky. There is however far more focus on increasing the earned income than we’ve seen previously and it is reasonable to expect this to turn into pressure from key funders such as the Arts Council England, Creative Scotland and the various Local Authorities to set higher and more challenging targets for this area.

The risk then is that arts organizations feel pressurized to set higher goals and if they don’t have enough experience in the areas of income development they select then they risk over-committing themselves. How can we avoid this? Well for a start you need to know your own business model inside out and backwards. This means looking at several years of profit & loss sheets and having a good think about which areas of development have a reasonable chance of delivering earned income growth. If you want some stimulus material to help you start thinking about this try Capitalising Creativity, LUX Leveraging Leadership and Size Matters.

Once you are familiar with your own data the next question is how good are you vs. your peer group and vs. those who are one level up in terms of size of organization and total turnover. You can of course ask your peers to share their P&L data with you, you can also download some of this sort of data from the Charity Commission website (look up each organization by name to get to the details). The work of Culture 24 on a benchmark for digital activity, the work of MyCake with the Culture Benchmark and RFO Benchmark, the annual benchmark of private investment in culture run by Arts & Business and Audience UK’s development work on benchmarking (soon to be an online benchmark) are also routes to these comparisons.

Irrespective of the route you take the sorts of questions you want to use comparisons to other organizations to answer includes:

• How does my mix of grant, earned and other income stack up against my peers i.e. what’s the overall mix on average, and how does it compare to the ‘best in class’ • How do my sources of earned income compare?

• Comparing my organization just against organizations of a similar size/geography or sector are there any obvious gaps in our business model e.g. if it looks like others are achieving income from their intellectual property and you are not then is this an area to develop?

• If there are pressures to develop particular strands e.g. private donations then what is this actually likely to be worth for an organization of your size/sector/geography i.e. it works well for larger organizations but does it really work well for smaller ones? Trusts & Foundations seems to be a greater source of income for visual arts organizations (perhaps because they don’t charge for tickets???) than for performing arts so if you are in the performing arts you certainly need to compare just within your sector … I suspect Charlotte Jones (ITC Director) would go further and say that you need to compare just to your own type of performing arts organization ie youth theatre vs. youth theatre not vs. large venues

Can you use comparisons to do more than look at earned income?

Sure! The question is one of finding appropriate sources of comparison data. The data we hold in the Culture Benchmark and RFO Benchmark certainly enables you to compare all your sources of income as well as all your costs, so does the data you can download from the Charity Commission.

Comparing non-financial information starts to get a little trickier as less is published. Folks like Audiences London run ‘snapshot London’ and the various audience development agencies tend to have their own versions of this sort of thing. The tourism agencies such as Welcome to Yorkshire run monthly stats on visitor figures to a wide range of tourism venues (including cultural ones). Of course Arts Council England runs the annual RFO survey and publishes the aggregated data on this. For simplicity here at MyCake we’ve replicated the RFO data form so that you can benchmark your audience and organisation structure data and make use of the advanced filters that we can deliver through online benchmarking that you simply can’t do with excel. As ever it is about picking an appropriate profile for the comparisons.

There have been a variety of projects funded by the Arts Council England and others to help review the state of a sector or activity. For example Culture 24 has been funded to gather data on digital activity of arts organisations, this would provide a very good start point for setting KPI’s for your organisation in this area.

So, in summary, in our view you need to have high quality and specific data on a topic, sector or area of work in order to be able to set appropriate KPI’s. Whilst this is not an issue for areas of work you’ve been engaged in for some time it is more challenging when entering new territory. There are sources of data, some more accessible than others but all useful in discussions with funders and stakeholders about what level to set the KPI’s at.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

What reports should I run in my book-keeping system?

One of the benefits of using a proper book-keeping system as opposed to a set of excel spreadsheets is that there are usually a whole set of reports which you can run on the data without having to invent complicated charts for yourself. MyCake is no exception to this. In recent conversations with users we’ve been asked which of the myriad of reports should folks be looking at regularly (monthly or quarterly) so here’s our take on that.

First of all you need to check that the data you’ve been entering is being categorized correctly (otherwise the reports won’t be accurate or useful).

There are two things you need to check:

• The chart of accounts – you can access this via the settings section under ‘Lists’. You need to run down the list and check that each code is set to the appropriate income or cost heading. If that sounds complicated just look at each one and ask yourself if it reflects money coming in or money going out? Then make sure that it is correctly allocated to an ‘income type’ or an ‘expenditure type’
• If you are self employed you also need to check the self assessment report. This is in the tools & reports section under general reports. Click on the ‘code mappings’ button and again go down the list of income and expenditure headings and make sure they are allocated into the appropriate line of the self assessment report (the SA lines are clearly defined to help you do this)

Now that you’ve confirmed these are set correctly print out a copy of your profit & loss (in the reports section) and the self-assessment report and check that they match up. They should!

Ok, now that we know that the data you’ve been entering is being allocated to the right headings we can look more closely at the monies coming in to and going out from your business. There are a few reports you’ll want to look at, indeed you could add them to the ‘favourite reports’ section so that when you check one you remember to check the rest!

With most of these reports you can set the date range (in the top right hand corner) and download the data to excel should you wish to. We are just going to focus on what the report is and how it is useful to your thinking

• Monthly income – this is very useful in terms of spotting annual patterns or sales cycles in your business. What is your busiest month? What is your quietist month? Is it the same each year?
• Income by source – this is particularly useful if you attend trade fairs and want to track which fairs lead to the greatest amount of sales
• Income by customer – this gives you a pie chart of the income you’ve achieved broken down by customer. So if you are wondering which 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your income this is the place to look.
• Unpaid invoices report – so you know who to chase!
• Income by product – if you make products this is a very useful report to show you which products are selling well and which are not. You will have a gut instinct on this topic but why not check it against reality!
• Expenditure by outgoing type - what are the types of expenditure that are responsible for the greatest costs to the business and are they the ones that add value or are they just eating up profit?
• Monthly expenditure – checking that the trends here have some relation to the trends in your monthly income and that expenses are not getting out of hand.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Money For Creative People – is LIVE

Hurrah, we’ve made it to the launch. Here’s the link to the product.

In our view selling yourself short is as bad as selling out.

Money for Creative People is an in-depth guide to financial management for your creative business, covering everything from cultivating a balanced mindset about money and creativity, through to assembling a team of experts to help you, the nitty-gritty of doing your accounts, and making the big strategic decisions that can grow your profitability and make your business rewarding in every sense.

It’s designed for the very particular needs of creative business owners:

Creative freelancers of all kinds
Independent artists
Creative entrepreneurs
Owners of small-to-medium-sized creative businesses

(If you’re an employee, this isn’t the course for you. There are some excellent guides to personal finance out there, but this isn’t one of those — it’s a guide to business finance for creatives.)

We start with the bit most books on business finance leave out — your mindset. We’ve already seen why this is particularly important for a creative business, so we’ll teach you to adopt the attitude that distinguishes people who succeed financially as well as creatively.

We’ll then walk you through the process of setting your financial house in order, starting by assembling a team of expert advisers and choosing a structure for your business. Next come the basics of recording your accounts, budgeting for the year ahead and making cashflow forecasts.

After that comes the really interesting stuff — where you analyse your financial figures and make informed decisions that will make your business more profitable and sustainable. We’ll also show you how to make meaningful comparisons between your business performance and others in your sector (Sarah has collected some eye-opening data via MyCake to help you do this!)

So, if you’d like to take advantage of our launch offer ($97 instead of £147) sign up here.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.