Business Management Courses: SBA Free Online Courses
The SBA "Small Business Administration" offers links to an impressive array of more than 40 free, business-related courses. These online courses cover many areas of managing your small business, including finance and accounting, marketing and advertising, e-commerce, and international trade.
Many of these courses were developed in co-operation with universities and regional small business development centers.
The typical course is self-paced and should require about half an hour to complete. That's a nice bite-sized chunk of knowledge, perfect if you find it difficult to squeeze a lot of time out of your business day to invest in training.
All courses are free. Most require registration that shouldn't take more than a minute or two to complete.
Business Planning: Planware
If you don't plan your business, you're planning to fail. An important part of business planning is forecasting your financial outlook. This includes both financial statements and cash flow.
Typically, the financial projection will show the likely future financial results of the business. A projection will usually cover the next five years. The first year or two will show results on a month-by-month basis, while later years show only annual estimates. At a bare minimum, the financial projection will show details of future cash flows. An integrated financial projection will also show future income and expenses and balance sheets.
Many banks and other financial institutions have developed financial projection model spreadsheet templates or software apps that they distribute at no cost to loan applicants.
If you'd like an alternative to your bank's Excel template, consider Planware's solutions. It offers free Excel templates both for financial projections and for cash flow planning. The company also sells more sophisticated versions of these financial models. Free, limited trial versions of other business planning apps are also available.
Project Management: Basecamp
If you need to work with others on a business project, such as creating a customer proposal, then Basecamp could be just the simple project management solution you need to help everyone stay on track.
Basecamp is an online service that is particularly suitable for coordinating the efforts of a geographically dispersed project team. Members of the project team can keep up-to-date by logging into the project site, by subscribing to the RSS feed, or by e-mail.
You can post messages in a project forum and collaborate on documents in progress using the Writeboard. You can also set up project milestones and to-dos to help stay focused on the task at hand.
Basecamp's free service is limited to one project with two Writeboards. Paid plans are available to handle multiple projects and Writeboards and to add additional services such as time tracking and online file storage for shared documents.
Web and E-mail Hosting: Microsoft Office Live Basics
Microsoft's Office Live Basics lets a small business establish an online presence by providing a domain name along with the capacity for managing a good-sized Web site and a couple of dozen e-mail accounts.
Office Live Basics will appeal most to small businesses that do not have a Web site and want to establish and manage one. Unfortunately, if you already have a Web site you can't upload it to the free Basics service.
While a professional Web site designer would chafe at the limited template design options available, the templates make it easier to develop a simple site even if you know absolutely nothing about the HTML code for a Web page. Some handy interactive Web components, such as a forms submitter and a site search engine, are also included.
The free advertising-supported Office Live Basics provides a domain name you select along with Web site storage that can hold up to 500MB of data and e-mail management for up to 25 accounts with 2GB of storage each. Paid editions of Office Live offer greater capacity and additional services such as uploading an existing Web site, document sharing, and contact and time management.
2 u From : PCWorld.com
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