Category: Consultancy

Business Financing

Equipment Leasing and Funding

With Business expansion in mind, when there’s a need to fund key purchases of equipment, but you don’t want to tie up precious capital, and perhaps even with a carefully worked out business plan, your bank won’t provide the lending – help, is at hand …

@YellowsBestLtd we can assist with funding though our business finance partners. Finance can be arranged for nearly all business equipment, machinery and IT (including software). With facilities small and large that can be repaid over 1 to 5 years, it makes sense consider how you can get what you need now, not what you can only afford. After all, you don’t pay for your staff 3 years in advance, and you don’t wait to buy a building for them to work in. So don’t hold yourself back!

Please get in touch to let us know what you need to purchase and see how we can enable your business to move forward. Or perhaps you’re selling your products to your Customers, in which case we can arrange a point of sale facility to aid their purchase and accelerate your sale.

Summary of Customer Benefits

– an alternative line of credit: finance lease, lease/hire purchase, loans, sale & leaseback

– tax efficient: leasing is 100% tax deductible

– all asset types considered: office equipment, production machinery, fixtures & fittings, etc

– the biggest benefit is ‘the use’, not ‘the ownership’

Summary of Vendor Benefits

– provision of ‘point of sale’ leasing and finance facilities

– increase order values, sell more equipment

– incorporate services & consumables in rentals

– more effective cost justification

Reduce Reuse Recycle

@YellowsBestLtd helps Customers with their operational needs, and one aspect is to #Reduce the demand for avoidable whole-scale replacements through a combination of supply for #Reuse of refurbished spares and repair of system elements. When removal and disposal of no-longer serviceable infrastructure parts is necessary, we can also assist with the resale and #Recycle for ‘value recovery’ of valuable materials.

Most customers have implemented their private network infrastructure systems over a number of years, and for many their operational requirements have not changed. Consequently, it makes more sense both financially and environmentally to maintain these systems rather than embark on complete change-outs. We can assist by supplying critical and hard-to-find spare parts and hardware repair services, even when the systems have been declared ‘obsolete’ (i.e. no longer in production) by the O.E.M.

Eventually there does come a time when it proves necessary to remove and replace network infrastructure. Rather that simply discarding the old system elements, we can provide ‘value recovery’ to the Customer by means of resale of working parts and recycling of components, extracting useful materials. This often proves financially beneficial, generating a source of funds which helps to pay for the replacement systems, as well as providing an ethical means of disposing of unwanted parts with the least environmental impact.

Please get in touch should you wish to discuss your operational requirements and see how @YellowsBestLtd can be of assistance.

 

Recommended reading on the wider aspects of ‘The Future of Waste’ can be found in:

@TheIET @EandTmagazine Volume-12_Issue-11

Consultancy Services

A flexible approach to Consultancy provision

It has been a pleasure providing consultancy services to a client who was looking to develop their product sales business. YellowsBest’s approach is to tailor what we provide to meet the Customer’s exact needs. Several stages of activities were therefore established, reviewed and amended before these ‘workpackages’ were acted upon.

Strategy Workshop to identify the requirements

To thoroughly establish and document the ‘needs’,  a relatively informal but comprehensive ‘workshop’ was held.

This produced the ‘framework’ for the consultancy provision and provided an invaluable tool for measurement of progress toward the goals which were documented as part of this process.

Undertaking key tasks to assist Strategy implementation

A number of tasks were undertaken on behalf of our client in order to assist with the putting into action of the documented strategic aims.

Naturally, the implementation and development of a sales Strategy is a long-term undertaking, and YellowsBest is able to provide ongoing support to its clients with the assistance they need, as and when required, in order to ensure long-term success.

Summary of assistance YellowsBest can provide

YellowsBest is able to assist companies by providing consultation advice for a wide range of initiatives, such as:

  • Creation of Business Plans for identifying markets, customers and strategic propositions
  • Sales Strategy formulation for the generation of prospects and reaching customers via direct and channel approach
  • Assistance with key sales and business development tasks, including customer enquiries and presentations, liaison with vendors, attendance at industry events and content creation for websites and marketing initiatives
  • Performance Measurement analysis to understand success ratios and identify corrective actions to improve utilisation of resources and optimise business efficiency

YellowsBest is able to provide its consultancy services on an ad-hoc day-rate basis, or as a more structured project-delivery, over a number weeks or months as appropriate.

YellowsBest can also provide a range of other related Management Services, including Account Management, Bid Management, Business Development, Channel / Vendor Management, Commercial / Contract Negotiations, Sales and Marketing, Solutions Engineering and Training.

Solved: UK Date Format Issue on a new Apple Mac with Microsoft Excel:mac 2008

An annoying issue (for UK users) is of the date format defaulting to US (MM:DD:YY) rather than UK (DD:MM:YY). This occurs when transferring to a new Apple Mac computer with a previously correctly working installation of Microsoft Excel:mac 2008 (from an older computer, but running the same version of OS X). In theory, there should be no change, but hidden somewhere in the setup of the new computer lurks something preventing use of the UK date format.

The problem shows itself when, in a new Excel worksheet, a date is entered, e.g. using the formula =TODAY() returns something like 11/22/16 (for 22nd November 2016) instead of 22/11/16. Worse, if an existing workbook is opened, which had previously  correctly UK-formatted dates, they are all changed to the US-variation. A particular ongoing problem is then generated when new dates are added to the sheet, as entering 1/12/16 is then taken as 12th January not 1st December 2016.

 It turns out that the issue manifests itself in any User account set up on the Mac computer EXCEPT the ‘Guest’ account, which mysteriously sets the date to the UK-format. Hence this provides the clue to solving the problem. After some searching and trial-and-error, I have identified that the issue relates to the absence of a key file: com.apple.HIToolbox.plist, which for some reason is not created when setting up a new User account (and may not be copied across if importing from another computer). Luckily this file is created when opening the Guest account, which can then be copied across to all required User accounts.

Here is a detailed summary of the procedure I eventually used to fix this date format issue:

  1. Create and open a Guest Account (if not already enabled, go to Users & Group Preferences)
  2. Go to the Library folder (it’s a hidden folder, so to find it, use Finder to go to the home folder, then select from the menu ‘Go:Go to Folder’ and type in ‘Library’)
  3. Go to the Preferences folder
  4. Make a local copy of the file: com.apple.HIToolbox.plist (e.g. onto an SD card, or external/cloud drive)
  5. Now open your desired User account
  6. Go to your Library folder (again it will be hidden, so find it as above)
  7. Go to the Preferences folder
  8. Copy the file: com.apple.HIToolbox.plist (from local storage) into this folder
  9. Quit Excel and then log out of your user account, and then log back in
  10. Next time Excel starts, UK date format will be correct!