Accounting is one of the most arduous tasks a small business owner has to face – all you want to do is get on with the day-to-day running of things but each month you end up getting yourself lost in a mountain of receipts, bank statements, pay slips and credit notes.
The good news is, there is accounting software out there that can help, you just need to know exactly what it is you’re after to find the right software to suit your business needs.
More of us are working from home than ever before – the latest estimates show that a third of UK workers now do so exclusively from home.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show this increase”can be attributed to the formal announcement of national lockdowns in England and mainland Scotland in early January 2021″.
Technology has played a massive part in the work-from-home boom – businesses have had to act swiftly to a remote-first work force to keep things going. If you need some help with working from home, here are seven tools you shouldn’t be without…
2020 has seen us all spending a lot more time indoors than in previous years – and with so much time at home, internet searches have surged by between 50% and 70%, while streaming has leaped by at least 12%, according to preliminary statistics from Omdia, the tech research arm of Informa Tech.
Things were bad enough before lockdown when, globally, we spent a combined 7.5 billion hours online every day. This totals 856,164 years spent browsing – that’s long enough to travel from Earth to Mars and back again.
1,426 times!
So, how exactly are we spending so much time connected to the internet? And are we wasting too much time online?
Cyber security experts are warning us to be extra vigilant online, as the panic caused by the coronavirus crisis has seen a surge in cyber crime and online fraud.
And while anyone who regularly reads our blog will be all too aware of the dangers posed by cyber attacks* – which can cause everything from mild irritation to a full-on international incident – did you know that hacks are graded on their severity?
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – the part UK spy agency GCHQ we’re actually allowed to have sight of – has drawn up new framework for ranking cyber attacks in an effort prepare ministers, agencies and law enforcement for a major attack.
The frequency and severity of cyber attacks rose again in 2019 as hackers successfully attacked major cities, governments, businesses, hospitals, and schools across the globe – in October alone 421,103,896, data records were confirmed to have been breached, with 111 incidents in which sensitive and financial information was compromised.
It’s been a few years since the Wannacry cyber hack hit thousands of organisations worldwide, including the NHS, and brought the reliance on the internet and technology into sharp focus. While the events were more about hackers holding large organisations to ransom, many individuals could be concerned about whether their personal data might be at risk as a result of the hack. And the hackers are showing no signs of slowing down.
But how well do you know the web?
Social media has been around for the best part of 40 years – Usenet appeared in 1979 and is the first recorded network that enabled users to post news to newsgroups.
Although these Usenets and similar bulletin boards heralded the launch of the first, albeit very rudimentary, social networks, social media never really took off until almost 30 years later, following the roll out of Facebook in 2006.
So, what exactly is the state of social media in 2018?
The internet of things (IoT) is the name given to all those devices that are connected and communicate with us, each other, and compatible apps over the internet.
The idea of the IoT has been around for decades, at least since 1989 when the first connected toaster (!) was mooted at that year’s Interop Internet networking show – a year later, at the 1990 Interop, a Sunbeam Deluxe Automatic Radiant Control Toaster was connected to the internet, and so the fledgling IoT was born.
And now pretty much every electrical device you can think of is connected, from televisions, to printers, to fridges – and we all know the endgame is that the machines will one day rise up and take over the world, but that’s another story…
Social media has become a vital marketing tool for SMEs of all descriptions as it not only enables them to target their advertising directly to customers and brand advocates, it also allows for genuine interaction and can be great for customer relations.
And so popular have social networks become that last year, half of all SMEs in the UK increased their marketing spend on social media; higher than that of any other marketing channel
So here’s how SMEs are making social media work for them…