The New Business Blog

Graduating high school is a big milestone in life. It is an exciting time that often makes young adults feels a bit of freedom. Along with the excitement of freedom and going off to college is the sense of requiring more financial assistance. This can be in the form of credit cards, vehicle loans, store credit cards and a variety of other options. Debt can build up fast, below are the main ways that it happens.  It is important to avoid going into too much debt.  You may need to find quick ways to make money so you don’t fall victim and find yourself in financial trouble.

Student Loans for College

Student loans do not have to be paid back until college is complete in most cases, but this is instant debt right out of high school. For those that choose to leave college, the debt is still there. These are low interest loans and your wages or bank account can be garnished if they go unpaid. Court judgments can also be made against you if they are unpaid. Paying for education is important so finding employment during college and immediately after is important.

Taking Personal Loans

Personal loans are often sought by those fresh out of high school, as well as payday loans. These types of loans are intended for quick cash to help you when you’re in a bind. Keep in mind, personal loans do often have higher interest rates and have to be paid back much faster than other types of loans or credit. Garnishments are also possible with this type of loan if they are unpaid.

Credit Cards

Students or those that are freshly 18 often go on a credit card application spree. While having money when you need it is great, the debt builds up really fast. The interest on a credit card or store credit card is much steeper for younger applicants. Minimum payments are ideal but the interest continues to build on the remaining balance so your debt continues to build. Be careful with the type of credit card you choose right out of high school.

Financial Aid

Financial aid is different from a student loan and is often scheduled to begin repayment immediately following graduation from college or secondary school. Once you are approved and accept the financial aid this is debt. Most college students apply for financial aid as soon as they are accepted to an institution, which is generally before high school graduation.

These types of debt are the most common for those that are fresh out of high school. Immediate debt in the way of student loans and financial aid are nearly inevitable but do at least allow you to finish your secondary schooling before they have to be repaid. Watch your debt and keep track of interest rates, spending and maintain a budget to keep your debt to a minimum. If you take payday loans, make sure that you can afford the increased repayment amount and that you can make it on time.

If you’re here, it’s because you’ve probably realized that people have been talking a lot about SharePoint Governance recently. Therefore, you know that it’s important, but you don’t know what it stands for. In this article, I take the time to explain the main idea of what is SharePoint Governance in order to clarify that mysterious subject.

At the end, you should have a better answer to the question:  what is SharePoint Governance?

A SharePoint Governance plan

Let’s figure it like this: when you work in a big company that has a lot of employees and departments, you need to set some limitations, rules or guidelines to somehow structure what happens internally. If you don’t, you might end up with a pretty bad mess. That is why most of the companies usually have a document explaining what are the rules and policies you have to follow. Now, what does that have to do with SharePoint Governance? A SharePoint governance plan is basically the same thing, but instead of being used to manage a workplace, it is used to manage your SharePoint environment.

Mainly, a SharePoint Governance plan is a set of rules, responsibilities and procedures created to structure the decisions around SharePoint. The purpose here is to make sure that all the decisions made by the IT department follow the business goals of the company. Of course, the bigger is the company; the longer is the SharePoint Governance plan. It’s logical since we can also say for most situations: the bigger is the company; the longer is the work policies document.

What SharePoint Governance can do for you?

It can give you guidelines when you need to create a new team site or you have a new product released and you want to know the procedure for each one. For example, you have a new brand and you need to create a new subsite, your SharePoint Governance plan could give you the set of rules for that type of project; who’s responsible for that, the authorizations required and so on.

It is also a good way to make sure that your company’s SharePoint environment is secure and meets the standards. At the end, the fact of following rules and procedures written in your SharePoint Governance plan will also make you save time and money on different technological projects which will assure a better ROI.

Are all the SharePoint Governance plan similar?

Of course, a good practice to adopt would be to build a different plan depending on the type of site. For example, you might want to set more rules, policies and responsibilities for a site involving a lot of people. In this case, your Governance plan should be bigger than if you create one for a team site involving a small group of people. There are a lot of different possible cases that you need to consider in your SharePoint governance plans in order to make sure every situation is well managed by your IT team afterwards. Like I said before, you will save time and effort if you really build a complete and thoughtful plan.

Some best practices for you SharePoint Governance

First of all, you need to set specific goals you want to achieve with your plan. This will make sure that everyone follows the same vision while making it. You will also be able to track the results of your SharePoint governance plan when it’s done. The best way to make sure it’s good is to review the results and make sure the plan meets the goals set. Yes, you will need to test, review and modify your plan regularly to avoid conflicts, wrong procedures and to adjust the plan to the new business goals requirements. Finally, it would be a big mistake to ignore training in your SharePoint governance, because SharePoint can be very complicated for the users and by forming them adequately depending on their role in the company, you will avoid misuse of the platform. In your plan, there should be a very specific description of the formations available for site owners, administrators and end users.

Conclusion

Now you should have a better idea of what is SharePoint Governance. Afterwards, you might end up in a position where you have to build a SharePoint governance plan from scratch and that is not an easy thing to do. Here’s a good series that explains how to build your SharePoint Governance plan from the start.

There’s a new, simpler home office deduction this year that could very well save you a lot of time but, in most cases, won’t save you as much as money as the long form that everyone despises.

For those people who work at home, even if they only do it part time, deducting home office costs is a great way to save money on taxes. That being said, the 43 line IRS form that needs to be filled out in order to do it has always been a huge challenge, sometimes so much so that people have actually lifted out of their tax planning and sacrificed the deductions completely.

This year however there is a new and more simplified home office tax reduction. You simply take $5 per square foot for 300 feet, or $1500, and you’re done, quick and easy. The trade-off is that you won’t be able to deduct as much as you would using the older, more involvement. When you consider that the average home office deduction, at least as far as the IRS reports, is approximately $3000, you might well be giving up a good bit of money if you’re eligible for more deductions than the $1500 cap the new system gives you.

What exactly constitutes a Home Office?

Before considering any of this however, it’s a good idea to know exactly what constitutes a home office. First, it’s a room or area of your home that you use exclusively and regularly for business. Please either your principal place of business or you see clients are customers there regularly, as well as patients.

As with most tax rules there are exceptions to the exclusive rule. One says that if you store products from your business in a different area of your home than where you actually do your work, you can use that storage space for other activities such as watching TV. Also, if you travel a lot and thus aren’t doing all of your work from home, but still do all of your essential work tasks there like billing and so forth without any other location to do these functions, you still qualify for the home office deduction.

If your employer requires that you work from home, and you don’t charge them rent, you can also deduct your home office. This however must be done as your employers convenience, not yours. If, for example, you only use your home office to finish reports at night or sometimes work on the weekends instead of going to your office, you won’t be able to claim the home office deduction.

Also covered under this tax break are separate structures that you own on your property like an attached garage that you might have converted into your office. Since the IRS looks at the fact that your family would be less likely to use a separate structure as part of their regular “living or play area” it doesn’t have to be your main place of business in order for to qualify for your home office deduction.

Seeking for a job in California State is not time for us to think how dangerous it might be, when deciding to work as in the construction sphere. Job market of the USA has many propositions for builders, offering highly-paid salaries and number of working places.

Seekers try to make their search productive and select construction vacancy through all existing ways. Usually they choose the one with the highest salary. So, revising all proposed vacancies in construction many seekers come across such interesting construction job as supervisor and suppose it is the easiest position that may be held. But actually it is far from it. Let’s discuss some construction supervisor job’s details.

What does construction supervisor mean?

Generally, people who master this occupation are usually responsible for any construction project that should be completed. All activities of the workers are strictly controlled and navigated by a supervisor. If you are a representative of individuals who have the meaning about easiness of this occupation, you are very wrong, because the major supervisor’s duties are to observe the whole working process, to inspect the working site and make sure that it meets health, professional and safety requirements, to follow all rules are observed and to guarantee the construction projects to be accomplished on time and related to the budget limits. This profession occupies also the obligation to keep in head all existing materials, worker’s requirements for particular job accomplishment and also planning and organizing of different building procedures. Supervisor is very responsible and crucial profession.

This is a person, who deals with other personnel, suppliers, builders and other departments in order to solute the problems, if they appear during the construction process. Construction supervisor has the responsibility of transportation, location and marking of the materials and all kinds of equipment used in the process of construction. They should have a talent of ability to turn a poor-budgeted building into a huge complex promising rich budget.

There are no strict responsibilities of any supervisor, as they vary and change each working day. If you are intended to get your dream’s realization when becoming a construction supervisor, be ready to work like a horse. Most of the vacancies in construction sphere are better to look for using the web databases, such as Jobtonic.com. Do not waste any minute to inventing a perspective construction vacancy.

While digital signatures have existed for a while, it’s only in the last decade that they have become accepted worldwide as a legal alternative to the standard hand written signature. While there are a handful of desktop and cloud electronic signature software, mobile apps that follow current legislation to ensure that your e-signatures are valid in court are still hard to find.

Here’s a list of 5 great apps that are not only great and inexpensive, but are generally just amazing to use.

RightSignature

RightSignature is one of the most innovative e-signature software providers that currently exist. While you will need to sign up to their plans for desktop software, their mobile app is by far one of the easiest to use for technophobes. It allows users to use click-to-sign authentication and text forms.

e-SignLive

e-SignLive is both a cloud and mobile based e-signature solution. It’s definitely the most robust out of all existing electronic signature software. This means that you will be able to use the same solution for both desktop and mobile signing. In addition to the standard digital handwritten signatures, users can also use click-to-sign and voice signatures to authenticate their electronic documents. In addition, they can integrate with the most services such as Dropbox, Google Docs, Google Drives and Box.

SignNow

SignNow is an app that was specifically designed for use on all types of mobile devices. SignNow allows user to sign a variety of documents from emails, camera, and even Dropxbox.  All it allows you to take advantage of your touch screen or use pre-saved signature and signed documents are saved via the cloud or sent by email.

EchoSign

EchoSign by Adobe is a great application for electronic signing. While the app requires a EchoSign account for desktop. You can use it to sign with your finger or stylus and use documents from your EchoSign document library.  In addition, you can also review and sign documents without a network and schedule the document to be sent at a later time.

DocuSign Ink

DocuSign Ink  offers additional capabilities in terms of encryption and authentication but is almost identical to SignNow. This particular app also creates an easy to access document trail that indicates who signed what, where, and when. This is great for companies that want an obvious audit trail.  This paid version also enables users to send documents to multiple parties and to create reminders via email. Both these functions are available with e-SignLive and EchoSign as well.

For millions of us, sitting down with a cup of coffee in front of our computer to open our email accounts and see what awaits us is a daily ritual. That ritual includes deciding which emails should be kept and read, which can be flagged for later, which should be sent to “spam” and so forth, something that takes so long that some days, by the time you’re done, your coffee’s already cold.

As the evolution in digital communication continues however, email may soon be overshadowed by other technology, leading to the question; is the age of email coming to an end?

For many of us the idea of going to work and not opening email just seems really weird. The fact is however that it’s become quite cumbersome and ineffective, especially if you have lots of projects to manage and many people that you need to communicate with on a daily basis. Add to that the absolute ton of irrelevant email messages that the average person gets every day and you find that most people would be happy to give it up for something better.

Indeed, for a communication method that was once applauded for being so efficient, the nearly 100 billion spam emails sent DAILY have turned email into anything but that.

Another problem with email is something that recently been in the news quite a bit; security. From Edward Snowden to WikiLeaks and more, it seems that we’re getting hit with daily headlines about the dangers of unprotected emails. Interestingly, a study in 2013 showed that less than 21% of businesses are using an encryption service for their email, negligence that is a bit of a mystery.

Email actually peaked way back in 2008, so it’s hardly a surprise that people are increasingly turning away from it both in the workplace and at home. The fact that young people, the professionals of tomorrow, prefer social media and texting to email is another reason that it is on its way out. Add that to the increasing number of viable alternatives available to email and its dominance coming to an end is not hard to understand.

One of those alternatives is called Yammer, a platform that allows person-to-person communication  within a business similar to how “friends” post messages on Facebook. Yammer has the added benefit of being able to share documents, create meetings and be a centralized location for the knowledge and an institution or organization. Add to that that its mobile friendly, cleaner and more organized than any email inbox and you can see why big-name companies like DHL, eBay and Ford have already adopted it.

Another platform that’s similar is called Chatter and, while it offers the same basic functionality, it also adds better workflow management, the ability to manage sales leads and also gives options for issue resolution that large, sales-driven organizations need.

Then there’s the fact that so many companies have become fed up with email that they’ve opted instead to build their own internal solutions.

While the end of email may still be a little bit in the future, it’s reliance by businesses as their primary communication line is definitely coming to an end. Today’s new technologies offers significant promise for the future of business communication and, for many fed up professionals, the end of email can’t get here quick enough.