Australian SME Business News and Accounting Articles

Social media has grown tremendously popular over the decade. Its reach is enormous that almost every single man of the world’s population has an account on Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, and MySpace. And why not?

The advantages of having such accounts cannot be underestimated. People are able to reach old friends from several years back and friends who are at the other end of the globe. Individuals are able to connect with families and relatives that they have not even met. People, in fact, use the social media to start up their small online business. And with this last statement, why not business owners acknowledge the fact that the social media can also be used for their transactions?

The trading conditions have already been at their worst levels for about 14 years now. And this has led the business owners in believing that the economy is desperately in need of more interest rate reductions.

An appalling result in the latest survey of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) on investor confidence showed that most businesses are stabilizing at low levels while some others are “sinking to contractionary territory”.

According to the ACCI Director of Economics and Industry Policy, Greg Evans, "Overall the survey shows that mainstream Australian business is under significant pressure."

Do you have a small business online?

With social media sites reporting users in billions of numbers, one cannot be wrong to presume that social media sites have gone viral.

Nowadays, with these billions of social media users, having no social media presence could now mean a slow death to your site. If you have a small business accounting software and you haven’t brought it into the social media craze, this would not do anymore.

Now, having no online social media presence even for those big accounting on line businesses is no longer an option as having a website and online presence is not anymore enough in this competitive world of internet marketing.

A recent survey reflects that among the top priorities of small and medium business this 2012 are customer relationships and increasing business activity in the markets.

This was according to the Business Monitor Survey which was released recently by MYOB, a management service provider. And yes, the customers remain the main focus of small and medium businesses.

"Customers will understandably remain the core focus for Australian SMEs in maintaining and strengthening their business health in 2012, with our research finding more than one third of businesses are set to increase activity around attracting customers' attention and building their loyalty,” said Tim Reed, Executive Chief of MYOB.

A two percent rise was seen in the Australian shares as it closed this week. This was after the yields on government debt issues by Italy and Spain had fallen to their lowest. A total of 10 billion euros in bond were sold by Spain while Italy sold 12 billion euros of bills.

"Spain’s auction was met with strong demand at resulting yields lower than the same maturities late last year, while the Italian auction also saw yields on one-year maturities falling to their lowest levels since June 2011. Obviously investors welcomed these developments,” said Cameron Peacock at IG Markets.

Cloud computing has been increasingly becoming very popular today. As forecasted, it will even grow bigger this year. And why should it not? Cloud computing, an accounting on line, has numerous benefits for its users.

The year 2011 has seen many businesses turning to the clouds. Topics and issues on accounting software online and Cloud Computing have become one of the favored topics of discussions and debates among the IT community.

In recent months, countless polls and surveys have been conducted, with the focus of making improvements on the people’s understanding of the cloud computing market and industry trends.

The Australian share market has seen a rise on the first day of trading in 2012, with more than one per cent rise on the back of positive leads in the local bourse, boosted by the European stock markets and the rallying in commodity prices during the long weekend in Australia.

For the first time in a week, the Australian shares have risen as the materials sector led broad-based gains after the official positive manufacturing PMI data out of China for December beat market expectations, helping boost risk appetite, helping resources, and energy stocks.