Category: Blogs

Benefits to Purchasing Content Management Systems

Content management systems and other software solutions for business make your life easier, and your business much more successful. We gave you several benefits to purchasing a content management system in our previous blog, including that they give you complete control, allow you to keep your content fresh with ease, and facilitate communication within your business and with your customers.

Here are a few more benefits to updating or purchasing a new Apparel ERP or other business software system:

1. Security: You have to do a lot as a business owner, including managing your website, cultivating new products and services, and communicating with customers. One of your most important tasks, however, is keeping all of your and your customers’ information safe. Onsite software systems help you do just this, and make your information secure to hackers or thieves.
2. Organization: Filing cabinets and messy piles of paper are a thing of the past, and make keeping your business information organized very difficult. Even if you have several different systems to help run your business, your information is stored in multiple places, which can make it hard to find quickly. Having a single content management system that does it all makes it much easier to keep your business organized and efficient.
3. Customer Service: Onsite software systems help facilitate better customer service. Many systems have programs that automatically reply to customer emails and help field calls, giving faster and more accurate assistance. These systems also allow customers to contact you through your website instead of through email.

When a custom t-shirt business starts up, it needs commercial screen printing equipment to keep up with demand. If you are wondering, “What equipment do I need to start a t-shirt business at home?” Look no further. Below is our list of the most important items to have on hand when starting up this type of business.

1. Printers. The printer is one of the most important items you’ll need. You can do a lot with just one printer, but the best businesses have several different kinds to choose from. The four types that printing businesses use are inkjet, laser, sublimation, and solvent printers. Solvent printers offer the best graphics, but they are very pricey and might be too expensive for a small business.

2. Computers. You’ll need a PC or Mac to use with graphics and cutting programs for our t-shirt business software. You’ll also need it for payment, inventory, and ordering functions. Our suite of software is ideal for helping you manage your business.

3. Graphics programs. Graphics programs are essential to creating custom images and art for shirts and other media. CorelDraw and Photoshop are two very good programs for this.

4. Transfer paper. You need quality transfer paper for transferring the images from the printer to other materials. This requires the use of a heat press.

5. Heat press. You’ll need at least a 16’x20″ heat press for transferring graphics over onto shirts.

6. Cutter. You’ll need a cutter and the program included in it to create stencils for screen prints. The cutters cut out what you design on the cutter program.

You can save a lot of money by purchasing used t-shirt printing machines and other equipment. Learn how to vet used screen printing equipment.

For more information about custom T-shirts and screen-printing management software, contact us at ShopWorks.

Almost every company has opted to invest in various business software systems, including comprehensive content management systems and similar software solutions for business. Billions of dollars each year are spent on new systems, upgraded systems or training on how to better use business software. Here are some of the top benefits you can enjoy when you purchase a content management system.

1. Complete Control: You know the most about your business, including its mission, products, services, and the tone you want to create on line. Apparel ERP systems and other business management software systems give you total control over the content on your website and the organization of your files and company.
2. Keep It Fresh: Your business will be much more successful if it is constantly growing. This can be as simple as changing your content online or updating a blog and other social media sites on a daily or weekly basis. Content management systems make this much easier.
3. Communicate: It is easier to communicate, not only with current and potential customers, but also with other employees and managers within your business. When the lines of communication are open within your business, your business will run more smoothly.
4. Easy Updating: You are much more likely to continuously update your various sites if it is easy, which is exactly what sign business software and other content management systems do for you. You no longer need to log onto various systems or jump through hoops to get new content live on your website. Content management systems consolidate and make it easy.

ShopWorks aims to bring customers the best industry specific software available. Simply creating and supplying software solutions for business is not enough though, which is why ShopWorks also does its best to provide comprehensive, flexible support for customers.

In addition to the webinars, training videos and remote support, phone support is also available if you have a few quick questions that need personal attention right away. The phone staff at ShopWorks has been extensively trained to be intimately familiar with all software available so that they can best answer any questions you have.

When clients purchase ShopWorks, they purchase a technical support contract, and phone support is charged to this contract in 15-minute increments. If customers fall delinquent on their payments for their contract, phone support may be denied, but simply paying what is due in full can reinstate it.

The phone support line is operational between 8:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. EDT, and to utilize this resource, all customers need to do is call 1-800-526-6702.

In our last blog, we informed you about several of the webinars available to help you and your staff become better educated about the software solutions for business from ShopWorks that you are currently using.

Here are several more pre-recorded webinar options that are open to you

• OnSite 7 Marketing: Attendees in this Webinar learn how OnSite 7 can help you better manage your business’ prospects, quotes, customers and salesperson activities.

• Proactively Manage Your Business: So often, business people slump into a habit of fixing problems once they occur, instead of anticipating problems before they happen. This webinar helps demonstrate how you and your employees can use OnSite 7 to head problems off by increasing revenue, growing your bottom line, reducing company expenses, and monitoring individual employee productivity.

• Design Management: Many companies who aren’t as familiar with our system as they could be use OnSite 7 for simple order entry and information storage. This webinar teaches you how you can use the system to record production parameters related to a specific design, store custom designs from customers, manage artists’ work schedules, and see how customer sales and service can interact with the art department more thoroughly, to manage jobs.

• Increase Your Sales Using OnSite 7: The system, whether you are using it as a print estimating software, a commercial screen printing system, or something else, was designed to help you increase your company sales. This webinar focuses on powerful features to increase quotes, customer responses and sales. Companies in the past have found this to be one of the most useful webinars for seeing an almost immediate increase in revenue.

The key to running a successful business is consolidation, meaning it is better to have a single software system that helps run and keep track of your business, than it is to use many different systems for different functions. One of the key areas where you can do this is to purchase commercial screen printing software that fulfils accounting needs in addition to business functions. ShopWorx is one such system.

Useful Accounting Software Solutions

• Tax: As a business owner, you have many different tax elements to keep track of throughout the year. These include withholding enough money from your employees’ paychecks, making monthly tax payments, figuring out your own taxes and the business’s taxes, and more. You also need to make sure you are being extra careful when you do your taxes throughout the year, because the IRS targets small businesses for audits more often than they target individuals. Business software helps make sure you are withholding and making monthly payments exactly on time each month and that all of your other accounts are in audit-ready, perfect order.

• Cash Flow Analysis: This accounting software function is particularly useful in making sure you are using your resources as effectively as you need to be in order to maintain a healthy business. This type of analysis can show where you are spending money too much and how you can cut back.

• Budgeting: A computer program is much more capable of keeping track of your finances than your brain is, so it is much wiser to enter all of your information and create budgets for your business season, certain projects, months and more, with the help of Apparel ERP software, rather than estimating. Call us at 800-526-6702 with any questions you have about our business accounting software solutions.

One of the most important parts of owning a commercial screen printing company is purchasing reliable software solutions for business. Your software should, among other things, help you monitor your screen printing equipment, keep track of old jobs, track job progress by machine, employee or department, store pricing and matrix information, and more.

Here are a few features you should prioritize when shopping for screen printing software systems for your business.

• Print estimating software functions are important, as they allow you to automatically calculate selling prices based on different variable markup percentages, labor costs, material, setup and supply costs, and more. This function also helps provide an incredibly accurate estimate in little to no time. Software systems can complete these tasks much more quickly than people can, with no possibility for human error.

• Your system should be able to store matrix information for size, ink, fabric and more. This way, when you enter future jobs, you will be able to select these modifications for your template.

• When dealing with so many different machines and different kinds of equipment, it is important to be able to monitor the individual progress of each machine and department. Your system should be able to do this, thus allowing you to pinpoint problem areas quickly and make adjustments to correct the errors.

• Your system should also act as your filing cabinet, and should store all of the information for past jobs. This way, you can pull up information on past jobs in seconds, allowing you to replicate successful jobs or correct errors quickly.

Cutting costs is always a good idea, but what better time is there to make sure you are being cost-effective than the holidays? Everyone can use extra money near Christmas-time, and for many businesses, it is the extra spending during these months that can help make up a deficit in other months. Here are some tips to help you cut costs without cutting corners this Christmas:

• Make sure your software solutions for business are as current and efficient as possible. For instance, if you are a custom clothing company, you should have up-to-date apparel ERP software or screen-printing equipment software. Having software that was designed for award companies or another industry will end up slowing down your workflow and costing you money in the end.

• Go to Walmart, Costco, Target or Sam’s Club, when you need office supplies fast, instead of going to Staples or Office Depot. While these office supply stores are guaranteed to have what you need, they usually charge more for the convenience and larger selection. If you need a larger resupply, buy items in bulk from a discount store. Also make sure pencils, pens and other small items aren’t getting lost or stolen.
• As far as larger office equipment goes, like copy machines, screen-printing equipment, and other machines, you need to make sure you are able to run your business efficiently, but you shouldn’t buy new pieces just to update. Use your machines until they are unusable, and if you only copy things a couple times a month, put it in your budget to copy at Staples, instead of buying a new machine.

Creating more customers is a challenging endeavor for many businesses. The best way to approach the issue is to find out what is making current customers unhappy. If the problem is turnaround times, order management, and the ability to know a project’s status, this can be remedied with software solutions for businesses.

Software solutions come in the form of a streamlined approach to order management. Instituting an integrated system allows the business to keep track of all parts of a project. In keeping track of a project, the business can keep customers updated on manufacturing times, shipping times, and project length times. This keeps the customers in the loop and makes them generally happier.

These solutions do more than help the customers feel at ease. Using integrated systems will save the business money. Less employee hours, supplies, and time will get wasted with some sort of management system in place. Other benefits are increased productivity, accurate estimates, and faster turnaround times. These benefits also make customers happy.

Due to the state of the economy, a big factor in a winning business is the ability to prove that projects can be delivered on time and on budget. These two things are not possible without business solutions. If the left hand does not know what the right is doing, you will not have success in meeting deadlines or budgets. This means that your customers will not be happy. And unhappy customers do not bring in more business, nor do they continue to bring repeat business.

For more information about how integrated software can help your business, contact us at ShopWorks.

In our last blog, we discussed the first three reasons why the different versions of OnSite 7 make it a perfect apparel software solution. Here are three more features that make the software an ideal solution for companies at all stages of the apparel industry.

1. The embroidery business software also features applications that allow managers and project leaders to schedule jobs, track their production and see the labor costs per job in any department of their business.
2. The screen print business software includes a size matrix that can be used for apparel items and features that allow managers to track production rates of individuals and departments and monitor the progress of jobs similarly to the applications in the embroidery business software.
3. If you sell apparel products that have been pre-produced, several of our different software solutions for businesses allows companies to download supplier pricing directly and provide quick quotes for customers over email.