"Homebased business"used to bring to mind images of ladies sewing up casserole dish cozies while their kids were at preschool. Now, wiith estimates of the number of homebased businesses in America reaching 38 million, that image has to go.

Entrepreneur magazine claims that American homebased businesses generate $427 million in revenues each year -- an average of $63,000 per year for each home business that generates revenue, according to IDC.

Not only are the numbers significant, but most homebased businesses are successful, too. 70% of new homebased businesses are still around after three years, while only 29% ofother kinds of startups survive that long.

There are plenty more numbers where those came form, but they don't change the fact that many people are still imagining that lady making casserole cozies when they think of home businesses. That means that some will expect to pay less for services from someone working at home, will be more casual about paying at all, or may in other ways offer homebased workers less professional respect.

How can you avoid having your clients think of you as some nice guy who does a little work on the side? Make sure that your homebased business looks professional.

• If you don't have an office, then your website can be your place of business. Make sure it's a professional web site.  
• Your email address needs to be a professional one, too, with an @yourbusiness.com address rather than @aol.com or @gmail.com.
• You can use your home phone number or a cell phone -- just try to avoid having lots of homelike background noises (childrem TV, dogs) when you answer it.
• Use a professional ebilling system like SmartPay to send invoices, rather than typing something up or writing it by hand. SmartPay gives you a customized secure portal for a very professional look.
  
• Keep office hours -- or look as though you do. You can work when you please, but answer your phone and schedule meetings only during regular working hours for your industry. If you can't answer your phone during normal working hours, make sure you have a professional-sounding message on your voicemail.
  
• Don't expect clients to accept excuses about childcare, exams, or other personal issues. Even if they don't mind, it reinforces the idea that you're just working in your spare time.
• Pay attention to packaging, advertising, and other elements of your brand -- a consistent look shows that you're serious about your business.
  

Even if being homebased is part of your brand identity,use a consistent look in your website, payment portal, business card, and advertising to convey your professionalism. "Fresh from the Farm Kitchen!" or "Your Mobile Mechanic: Our Low Overhead Means You Pay Less!" are great business messages, but "I do this in my free time for fun, so I don't really care if you cancel appointments with me" is not.

There's a new medical experiment going on, and it doesn't involve any mice.

A growing number of physicans have chosen to take up an insurance-free practice. These doctors refuse Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance, and bill patients directly.

Your first thought might be that this is a luxury service, but it doesn't end up working that way. Here's why:

The typical medical practice spends 65-70% on overhead, much of which is for the special and elaborate paperwork and negotiations involved in billing insurance. According to a survey in Health Affairs, the average American doctor spends 43 minutes a day on insurance paperwork, in addition to the support staff's time spent on it. This paperwork is for the insurance companies or Medicare/ Medicaid, not for the good of the patient or the practice -- and Health Affairs estimates the total cost at about $31 billion each year. 

The typical medical practice also does 90% of its work at pre-negotiated discounted fees. The insurance company negotiates lower prices on the services, and pays the doctors less. The patient's savings over private billing is based on their ability to pay the lower fees the insurance company has negotiated for them.

Physicians who switch to direct patient billing can lower their overhead and charge the discounted fees directly to the patients -- often ending up with a better bottom line than they have when the vast majority of their work is done through insurance.

Add electronic invoicing, which routinely improves collection of fees by 32% or more and reduces staff and storage requirements, and physicans can earn more  with a smaller staff and a smaller space. A more patient-centered practice, a less stressful office environment, and quality care for uninsured as well as insured patients are the results.

At present, just under 2% of U.S. physicans run insurance-free practices.  The number is growing, though. The experiment has been largely successful for those who've tried it, and some experts are suggesting that this new trend may solve the problem of shortages of medical professionals, as well as offering more affordable health care to patients.

 

We know that e-billing is less expensive, more secure, and more environmentally responsible that paper billing. But we were a little bit surprised by thye results of Aspen Marketing's study on a company that gave customers the options of using EIPP or paper billing.

The study, which looked at records of 8 million customers at a large corporation, compared customers who chose online invoicing with those who chose to pay their bills by mail. This large study turned up some statistically significant differences between the two groups. 

First, e-bill users are more faithful. Paper bill users were 12.5 times more likely to leave for another service. Among those who had automatic recurring bills, the number was even higher -- they were 14% more faithful. Even though these consumers chose their method of payment, it's possible that e-invoices were convenient enough to give consumers a more positive feeling about the company -- perhaps without their analyzing the feeling much.

Second, those who chose electronic invoicing are 35% more likely to pay their bills on time. Those who used an automatic recurring bill were a whopping 86% more likely to pay those bills on time. That was no surprise to us. Study after study -- and the experiences of our clients, too -- show that quicker turnaround on payments is a primary benefit for e-invoicing.

Here was a result we did find surprising: electronic bill users buy 20% more products than those who stick with paper bills. It's possible that more affluent consumers are less resistant to e-invoicing, but the study didn't find any significant differences between the two groups apart from their billing choice.

Again, the overall sense of convenience may just give these consumers a happy feeling about companies that offer the electronic payment option.

Shouldn't your company be one of those companies?

Tonight we will be gathering together as Tweeps for a cause at the second annual FargoTwestival.

Thank You! to all of you who have made your donations and bought your tickets. We have not only reached our original $500 goal but we have surpassed our second goal in just one week. As of this writing, we're providing supplies for 26 children, and we're not through yet!

There's still time to buy a ticket for tonight's Twestival.  Your $7 donation will buy school supplies for a needy child for a quarter of the school year -- $28 buys school supplies for the whole year. Do the math and help as many kids as you can: every donation equals a ticket to the Twestival.

When we see you at Jitter’s you will see a physical representation of the help we are providing to those who truly need our help. Not to mention the chance to see the people you have been tweeting with, the volunteers, and the great selection from Jitters.

As an online community we have proven the power of our online connections and the powerful impact we have as a group. We can make the world a better place.

Tonight is the night and you can still purchase your ticket online or at the door! Beginning at only $4 you can help a child with the supplies they need to go to school. Look at what we can accomplish! I think we have destroyed the misconception that Twitter is a “time waster”.

See you at Jitters 1414 12th Ave N, Fargo 6:00pm to 8:00 pm Feel free to park in the NDSU “T” parking lot. They do not monitor after 4:30pm

In 1995, people talking about the future of money were predicting confidently that checks were on their way out, and that by now we'd all be using electronic billing systems exclusively.

We were also going to have flying cars, right? And live in space, wearing jumpsuits. 

It made sense, fifteen years ago, to assume that online invoicing would be the norm by now. Everyone agrees that it's cheaper and safer, and most people agree that it's  more convenient, too. It's certainly more environmentally responsible. In the 1990s, the numbers of people using such services were doubling annually, a trend which would have led to universal EIPP by now had it continued.

In the 21st century, adoption of EIPP continued, but a bit more slowly. In 2005,  69% of American households paid at least one monthly bill online. In 2007, online payments outstripped checks. People in the west and the south (where the most e-savvy consumers live, according to people who track these things) now make as much as 80% of their transactions online.

Nearly universal buy-in for EIPP is a reality now in Finland, we're told.

But for the United States as a whole, only 42% of transactions take place online.

Consumer demand is still the main reason businesses choose to offer electronic inovicing, and consumers are usually ahead of businesses on this, though more businesses choose to pay their own vendors electronically (when they're being consumers)than offer the service to their customers.

Consumers overwhelmingly prefer to pay their bills electronically, in spite of lingering concerns:

• 15% don't understand how it works, and therefore feel nervous about it.
• 51% choose to pay bills online for environmental reasons.
• 44% do it for the convenience. 

And yet the average wired American consumer pays bills in three different ways every month: 11 online, but the others with mailed checks or in person, usually because online payments aren't an option.

Why don't businesses offer e-invoicing, even when they choose to pay their own bills electronically?

Concern about costs and the effort of shifting over are the most commonly cited barriers.

It's probably the same with the flying cars. 

Call us at 701.356.9010 to discuss any concerns you may have about e-invoicing; we'll be able to reassure you. Flying cars? Maybe not. 

SmartPay is an intentionally green company. One of the reasons, in fact, to go with SmartPay electronic invoicing for your billing needs is that it cuts down on paper waste, fuel (no mail to be delivered), and toxins used in preparing ink, paper, and copy machine toner.

But sometimes people question this. "What about the electricity for running your computer?" they ask. "You can't think that e-invoicing is completely green if you use electricity for it."

We're glad to see people thinking about these things. We've thought about it, too. Here's our answer:

• The great majority of the fuel use for computers isn't the electricity used to run the computer, or even the electricity used to run the servers that stay on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week keeping things going. It's the electricity used for cooling the machines. Some studies estimate that two thirds of the electricity for computers is actually for cooling. Whatever we do to help slow down climate change -- including reducing our use of physical resources like paper and fossil fuels -- can help.
  
• Once your computer is on and running, it won't use any more fuel to run SmartPay than it would to run the spreadsheet, word processor, and printer you used to use to create those paper bills. In fact, turning off the printer can save as much energy as turning off your computer would.
• Energy-efficient computing is more about limiting the size of your monitor, giving up your screen saver and powering down when idle than about how much you actually use your keyboard. This is only relevant to billing if you actually wrote your invoices out by hand, though, since you probably used your computer to make paper bills.
  
• Having lots of software on your machine, on the other hand, can increase energy use, and can also slow down your computer. If you have lots of programs that you no longer run, or lots of unneeded files, consider taking an afternoon to clean up your computer. Give it a tune-up now and then, too, and you'll find that it runs better and you may get more done in less time -- thus reducing your energy usage.
• SmartPay is web-based, not software that runs on your computer, so it doesn't take up extra energy. The internet is an amazing energy-saver, and it runs much more efficiently now than it used to. Nearly anything you do on the web uses less electricity that the comparable task done without the internet.
• Having said that, we should also now suggest that the good-luck message email with music, a power point, and 17 large images that you were just about to forward to 200 of your closest friends should probably not be sent at all. If would take less energy than printing it all out or recording it and putting it into envelopes and sending it in the mail -- but you wouldn't do that, would you?

SmartPay is a green choice, and thoughtful, informed computer use is also a green choice.

What's it like to use SmartPay?If you're not yet one of our happy customers, you might have wondered.

Jennifer Rise shared her experience at last week's seminar, and we're glad to share it with you here, too.

702 communications provides broadband and phone service here in Fargo and Moorhead. They provide data and network solutions for businesses, and digital TV as well as VoIP services for residential customers.

702 used to send out all their invoicing communications on paper. This meant that they prepared and mailed out paper bills, of course, but they also had to manually key in recurring bills each time and send them out, send out reminders, and even make reminder phone calls. 

Automating much of this has allowed the staff to turn their attention to more important and more satisfying tasks.

SmartPay provides the level of security 702 needs (very high) and also helps with customer integration. These factors give SmartPay additional value beyond the obvious one of getting the invoices out. 

Here are the results 702 has seen now that they use SmartPay:

•  Payments received have increased by 21% since they began using SmartPay in August of 2009.
• They're saving an average of $1.11 per statement.
• They have the complete security their industry demands.
• Their response rates are faster.
• They can upload payments and invoices daily, because the process is so fast and easy.

We asked Jennifer "Why SmartPay?"

"Very few systems out there have the type of billing we need," she explained. SmartPay is clean, simple, and modern. The customization gives 702 the look and feel that they want, and integration with the other systems they use was easy.

 We appreciate 702's willingness to share their experience with us, and with you. Now, you can contact SmartPay to find out just how it would work for you. 

Everyone can be a publisher now, or a filmmaker, or a recording company. Thanks to the internet, anyone can also now be very much like a bank or a credit card company, using computer code to create a means of accepting payments online.

Where banks and credit card companies used to be the only ones that could process payments, there are now many other options. 

There are advantages to this. Just as it can be very liberating to let everyone in on the opportunity to create books and films and recordings, it can be liberating for everyone to have the chance to accept payments.

But, let's face it, there's a lot of very poor quality content on the internet. It used to be that a writer, filmmaker, or musician had to be good enough at least to convince a company to make the investment to produce their works. Now, the increasingly level playing field lets amazing independent artists reach their audience easily -- and also lets untalented people send their stuff out into the ether freely. 

Just so, the increasing number of options for electronic payments opens the door for small companies -- and for scammers. People get more accustomed to the convenience of paying their bills online, but also more nervous about who they're dealing with when they make those transactions.

How can your company  get the benefits of the new possibilities in e-invoicing without suffering from the new dangers associated with it?

At SmartPay, we've chosen to stick with credit card and ACH bank transfer payments. You can choose your own merchant account, or go with our partner InterceptEFT, as you prefer. The level of security remains as high as if your customrs dealt directly with the bank or credit card company.

You also have a secure custom portal, so your customers know who they're dealing with and where their money is going. They can check their records easily, and they aren't shunted around from one site to another. They can feel completely confident when they trade with you.

But you also have the degree of control that you want and need. You get the fast turnaround that lets you keep costs down and the high efficiency that keeps your systems lean. That's good for your customers, too. 

We at SmartPay are keeping up with the new advances in EIPP, and we'll make sure that our system remains agile and responsive to these new opportunities -- without sacrificing the security and confidence we're known for. 

 

Chances are, you're thinking about switching to electronic billing if you haven't already done so -- most companies are.

You may have questions, though. How much will it really save? How difficult is it? When's the best time to make the switch? What are the up-front costs, and how quickly will we recover those costs? How much of a difference will it make for the environment? What about security?

Fargo businesses can get the answers to these questions and all the others we haven't mentioned, directly from the people who know the answers.

SmartPay, in partnership with InterceptEFT, will present a seminar next week. "Save Money, Save Time, Go Green: Learn how paperless billing will benefit your business" is the theme of the presentation, and there is no charge. 

When: Wednesday, February 24^th, 2010, noon to 1:00 p.m. Registration begins at 11:45
Where: Hilton Garden Inn, 4351 17th Ave So, Fargo, ND map

Onsite registration begins at 11:45, but you can register online.

E-billing saves time and money, it's more secure, and it speeds up payments. It's also a greener choice. Paper currently makes up 40% of the waste stream in America, so anything that reduces paper use is going to have benefits for the environment.

 There are other ways to save paper, too, and we'd like to share some with you. If you like the reductions you've made through electronic invoicing, you may be ready for some more ideas. 

• Use both sides of all papers. Use "duplex" mode for making copies. Put paper with only one side printed into the re-use box before passing it along to the recycling box. Cut up papers you've received with one clean side to make scratch paper for the office. Half-used paper can go through your fax machine and your copier safely, as long as you're diligent about removing staples.
• Choose not to print things. Sensitive information is better off in your password-protected files than on paper. Cover sheets of faxes, agendas that can be projected rather than printed and distributed, and confirmation sheets are just a few examples of written materials that really don't need to be printed.
  
• Help people shift from paper to electronic information by making it easy. Simple things like naming files with transparent names and saving them in folders can make it easy enough to access data that people won't feel compelled to print it. Searching for a file named "something like 1136wassu, somewhere on my computer" is the kind of experience that leads people to make and file unnecessary copies.
• Use thinner paper. Paper is sold by weight. A heavy bond may be needed for certain jobs, but lighter weight paper uses less raw material. Consider switching when you can.
• Use smaller images, or a smaller font size. Your document may take up fewer pieces of paper if you simply design it to fit on one sheet.
• Try to make your decisions before you print. Some of us write a document, then print it and proofread it on paper, and then go back to make corrections and changes on the screen. Instead, email it to a colleague for proofreading, and make corrections on the screen before printing it out. If you have trouble imagining how your document will look on paper, save it as a PDF file and check the look before printing.
  
• Certainly, buy recycled paper and recycle the paper you use. But don't focus on recycling to the point where you don't feel a need to be efficient about your paper use.
  

These habits will become so natural after a while that you won't have to put extra thought into them. You can just enjoy the savings.