How to Maintain Safe Money Transfer Between Small Business Owners and Customers

Money makes the business world spin. Cash flows are the bloodstream of companies both big and small, and nobody wants to see it become clogged. With the current economic climate, where most people are still tightening their belts, it is important to account for an each penny, and a ballpark number does not suffice.

Even customers who live high off the hog want a safe and fast money transfer system. It can be easily established online, as the digital world offers countless opportunities to improve operations, cut the costs and reach a broader customer base. But, keeping the integrity of the payment service is linked with many security challenges and risks.

Safe money transfer

Playing hard, killing them softly

It is crucial to have a clean machine with powerful hardware and appropriate software platforms. Make good use of the latest security software solutions and up-to-date operating system and web browser. Several strong layers of defense can repel any malware, virus, cyber attack or other threat. Passwords should be long and strong, and encryption methods considered. Pay attention to Wi-Fi hotspots as well and never use an unsecure wireless network to make payments.

Backing-up

Apart from being protected, your data should also be backed-up. Losing valuable information is something that could happen in cases of hosting failure, hardware problems, hacker attacks and other unpredictable hazards. To prevent this, you can use external hard drives and other equipment, or cloud computing software. One of the most popular ones is Dropbox, and millions of content customers speak in favor of this option you can use for free or as a paid service.

Doing the research

Sending money overseas for international payments is a convenience, but also a process that can be hard to control. To keep your foreign transactions secure, you can work with an online exchange provider. However, doing a thorough, independent research beforehand is highly advisable. There are a lot of malicious sites that may appear legitimate, and customers should also have this in mind. These schemers want to trick you into submitting personal or financial information, so stay vigilant.

Embracing transparency

When you do not meet and see people you are doing business with, there are some serious trust issues present. Transparency is just as important as reliability, and providers that offer options for both the sender and receiver to track the money are to be trusted. So, educate your staff to use the internet in a safe and secure way, and to provide the necessary information to clients. A clear return policy is something that makes them feel safe, and the same goes for handy online tools and educational resources.

Choosing a safe payment options

Credit cards are one of the safest options, as they have a limit on the amount of money that needs to be paid if something goes wrong. The most popular online payment solution is perhaps PayPal, although it’s not available in all countries. Another option is to use an escrow method which introduces a neutral third party that holds and disburses money. This makes sure there are no ill-gotten gains or random losses due to imperfections in the system or human error. For example, PromisePay is one of those payment solutions that provides the escrow method.

Safe and sound

Conducting business online has never been easier, and there is no shortage of efficient and safe ways to go about it. Online payments are not taboo anymore, but one should be on the safe side here to prevent money loss and other inconveniences. Keeping the privacy of sensitive information is of the utmost importance, and it is always better to be safe than sorry.

It is crucial to find a payment system as sound as a dollar, and as safe as houses. Manage the risk associated with such transactions, see if you can find a reliable middleman, and deploy strategies and measures to thwart cyber threats. This is the best way to obtain loyal customers and to see your business flourishing. We all want our money to be in safe hands, don’t we?

Here’s How to Get Free SharePoint Hosting

Small business owners – if you are new to SharePoint and want to test its various features and functionalities first, the best way is get a free SharePoint site. Just make sure that the free version is fully functional, like the one at https://www.cloudappsportal.com.

Sharepoint free hosting service

Easy SharePoint site setup

Once you get your SharePoint site up and running, the initial step to take would be the inclusion of a project description that tells the visitors about the purpose of your site. SharePoint sites come with wiki editing and the editing operations are displayed in a ribbon, just the way you see them on the Microsoft Office 2007.

After you have the project description put up, add a link on the home page to your project workbook as the next standard step. Using this link, any of your user/team mate can easily navigate to the workbook and get additional details about the project.

Image storage and management

Uploading, storing and managing of images in SharePoint is quite easy. In fact, you will just need to spend a couple of minutes for adding a logo to your site, which will get positioned above the project description. There are actually six ways to add images to a SharePoint page – here’s the how-to.

You can also choose to replace the standard template image with a more interesting one that is better suited to your site; this is strongly recommended for branding purposes.

Videos

When you feel that a video must go up to add impact, it would be a good idea to create a totally new page for it, and the web part need to show the video – things that you can easily do it using SharePoint.

Adding a video is as easy as 1-2-3. What you need to do is to open Asset Picker and browse for your videos. Choose the one that you want and click ‘Insert’. That would be all.

Document groups

Likewise, you can use SharePoint Document Set feature to manage large collections/groups of documents as an aggregated entity, or quite simply, a single document set. When a document set is checked out, all of the documents within the set also get checked out and can be managed conveniently as a single item.

Learn more…

As you can see, there are plenty of possibilities when you set up a SharePoint site from SharePoint Hosting. It’s certainly not bad for free – plus there are the loads of support articles and guides that should help you and your business further with the out-of-the-box platform.