How can Chatter help the SMB?

Chatter is the latest in social media for the enterprise from salesforce.com. It is now generally available as of June 22, 2010. When people talk about the benefits of chatter it is generally in the context of a larger enterprise; Phrases like 'break down silos', 'increase communication', 'foster collaboration' are frequently heard. What is not as often discussed is the SMB market. At first blush you may think, why would I use chatter when I can just talk to the person beside me?

I can think of some good uses of Chatter for an SMB.

 

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Can we get more bang for our buck?

Previous blogs discussed how to get a handle on T&E expenses.  Now that you know what you are spending these dollars on, how can you determine if it is money well spent? Equally as important, how you can these expenses be controlled.

If you are tracking expenses by project and activities you should be able to now see the full costs of these projects, not just the salary costs. It may bring to light efforts that really are not as profitable as they may have seemed.

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How much are we spending and on what?

Now that you have identified your expenses you can determine how much you are spending and what you are spending it on. Depending upon what automation, if any you have in place you can leverage the application's reporting capabilities. This process will also help determine what changes to make to how you capture your expense entries. 

Here are a few things to look out for.

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Where do we spend our money?

It is a common question both in personal life and business life. 'Where did the money go?'. The first step is knowledge. You cannot manage what you do not know. For a business, the identification of T&E Expenses is easier if some automated system of collection is in place, but absent that it can be an onerous manual process. 

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Who is watching your expenses?

In the current economic climate companies are trying to trim costs where ever possible.  This may mean reducing headcount, using virtual meetings or limiting participation in conferences or seminars. Many times this means looking at big ticket items as it seems that is the simplest way to make an immediate and meaningful impact, but is it the best? Spending that is done by the employee, generally T&E expenses, comprise one of the largest portions of controllable costs in many companies.  Surprisingly most of these same companies exercise little or no control over these expenses.

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Salesforce Multi-Currency Expense Reports

Salesforce provides foreign currency management.  You define the currencies and their decimal places and conversion rate. You need to request explicitly that Salesforce enables the multi-currency feature for your organization. You can enable the Advanced Currency Management yourself, which allows to update the currency rates for a specific date range (minimum: one day).  If you want to use dated exchange rates, they are restricted to  opportunities, opportunity products, and opportunity reports.

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