Erasibo

Congratulations, you’ve landed a new contract a public sector institution (PSI). This may have not been your first time being awarded a contract from a PSI, so you feel confident that you will manage this contract successfully and get paid on time.  You deliver the the service to specification and contract terms of reference. You have reasonable expectation that you will receive payment on time, as outlined in your contract. This however turns out not to be the case. What are your options to getting what you earned?

Firstly you need to understand that the South African government has as its policy intention the aim of both growing the economy and redistributing the countries wealth through its own procurement processes. This implies supporting SMMEs to become involved in the delivery of public sector programmes. This applies equally whether your service is a high end strategy for government or a catering facility.

After much failure and criticism about the way the public sector operates, government being led by the Presidency and National Treasury are driving forward performance improvement approaches in the public sector to do away with issues like late payment and weak contract management. There is a clear understanding by the leadership in government that there are many within the public service who don’t do their jobs as required and thereby slow down the overall process of transformation in the country. These people hide behind the power of their institution. The leadership in government have started cleaning house and putting into place systems to allow you to complain better so that they can improve the functioning of the public sector. Recently,  the Presidency has signed Performance Agreements with Ministers. The plan is for all the accounting heads of government agencies to be tied into this Performance Agreement process. The intention behind these agreements is to link the political structure together with the delivery structure. However government is still notorious for being a poor payer and hamstringing small business, especially small black business, by paying late or not following their own procurement procedures on supply chain management.

Small companies have to think carefully about their options to recoup what is owed to them. They have to think carefully because the legal route is expensive and long drawn out and in the meantime you are burning up your cash reserves.

So what can you do in addition to following the remedies in your contract? In most cases your contract would specify an arbitration clause which should be followed first. We’d like to suggest a combination of tactics that are not mutually exclusive from each other. The tactics we suggest are intended to place pressure on an institution to quickly resolves and prioritise your issues, otherwise you might end up being a low priority.

You need to make sure that your payment is being held back for reasons other than non performance. The approach we are spelling out only works for issues where non payment is linked to a SCM violation by your public sector client. You as the owner of your business needs to determine whether you need a soft strategy to get your funds out from your non paying client – and this is typically favoured where your cash flow is not being eminently threatened by the non payment, or a hard strategy where you are weeks or even days (in the case of SMMEs) away from cash flow woes.

Other contract related matters such as contesting of results require more specific specialist intervention i.e. get a good contract lawyer. Contact us and we can recommend a few if you need referrals.

1.     Do a situational analysis: Important questions and steps before you decide on a course of action:

• Examine your contract to see if the terms and conditions are clearly outlined and that you have met these obligations.
• Where deviations or changes to the contact have taken place, do you have approval of these confirmed in writing by the client. If no,  a client could contest that these were required and not pay for the changes or resulting contract deviations.
• Have you invoiced according to the specifications? You need to make sure you invoiced using the correct procedure spelt out by your client. you also need to make sure you have provided them with all your substantiation documents – e,g, some contracts require an auditors sign-off on the invoicing.
• Before taking any action you need to formally approach your client about the delayed payment. You need to ask in writing of your contract manager where your payment is. If you get no response we suggest contacting their finance department directly to enquire about your payment. All too often what has taken place is that your late payment is as a result of someone not pushing through the payment on time. If this your problem, a friendly reminded of payment should get your funds through to you. Simple.

  The simple route is always the best route, relations are important and you always want to keep them going. However if you can’t access your contract manager or get assistance from the finance department you are left with limited options and cash burning out, in this instance consider the following further steps.

2.     Go to the head of the organisation: Once you have confirmed that you have both a payment and communications problem with the client go to the institution’s head. Don’t wait, the institution’s head is the accounting officer and is responsible for dealing with late payments. Please remember that late payment for a PSI is an issue the Auditor General’s office will want to know about. It is in the interest of the agency’s head not to have the AG asking questions about simple SCM issues.

Write a calm letter to the head of the institution explaining in detail the problem and your attempts to resolve the issue, and appeal for their assistance. We also suggest that you copy the letter to your contract manager. You should notify the contract manager so that the contract manager can feel some pressure from your approach to the institution’s head.

If appealing to the agencies head does not resolve your issue. You have a few more options available to you.

3.     Going to the reporting National Department: Your next level of complaint is to go directly to the reporting department.  For exampl,  if your client is a Sectoral Education Training Authority (SETA) their reporitng department is the National Department of Higher Education and Training,  and if your client is a municipality, their reporting department of is the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA). You can find out who the reportng department is for your client by vising your client”s website and looking at their annual report.

Once you’ve identified who the reporting department is, you need to know who to speak to within the department. You either contact the Chief Director under whom the agency reports or if this is not clear complain directly to the Director Generals office of that department.

In your letter, stipulate your facts in detail, as in the case with the head of the agency previously, but this time include the facts around your request to the head of the agency failing to provide you with resolution. As in the previous action copy the head of the agency and your contract manager on the communication with the national department.

By now you should be getting a response from your client. They wont want you to be causing waves, impacting on their performance agreements by showing them to be inefficient.

If however you still do not get resolution you now need to escalate the matter to the highest structure you can, outside of the courts, and this is the relevant Minister’s Offices and the Portfolio Committee in Parliament.

4.     The Presidency, The  Minister and Parliament: It sounds daunting – the idea of sending anything to the President, a Minister or to  Parliament. Remember they are accountable to you, they actually do want to hear from you because ultimately you are the end user of what they deliver and you can vote them out.

Parliamentarians also like to find issues to hold government agencies accountable. They can be a great leverage point.

You need to copy your letters to the head of the agency, the Chief Director and Director General, to the President, the Ministers Office and to a member of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee that holds oversight over the agency you are struggling wit, notifying them that:

• The agency is in breach of SCM rules,
• They have not paid you for services you have rendered. If they have used your work without paying for it – there could also be copywrite violations
• The damage being caused to your business and
• The interest being accrued by the agency in question on the outstanding payment, which is a wastage of public funds.

You can email the Presidents Office on: president@po.gov.za or try the Presidential hot line on 17737. You can find the contact details for the Minister’s Office on the relevant national department’s website – we suggest calling the Ministry and asking for the Minister’s PA’s email address and you can find the details for the relevant Portfolio Committee at Parliament by visiting www.parliament.gov.za and searching for “committees”.

If your payment difficulty is truly down to incompetence or inefficiency or even just spite on the part of your client, but you have stuck to the terms of the contract, this process should see you exert enough pressure on the agency to see you paid on time.

This article was published in Your Business Magazine

Getting Paid by Government_DecJan 2011_Your Business Magazine

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The rest of the videos are available here .

If you woke up feeling 2011 was going to be the year you took on the world and capitalized on the fact that you have come through the recession intact, think again if running a small business is what you do. If the Amendments to the Labour Relations, Basic Conditions of Employment, Employment Equity and Employment Services Acts come into being, you might have to seriously reconsider if it is viable to remain in business or not.

If your business model is based upon the employment of employees on a temporary or casual basis, than your business will come under attack. Ensuring that all employees, outside of much defined circumstances, will under the new Act, be forced to be made permanent. This will have drastic impacts on certain industries, especially service related industries where income and job security is linked directly to performance of employees.

Bet you didn’t factor this “unknown known” into your strategy planning.

South Africa historically has been pro-employer. Since 1994 workers have seen their rights entrenched and empowered under the South African constitution, various pieces of legislation and institutions such as the CCMA. South Africa is no longer viewed as pro-employer, however because of the rights won by workers and the high level of “labour action” these rights allow workers, South Africa is described as a country where” Cost competitiveness has been jeopardized by insider dominated wage bargaining..”

Now South Africa has a set of draft Amendments to most of the significant labour relations legislation. We want to touch on what are the implications of the Act and how will this affect your business?

The Amendments were tabled to address the undermining of general conditions of employment of workers that occurs through companies outsourcing their employment of employees via labour brokering firms.  The unions argue that labour brokering is equivalent to “a form of modern slavery” and further that in order to ensure “decent work” for South Africans, the term “decent work” needs to be synonymous with “permanent” employment and that labour brokering should be banned outright.

While, nobody wants to perpetuate “modern slavery” and surely everyone is entitled to “decent work” the Amendments being debated heatedly have high implications for the way you do business. It must be pointed out that many countries use a combination of approaches that allow fixed-term contracts to play their legitimate economic role while preventing abuse. The concern with the Amendments

Some of the key issues you should be concerned about as a business owner are:

• The amendments preclude the employment of foreigners over national citizens. If your business runs on the employment of foreign nationals, this practice will now be illegal and heavy penalties will be enforced.
• Ensuring that all fixed/temporary contracts become permanent and all employees are directly employed by a company as opposed to intermediaries, such as labour brokers, places increased risk on companies. Companies will need to seriously prioritise posts needed which will affect the number of people they will be able to hire within the confines of the required minimum wage and conditions of services.
• There is the possibility that as many  jobs could be at risk if employers chose to convert current temporary contracts to permanent ones. Coming out of an economic recession, where industry is risk averse and not confident of growth, job losses will seriously impact on the country. These job losses don’t just mean increased unemployed, it means less consumers to consume the services and good being sold by particularly small South African businesses.
• The amendments would violate the Constitution of South Africa; in that it would infringe on the right to choose a trade, occupation or profession freely. An employee could also not choose temporary employment as an option. This will have huge impacts on for instance, women, who need to work on a temporary basis to cater for the care of children and young people working informally to support themselves through university, etc
• The amendments across the Labour Relations Act (and other linked labour specific legislation) could destabilize institutions such as the CCMA and UIF by significantly increasing the workloads on these intuitions. These institutions will have to increase their capacity, which in the meantime will result in huge backlogs in unresolved cases. In addition to the cost of capacitating these organizations which will be borne by the State, businesses will have to cover the cost of maintaining employees of suspension for longer periods of time.
• If the amendments go through unchanged, your business could be faced with the situation where you need to let go of your current workforce and be fighting several claims at the CCMA.

These amendments could very well be a game changer. How does one plan to expand your business not knowing how drastically your rules will be changed? The unions need to start getting to grip with the concept of the bottom line, if there’s no bottom line there’s only the welfare line.

There are other ways of regulating this practice – that could even do away with the labour brokering all together, not that this is really a good idea to start with. Why use a stick when a carrot could work. Were no alternatives considered, such as tax breaks or quick access to business support financing, should they not be considered?

So what can you do about all of this? Should you shut up shop now fearing the worse? Don’t despair, should this amendment go through parliament it won’t come into effect immediately and there are still legal avenues for challenge, avenues that lead all the way to Constitution Hill and this probably where this fracture between business, government and the Unions will be splint.

If you are a business that makes use of temporary workers, you must start planning for the changes to the labour brokering environment that will be coming in the near future.

In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools’ dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.



Presentations from BUSA and SACCI on SMME access to finance.

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Developing countries are notorious for poor labour market conditions (Ronconi, 2008). While most developing countries have extensive labour regulations and social security systems, compliance in the less developed world is generally low (Ronconi, 2008; Strobl & Walsh, 2003). A key problem affecting wage earners in developing countries is the issue of law enforcement, particularly the enforcement of legislation pertaining to minimum wages. There is a burgeoning literature on the problem of non-compliance amongst employers with minimum wage laws in developing countries (Basu, Chau and Kanbur, 2007; Andalón & Pagés, 2008). Indeed, if non-compliance persists in a labour market, the effectiveness of legislation in raising actual wages is unclear. Whilst regulatory non-compliance is clearly represented by a violation amongst employers of, in our context here, minimum wage laws, the measurement of such compliance can prove difficult. A standard way of measuring non-compliance is the fraction of all covered workers whose wages are below the minimum. However, this measure does not distinguish between different degrees of violation. For example, a wage just below the minimum is counted the same as a wage at one third of the minimum, surely an inexact way to measure a violation of regulation. Given this drawback, this paper presents an ‘index of violation’ as a measure of both the degree and extent of violation of minimum wage regulations in South Africa. Having attempted to quantify non-compliance associated with wage regulation, some of the correlates of violation will then be considered. This paper contributes to the literature on the issue of non-compliance with minimum wage regulations in developing countries, and is the first attempt to undertake such an analysis for South Africa.

Click to download the report.

The President has made aggressive changes to his cabinet. Out are well established ANC cadres like General Siphiwe Nyanda; who has had suspicion dog his Ministry since he took over, Membathisi Mdlalana and Barbara Hogan. Elevated up the Ministerial ranks are the fwo former ANC Youth League Presidents, Malusi Gigaba and Fikile Mbalaula.

Ladies and gentlemen of the media
Fellow South Africans

Today marks the beginning of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) African Women’s Championship hosted by our country, featuring eight of the best African women’s soccer teams.

We congratulate Banyana Banyana on winning their first game in this competition today, in Daveyton where they played against Tanzania.

This is a good start and we trust that it signals greater achievements for our team in this tournament.

We have spent 17 months in government since the inauguration of the President of the Republic and the appointment of the National Executive.

We have completed the process of the reconfiguration of government, and that of putting in place systems that will help us change the way government works in order to improve service delivery.

During this period, we also had time to study the functioning of the current administration in order to ascertain what works and what needs to be changed or strengthened.

We are guided by the mission of our government, which is to improve the quality of life of all South Africans especially the poor, working with all our people.

Access to basic services is still as important as it was when we attained our freedom in 1994.

Given the fact that we still face serious challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality in the country, government has to work at a faster pace to change the lives of the poor.

Our people need to see a visible improvement in the delivery of water, electricity, health care, education, social security, civic services, safety and security and a host of other basic needs.

We have the resources, including skilled and experienced senior staff, who have to ensure that these services reach our people, under the leadership of their Ministers and Deputy Ministers.

We reiterate that we need a national executive and public service that knows where our people live, who fully understand the needs of our people and what we are trying to achieve.

We have taken a long and hard look at some of the departments with a view to strengthening some ministries.

We have noted that a few of them require the addition of deputy ministries to assist Ministers in carrying out their responsibilities.

Education is a top priority of this government. We have seen it prudent to strengthen the skills and human resource development sector by appointing a Deputy Minister to assist the Minister of Higher Education and Training, given the size of the portfolio.

The Performance Monitoring, Evaluation and Administration Ministry also has an expansive mandate which includes performance monitoring and evaluation, youth development, government communications and marketing as well as general administration in the Presidency.

A Deputy Minister is being appointed to assist the Minister to manage this over-arching portfolio.

We have mentioned before the intention to electrify at least one hundred and fifty thousand homes each year in the country.

As of 31 March 2010, the total number of households still awaiting electricity, including informal settlements, was estimated at more than three million.

In addition, we have to ensure security of supply in our oil and gas sector. This busy and strategic ministry will also now have a deputy minister.

The mining industry has been the foundation of economic development in South Africa for well over a century.

In 2009, the mining industry contributed more than thirty percent to the country’s total export revenue, and employed two point nine percent of the country’s economically active population.

The Mineral Resources Ministry will be expanded with the addition of a deputy ministry to enable it to take forward its responsibilities.

New appointments

After careful consideration, I have decided to make the following appointments of ministers and deputy ministers, in no specific order:

Communications

Minister: Mr Radhakrishna “Roy” Padayachie
Deputy Minister: Mr Obed Bapela.

Social Development

Minister: Ms Bathabile Dlamini
Deputy Minister: Ms Maria Ntuli

Public Enterprises

Minister: Mr Malusi Gigaba
Deputy Minister: Mr Benedict “Ben” Martins

Arts and Culture

Minister: Mr Paul Mashatile
Deputy Minister: Dr Joseph Phaahla

Public Works

Minister: Ms Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde

Water and Environmental Affairs

Minister: Ms Edna Molewa

Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities

Minister: Ms Lulu Xingwana

Sports and Recreation

Minister: Mr Fikile Mbalula

Presidency: Performance Monitoring, Evaluation and Administration

Deputy Minister: Ms Dina Deliwe Pule

Correctional Services

Deputy Minister: Adv Ngoako Ramathlodi

Trade and Industry

Deputy Minister: Ms Elizabeth Thabethe

Economic Development

Deputy Minister: Mr Enoch Godongwana

Energy

Deputy Minister: Ms Barbara Thompson

Health

Deputy Minister: Dr Gwen Ramokgopa

Higher Education

Deputy Minister: Ms Hlengiwe Mkhize

Home Affairs

Deputy Minister: Ms Fatima Chohan

Labour

Minister: Ms Mildred Oliphant

Mineral Resources

Deputy Minister: Godfrey Oliphant

Police

Deputy Minister: Makhotso Magdeline Sotyu

International Relations and Cooperation

Deputy Minister: Mr Marius Fransman

Public Service and Administration

Deputy Minister: Ms Ayanda Dlodlo

Rural Development and Land Reform

Deputy Minister: Mr Thembelani “Thulas” Nxesi

We extend our gratitude to the outgoing members of Cabinet for their contribution to government and the country.

Some have served in government for many years and we trust that they will still put their expertise at the disposal of the country.

Some of the outgoing members are to be deployed in other tasks in government.

We congratulate the incoming members of Cabinet as well as the Deputy Ministers and wish them well in their new responsibilities.

The new team will be sworn into office tomorrow at 2 pm.

I thank you.

Source: The Presidency

Issued by: The Presidency
31 Oct 2010

Image: Reuters

By Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen

Date posted: 28 October 2010
View this article online here: http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/572.1

The Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) occurs in a deepening economic crisis; expressed most notably by the loss of over 1 million jobs in the last year. The prognosis going forward is dire, with government estimates on reaching our developmental goals painting a worrying picture.

According to official projections, as a society, we are unlikely to narrow the income gap, nor reach our employment targets. If there is a silver lining in South Africa’s Millennium Development Goals report it is that government has achieved or is likely to achieve in the areas of schooling, water and sanitation in terms of targets, but certainly not in terms of quality. The bleakness of the picture going forward is an important reality check to understand the policy responses from government, in the MTBPS.

The dominant reading of the MTBPS is that it has steadied the ship, or as National Treasury calls it “rebalancing.” A virtuous cycle of lower debt, higher tax collections, improved economic growth and consequently, employment, define government’s response. The message of both weathering the storm, and charting a new course is the succinct one from government. More to the point, that with the tabling of the much anticipated “New Growth Path” government would intervene to improve the quality of economic growth, with a singular focus on employment creation.

There is some substance to this perspective. The National Health Insurance and proposed reforms to social security indicate a conscious effort to provide income and non-income support to South Africans. Moreover, there are incremental, but important steps to link budget expenditure to trade and industrial strategy.

Ever vigilant against the threat posed by corruption, the National Treasury further provides practical steps to strengthen anti-corruption measures.  Overall, government expenditure increases by 8% over the next three years, thus providing a cushion against cutbacks in social spending. Government has taken the tough choices, argues this reading of our economic policies.

But, has government really taken the tough choices?

A more demanding reading of the MTBPS would argue that given the projections on social indicators and the political climate, a space existed for reforms that reach deeper.

The argument proffers that through a combination of slower deficit reduction and interventions to weaken the Rand, an opportunity for structural change exists. Obviously, the assumption is that government would spend a higher deficit effectively, and that an export orientation will propel economic growth and job creation. The feasibility of this reading is supported by responses to the economic crisis internationally, that has seen governments raise debt, support longer-term investments and tax so-called “hot money.” The intent to do all of this is expressed in the words of our Finance Minister, but without a detailed policy mechanism. To rephrase a popular expression – we are letting a crisis go to waste.

Whatever one’s reading of the MTBPS, there is common cause that many decisions are still in the making. Most notably, the details of the “New Economic Growth Path” are yet to enter the public domain. This feeds a perception that the Zuma administration has been indecisive on key economic policies. The rescheduling of the Cabinet meeting to discuss and finalise the “growth path” suggests that this is a criticism that the Zuma administration has listened to. However, time is not on our side as a country, as we attempt to stop job losses, and widen economic opportunities. The central failure of the MTBPS, thus, lies not in the technical details, but rather in economic governance.

This years’ MTBPS, yet again, commits government and social partners to reaching a “social compact.” It is a commitment that has been heard since the Mbeki administration, and even though several agreements have been reached, there has been little movement towards reaching a compact in society that increases the possibilities of effectively dismantling poverty, unemployment and inequality.

The compact envisaged would be deeper than agreements, for example, in the Growth and Development Summit under President Mbeki. The depth of the agreement would be achieved through selecting policies, which on the best evidence, accelerates the economy and accelerates economic inclusion. In turn, it would require significant concessions.

This leaves not only the National Treasury, but our entire society in a policy wilderness. For instance, despite wide support for a weaker Rand, there has been little discussion on the exact mechanism to achieve this, as no process has been developed to facilitate this discussion. Similarly, there are other policy areas, especially on industrial policy, that require a more open and contested policy process. In a sense, government has not yet played the role of a ‘developmental state’ that leads society and makes choices in partnership with its social partners.

The entry of government’s “growth path” document offers a significant opportunity to create a credible, open and results-driven public policy process on economic policy. There are two conditions that government must meet to achieve this.

First, it requires a level of political leadership on equality that we have not yet experienced in South Africa. It requires navigating class, race, gender and other divides that diverge opportunities for fairer income distribution. At its core is recognition that to meet not only our development targets, but also the end result of a fairer society, will require greater innovation in our public policy. Today, across the globe, several experiments on redistribution offer a set of examples on how governments can make policy choices that are widely shared across income distribution. To use the idiom that Minister Gordhan used “Ke Nako – Now is the time.”

Second, and consequently, the metaphor to guide this discussion is that of the “little guy.” Current indications from the official press releases on the “growth path” suggest a strong place for larger, formal and export orientated firms. These bigger firms have a crucial role to play, but are not the only channel to boost economic growth and employment. Smaller enterprises, start-ups, informal businesses and organisations delivering public services (e.g. early childhood development) are voices largely absent from national economic policy. In building the links between large and small firms the prospects for greater levels of decent work are enhanced. However, it requires more deliberate interventions in areas such as development finance and competition policy in addition to other areas to create a more level playing field.

The MTBPS can thus be praised for being a hard win in a context that offers few building blocks to make bolder decisions. However, time is not on the side of the poor and more broadly, the country. A conscious attempt to finalise economic policy that has the best prospect to break unemployment is needed, and such policy should be integrated within government’s policy and budget by the next MTBPS in 2011.

Whilst researching SMME’s on Twitter, I came across the SME Survey 2010 tweetnote presentation of Arthur Goldstruck’s. This in turn lead me to great template resource page on the SME Survey website. They have pretty much every template a SME could need. I’ve copied the page text below with all the links going back to the SME Survey website.

SME Survey brings you free SME templates. We have compiled a list of templates that we feel will be relevant to SMEs.

If you have a template that you would like to share with our community please email it to info@smesurvey.co.za with a brief description of the template. We will place it on this web page for other SMEs to download.

• Extensive Website Checklist
  Format: Word
  A very extensive checklist for your website.
• Rolling Budget Forecast
  Format: Excel
  A great excel spreadsheet for you to use to forecast your budget.
  Source: Microsoft templates adjusted for South African’s
• Extensive marketing budget to monitor channels and their cost
  Format: Excel
  An extensive spreadsheet that has a break down of different marketing media and columns representing months to track the budget over a year. SMEs generally use the most affordable marketing channels such as partner marketing, PR, Referral marketing, Outdoor and online. HINT: Your employees can generate alot of word of mouth for you if given the right incentives: make them your brand evangelists. If you download this template make sure you budget for  commssion for your employees i.e. see your employees as a channel.
• Events budget
  Format: Excel
  A fairly extensive marketing budget for events and a graph to show income and expenses.
• Comprehensive Marketing budget
  Format: Excel
  Includes all possible marketing expenses with a graph that tracks each expense line item of the twelve month time period
• Download a basic start up expenses spreadsheet
  Format: Excel
  A basic spreadsheet for you to determine your start up expenses
• Download your personal quarterly balance sheet
  Format: Excel
  A balance spreadsheet and graph for your personal weatlh
• Download a Loan Amotisation Schedule
  Format: Excel
  Plug in your details and the loan schdule appears
• Download a cashflow statement
  Format: Excel
  A 12 month cashflow statement with graph to track your liquidity
• Download a balance sheet spreadsheet
  Format: excel
  A quarterly balance sheet tracking spreadsheet with graph
• Download a break-even analysis spreadsheet
  Format: Excel
  Plug in your projected income and expenses and determine your projected revenue
• Download presentation that explains the process of working out ROI for the recruitement process
  Format: Power Point
  Guidelines in working out return on investment
• Download presentation on recommending a strategy to managers of your SME
  Format: Power Point
  Presentation that gives clear guidelines in recommending a strategy
• Download presentation on a marketing plan for a specific product
  Format: Power Point
  Basic marketing plan on introducing a new product/service
• Download presentation to show your SMEs financial performance
  Format: Power Point
  A great template to have to use for a presentation on your SME’s financial performance
• Download presentation for a quarterly monthly feedback meeting
  Format: Power Point
  Throw in your SME’s details and you are ready for that quarterly meeting
• Download presentation used to introduce your company to new employees
  Format: Power Point
  This is a nice template to use when you need to present to new employees about the company they have just joined
• Download basic company expense spreadsheet
  Format: Excel
  This spreadsheet shows the high level expenses of a business and it is a very basic expense spreadsheet.
• Download invoice template
  Format: Word
  This invoice template is for SMEs who do not have an accounting programme and use excel and would like a basic invoice template.
• Download quote template
  Format: Word
  This quote template is for SMEs who do not have an accounting programme and use excel and would like a basic quote template.
• Download comprehensive personal budget spreadsheet
  Format: Excel
  This spreadsheet has a fairly comprehensive personal budget spreadsheet with a graph to graphically track your cash position at the end of the month.
• Download SME electronic newsletter campaign checklist and plan
  Format: Word
  If you are an SME that that sends out an electronic newsletter to your customers then this checklist is a great way to double check you have tested all the various elements.
• Download a basic marketing budget plan
  Format: Excel
  This spreadsheet has a fairly basic marketing plan budget for any SME business decision maker who where’s the marketing hat in the organisation.
• Download Comprehensive guide to writing a good marketing plan
  Format: Word
  This Word document has a fully comprehensive guide to writing a good marketing plan.
• Download a website checklist
  Format: Word
  If you currently have a website or in the process of designing a website then here is a fairly comprehensive checklist for you to use,  to determine whether you have all the elements of a good website.
• Download a share of voice analyses spreadsheet
  Format: Excel
  This spreadsheet shows you how to calculate your share of voice in organic listings of the search engines. Please note before you can use this spreadsheet you need to compile all the keywords that are relevant to your website and group them in three categories, brand, generic and specific.