MY 1ST BUSINESS GUIDE

BUSINESS BANKING – INVENTORY MANAGEMENT – SAVINGS – SHIPPING ORDERS –

RETURNS AND EXCHANGES

In this document I talk through the process with each, how to combat issues, organization, and more…

BUSINESS Banking
So, you have just started your business... maybe you have already started running it...
regardless, it’s time for a business account!

It is highly advised for individuals to have a business bank account when starting their
company.

For you to get your business account you will need to be a registered company,

This is so you can keep track of your money and spending for your business.

You need to start separating your money between, PERSONAL and BUSINESS.
For example,
When you’re purchasing anything for your business you use your business account,
Then anything personal would be through your personal account.

Sounds straight forward, right?

Well, there’s a little bit more to it...
When it’s time for paying taxes and getting an accountant it’s always good to know
what you’re spending your money on.

So get wallets!
Separate your receipts with what you’re purchasing such as ‘office equipment (pens
etc) and label that wallet for the month

Example
GREEN Wallet, labelled Month October
*All your receipts for this month go in here*
*Anything you spend for your business; receipt goes in here*

Then do the same for all months.

You can also create tables on your computer/phone. Which has dates and what you
spent your money on with the receipt.
When filing for taxes this will come in handy as you could see if your business profited
from a loss and how much money your business is generating.

Most business bank accounts will help you with documenting your expenses for
example this business account is by Revolute
Here is a screenshot of the information you add onto every cost you’re spending.

Credit - business banking

Having a business account will help you with your business credit.
The reason good credit is important is for times you need/want to take out loans to
invest on your company, you will be assets on your business credit just how you are
assets on your personal credit.

So let’s first talk about business credit versus personal credit.

Because there are some major differences. Business credit is much different from
personal credit.

When it comes to personal credit, it is very much different. They are looking at how
well you pay back your debts and what your debt ratio is.

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 So if you have trade lines on your personal credit, you will notice that they are
reporting all of your credit cards. All of your mortgages. Maybe you have some
student loans,
they also look to see what your mix of credit is, how long you’ve had those credit, and
how well you’ve been paying them.

So when we’re talking about building a business, it’s actually very difficult and
sometimes very detrimental to your personal credit when you start using personal
credit cards to fund your business. And This is why you’re going to want to use
business credit.

Inventory management
If you run a small business, you know exactly how time consuming and expensive
inventory management can be.
When I first started my business, inventory management was one of our biggest
headaches. We were constantly thinking that we had items in stock that we didn’t.
We were constantly making special runs to the store or making emergency phone
calls to our suppliers because we just didn’t know what we had on the production
floor.

Ways to keep track of inventory

• QR codes
• Unique barcodes
• Strategic table

So, let’s start with turnover. So, what is turnover?

Turnover is basically the rate at which you’re able to get inventory in and out of your
business. So, think about it from the standpoint of, how fast am I able to get some
inventory and then get it back out?

Maintaining good inventory levels will allow you to have good cash flow. Knowing how
much your customers buy on a regular basis, then restocking before you sell out.
As soon as you realized that you’re about to sell out you should place an order with
your manufacturer. This will make sure that you are always in the loop with your
inventory. Having items sold out on your website can be a good and a bad thing at
the same time.
The pros of having items sold out on your website, Will be that it creates hype for
customers when you restock. It also creates a calm period for you to decide and do
other things for your business.

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The con of being sold out on your website is that when you have new customers or
returning customers and they found out that you have no stock available for them to
buy, they will end up shopping elsewhere. They see something that you highly want
to avoid because this is loss of money and will ruin your cash flow. Depending on how
long it takes for a turn around with your manufacturer, you could end up way in two
weeks before a restock, and in those two weeks you’re losing out on money.

Once you get your goods from your manufacturer, you should always spend time
counting each one of your products. This is to ensure that you got exactly what you
ordered. You should understand that sometimes manufacturers make mistakes with
quantity. So, for example, you place an order with 20 hoodies, sometimes they may
miscount them and only send you 18 hoodies. In a rare case, they might do this on
purpose, knowing that you won’t count them, so they are making more money and
you are losing out on money.
In the scenario that you do receive less quantity than you ordered, you should take a
picture of all the items that you got in a pile sending to your manufacturer and tell
them that you only received a certain amount when you order this turn amount.

Even if there’s only one item missing that is still money out of your pocket, so you
should take that matter seriously. So, manufacturers will be open to giving you a
refund. Some of them will give you a discount on your next purchase, and some of
them will send out the product to you.

Once you have counted all your stuff, you want to make sure you Add all this onto
your website system. This is so that when customers are buying from your store, they
are buying what you have in stock. In the case that customers are buying when you
don’t have in stock, this is something you called drop shipping. This could be useful to
you in busy times when you want to make lots of money and maximize your sales,
but you don’t have stock. This would be a case of preorders.

Some good advice on keeping organized as keeping all the designs in one section in
size order. This will prevent you getting mixed up and your products being mixed up.
This makes it easier for you to package orders. You can buy a railing shelf on
Amazon.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/AmazonBasics-4-Shelf-Shelving-shelf-Black/dp/
B01LYBQXRH/ref=asc_df_B01LYBQXRH/?tag=googshopuk-
21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=214577275804&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=50762074116
30425716&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=
9044955&hvtargid=pla-325875862039&psc=1&th=1&psc=1

So you can neatly arrange all your stock on the shelves. When you’re packaging
multiple orders, it’s very easy for you to get confused and pack an order wrong.

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Having a shelf with everything organized will prevent this from happening. This is also
good because you can visually see when you are running out of a product.

Savings
Saving money is the key to a successful business. The side money you keep will come
on handy! Knowing you have money kept safe for ‘rainy’ days will bring you peace of
mind. Believe me, those rainy days will come, it’s normal. That’s why it’s so important
to keep money on the side.

When you need money for emergencies you will be kept safe from loans and borrowing
money!

Scenarios where savings will come very important with a business

> You want to pay for promotion
> Buying new equipment
> Restocking

Ways to save money:

1st option
You can create a savings table. This will be a table of different numbers such as ‘£10’
‘£5’ , ect , every day you colour in a number when you add that number in your
savings.
For example, I decide to colour in £5 so I add £5 to my savings. This way over time
money will add up and at the end of the month I would have saved £1,000 all that was
split into little parts but was made fun!

2nd option
Taking a small percentage of your sales and strictly putting them aside for your savings.
Example you are generating £400 you may want to put 5% of that into savings.

3rd option
Having a weekly number, you dedicate to putting into savings.
Example you dedicate £20 every week for your savings regardless how much you
make.

These are effective way to ensure you are financially safe from difficulties you may
face.

Shipping orders
When you’re shipping orders, you should have a shipment day. This is going to be a
day where you package your orders and ship them out. If you have a lot of spare time,

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you can ship orders out every day. But if you are limited to your time, then you can
have a specific day where you do so.

Customers are most likely going to shop with you again if they are satisfied with the
delivery. Not all delivery goes to plan as you are not in control when it leaves your
Hands. But you are in control of when the customer places order to you ship the
product.
A good time frame for orders would be three days shipping. This would be UK based,
around the world It may be different.

You should understand that during busy periods such as season times, shipping
companies tend to be a bit slower. This is when you want to organise, know when you
are going to ship and let your customers know how long it will take.

When a customer placed an order what happens?

I’m going to walk you through all the steps what happens when a customer places an
order.

The customer has come into your store and seen something that they want to buy. They
now go by this and added to the cart. Once they cheque out, this order will be sent to
your order system. This system is on your website which you have access to. Nobody
else has access to this, but yourself or your team workers. The customers do not see the
back end of your website, only the products that you list.

I’m going to use Shopify as an example.

This is what Shopify’s order page looks like. It has all the information that you see
here. On this page it shows you quick and important information about all the orders
that you have got during the days.
In order for you to see more details about each other, you would want to click on the
one you want to see the information about. But from this view here you can see all the
orders with the important information.

All of the menus are very self-explanatory.

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The first menu is the order number. This is a unique number which is attached to every
single order placed on your store. With this number you can identify every single order.
When customers reach out to customer service, they will need this number.

The second menu is the order date and time when they placed the order.

The third menu is the customers first name and surname.

The 4th menu is the total amount they spent when they placed the order.

The 5th menu has icons which say paid unpaid or partially paid. This is to identify
which order has been successfully paid for and which one hasn’t.

The 6th menu is highlighted in orange when it is not fulfilled and then it is highlighted
grey when it is fulfilled. Orders which are highlighted with. Unfulfilled means that the
customer has placed the order and you have not shipped out the product. Be aware that
this is not automatically changed, but you must click on the order and pressed fulfil for
it to change colour. Only press fulfil once you have shipped out that product.

The 7th Menu tells you how many items they placed in that single order.

The 8th menu shows you what their delivery method was.

The 9th menu is listed as Tags. You can add tags to each order that you want to
organise. For example, if you have multiple team workers, you may want to tag each
order with who handles the order.

Once you click on an order, this page shows up and it tells you the information about
this order.
With this page you can ship the shipping labels.
You can see the shipping address.
You can see the contact information such as phone numbers or email.
You can see the billing address.
You can see their payment.

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You can see the item they got and what size they got.
In this page you can edit the information such as changing the shipping address on
sending confirmation to the customer. Or you can do things such as leaving comments
on the order.
In this page you can also cancel the order or refund it.
Shopify also gives you the tool of fraud analysis. Or you can install your own.
This is to show you which orders are fraudulent and which orders aren’t.

Fraudulent orders…
Fraudulent orders happened more frequently than you can think of.
You want to prevent this from your store by implementing different things such as.
Cancelling orders which flag up red.
Contacting the customer if the order flags up orange.
Understanding customer behaviour.

Getting your order ready for shipment……

Now that you have the order confirmation and the customers information. It’s time for
you to ship the order.

You want to print out all the order confirmations of each order you will pack.
Then you want to line them all out of how you’re going to pack them.

For example, I want to pack all the teacher orders first. I will print out the order
confirmations for these orders and line them up.

Every business has different packaging, so it all depends on what type of packaging you
have.
Put the items in your packaging.
Make sure you add a thank you card.
Now you either want to put it in a box or a mailing bag.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sabco-Mailing-Adhesive-Waterproof-Tear-Proof/dp/
B08CZZPYW9/ref=asc_df_B08CZZPYW9/?tag=googshopuk-
21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=500836980941&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=5699546317
127199802&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocph
y=9044964&hvtargid=pla-1272239281598&psc=1

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The size of your box or mailing bag all depends on how big your product is.

Now you want to know how much your product weighs.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neoteck-0-01-500g-Electronic-Transparent-Gemstones-
silver/dp/B01GFTBIIM

For example, each of my orders weigh approximately 1kg.

This information is very important when it comes down to shipping.

Now you know how much that product weighs. You want to take a note of this so that
next time we ship the product, you already know how much it weighs. This will save
you a lot of time.
You can also add this weight information into your website.

Make sure that you write the order number on the package. This will keep it nice and
organised.
Now you want to put your order to the right order confirmation. You should have done
this earlier.

For example, you printed out the order 100 Then you package the order, now you want
to put the order on top of the piece of paper which has the order confirmation 100.

Shipping with Royal Mail

Once all your packages are all done and ready, it’s time for your shipping labels.

You must create an account on Royal Mail click and drop.

https://auth.parcel.royalmail.com/account/login?ReturnUrl=%2Fconnect%2Fauthorize
%2Fcallback%3Fclient_id%3Dsflite%26response_type%3Dcode%26scope%3Dopenid
%2520profile%2520email%26redirect_uri%3Dhttps%253A%252F
%252Fbusiness.parcel.royalmail.com%252Fcallback%26state
%3DYTU1ZDU4N2MxMjc0NDIxNGI5NzE2Mjk5YmM5OGMzNzE2Mjc5NTA5ZjA
3NDk0NjFmOWIxMGEyYjAxYWY5OTg5YTsv%26nonce
%3D89ffdfc98a3c483abf98f9dd7a61ef0cbf0d686e6b714b8abeb4ddd76d4e3acd

This is going to be your shipment account.

Once you have created your account, you want to integrate that with your Shopify
account.

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 Once everything has been integrated. All your orders from your Shopify store will
show up on your click and drop account. So next time when you’re shipping orders,
you can just click the batch you want to ship.

Paying for your labels is very straight forward. You want to go to the orders page and
click all the orders you want to ship out, then pay for them. There are different shipping
methods. My chosen shipping method is the service Royal Mail tracked 48. You can
choose a different shipping method according to your business.

Be aware that the cost of shipping will be different according to the size of your product
and the weight of the product. That’s why it’s very important to know the weight of
your orders. Once you’ve paid for your labels, you will print them out and stick them
onto the packaging.

Now what do I do?

Now that all the packages are complete and ready to be shipped. You need to find your
local Royal Mail Depo

This is where you will drop off all the orders. Remember you have already paid for
them so you will not need to pay for them again.

RETURNING PRODUCTS
I'm going to walk you through the process of customers returning their products. As a
new business, you're probably confused about this process. I'm here to explain how it
all works.

The first thing you need to know is identifying the reason why a customer may want to
return their goods. Once you have identified the reason why the customer wants to
return the product, you want to make sure that this doesn't happen again. Customer
satisfaction is so important when having a business.

To reduce the numbers of complaints and bad reviews, you want to make sure that the
customer is satisfied with their service and product.

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Here are the reasons why a customer may return their product.

 They ordered the wrong size.

 The size they ordered doesn't fit.
 They don't like the product.
 They want to exchange their product for something different.
 They bought the product for another individual who doesn't want the product.
 They placed a mistake order.
 The product was not as it was advertised.

When starting out your business and creating the website, you should make sure your
refund policies are strict and you stick to them.
Things that should be included with your refunds and exchange.
 Customers should only be allowed to return the product if the quality is still in
good condition.
 There shouldn't be any signs of odours or stains on the product.
 There shouldn't be visual signs that the customer has repeatedly worn the
clothing.
 The customer should return or exchange by the date you provide.

Here are some other things which you may want to consider.
 Are you going to provide free return shipping?
 How long would the customer have before they are allowed to return it?
 If a customer wants to exchange their product, are they allowed to exchange it
for another item or are they only allowed to exchange for another size?
 Are you going to allow cancellations before you have shipped the product?

Having this information included in your policies will make the customer. Be more
satisfied when shopping with you because they understand your rules.

In this scenario that a customer returns the product to you, and it is not in the exact
quality you have an option to deny a refund.

Where are the customers going to send the items back? If I'm running the
business at home or a private location?

It's time for you to get a PEO box.

If your budget is tight or you don't have enough money to afford a workspace, paying
monthly for a pee or box would be a suitable option for you.
This is where customers can send items to send any letters to or any good to this
address where you go and collect it from.

Hit is a good way to know why your customers are returning products and to make their
returning. Quick and smooth.

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 Making a return form which has information on it, such as:

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’

Please fill out this form

Order number….

Name….

(Circle) I want a …….. REFUND/EXCHANGE

because…..

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’

Making a similar form like this and adding it to your orders package Will get the
information that you need and may make it easier for customers to return the product
without getting in contact with you.

When the customer returns or exchanges our product and they have filled this out inside
the packaging, you will know whether they want a refund or exchange and why they
want a refund in exchange.
For example, a customer sends back a tracksuit that they bought, and they want a
refund. Then they say they want a refund because the size doesn't fit. That is how you
know that doesn't issue with your sizing.
Or if they tell you that the product doesn't match the description on the website, that is
your indication to make changes to your website.
This is a highly successful tactic which helps you grow as a business and improve.
Customers will most likely shop with you again because it was hassle free.

By having easy return methods, your customers will shop with you again. And your
returning customer rates will go up. Reasons why businesses are successful is because
customers come back to buy again. Having a loyal customer is better than having
multiple customers who don’t shop again. You want to amplify your customer
satisfaction.

END

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