Geoff Tyler looks at the essentials for kitting out the back office and offers some advice on choosing the best equipment for your business - from PCs to paper shredders.
These days, like it or not, offices centre on the personal computer, or PC. There are thousands of software products out there to help businesses with financial planning, stocktaking, VAT and tax records, advertising, design and internet connection.
The starter kit for everyone's PC is Microsoft Office, which runs under the industry standard operating system, Microsoft Windows. Most PCs come ready-equipped with Office, and all you will need to add at first is a good internet access and email program.
All this provides the basics for writing letters, setting up files, storing photographs, basic money planning - though not a full business solution - and spread-sheet software to produce figures, keep stock and ordering records and so on.
Microsoft Office is general purpose and you may quickly be tempted to buy more specialist software aimed at the hospitality trade for, say, accounting and sales management. This area will be reviewed in a future issue.
If email is important, bear in mind that some of the free internet services make it difficult to compose messages off-line. It may take a bit of learning, and inconvenience, to avoid typing out letters while you are connected, increasing your phone bill. Also with email comes the risk of virus infection. These electronic viruses are usually unleashed deliberately and can cause havoc if they get into your system via incoming emails. Some PCs come ready-equipped with virus scanning and quarantine software, but if yours does not - buy it.
When it comes to buying the PC itself, the cheapest machine you can find is likely to be a poor bargain. Modern software, if it is at all capable, is space-hungry, as are graphics and photographs. Go for at least 256 megabytes of RAM (random access memory). Have a hard disk with a minimum of 15 gigabytes of storage and a microprocessor speed of 700 megahertz or more. If the PC has a cache memory, which stores frequently-used items for faster access to them, and extra graphics software, so much the better - but these are not essential. Expect to pay £600 to £1,000.
Voice recognition
All PCs have keyboards, but not every publican is a born typist. If typing out correspondence or announcements is a chore, why not speak them into the PC and see your words appear on the screen? It can now be done. More advanced software can even get the PC to translate what you say into another language and speak that back out, which may be useful if you have a lot of tourist trade.
Given a microphone connected to the PC, companies like Dictaphone, Philips, Winscribe, Speech Machines, Dragon and others supply software to convert spoken words into screen text. The software generally has to learn to recognise your voice, dialect etc, but after a few tries, accuracy is well above 90 per cent. All you do is read it and correct mistakes. Even alternative spellings - "meet" and "meat" for instance - get worked out correctly by the software evaluating the context in which the word is being used.
You can do the same thing with some pocket dictation machines - Sanyo and Olympus among them — dictating somewhere more relaxing than in the back office and connecting the dictation machine to the PC later to read back the words.
Printers
The media has been forecasting the paperless office since the fifties, but it's still not here - so you will need a printer to produce documents from the PC.
Printers, like PCs, are coming down in price dramatically. There is really no reason to buy a printer that cannot double as a scanner to act as a copier, print out from a digital camera and print incoming faxes - if you can foresee needing those functions. An inkjet printer capable of reasonable colour quality and functions like those could still cost less than £350.
At under £100 come less capable but still totally functional printers.
Sharp, Canon, Xerox and Brother are names to watch. Sharp's new AJ-1805 ink jet printer, for instance, gives mono or full colour output from the PC screen, a cartridge ink system that avoids mess and waste, and some clever image manipulation software called Photo Suite III SE (that alone costs £30 or so) to improve pictures or edit them into new images.
Disbelieve most suppliers' claims about colour print speeds. Ten to 15 pages per minute in black and white is a reasonable and achievable rate. But colour print speeds fall off the more colour there is to print.
Printers using laser technology rather than inkjet can be faster and cheaper to run if the workload is heavy, but not for the kind of usage the average publican will need of them.
Laminating
If you are printing notices, posters or menus, they will keep look better if laminated between sheets of transparent plastic. This used to be a professional print finishing job. Now, table-top laminating machines for A4 size costs £60 to £80 or so.
Filing
Having created paper, where to put it? You can buy used three or four-drawer filing cabinets for a tenner or two (new ones are only £50) but they use up space and are a hazard to shins. Filing laterally, in a cupboard equipped with suspended filing rails is a more compact solution. If paper files are kept to a minimum there are handy plastic boxes, ready equipped for suspended files, at £10 each.
Mailing
Some of that paper, however, will get mailed. Upcoming events, tickets and invitations create a lot of postage. Sticking stamps takes time but franking machines mean taking letters to the post office - you cannot normally put them in a mailbox.
Franking devotees point to things like Pitney Bowes' new Personal Post gadget. You charge it with the cost of postage over the phone using your credit card, and the franking on the envelope can include an advertising message. It makes the job quick but there is a £20 per month rental charge.
You can now buy stamps, too, over the phone by credit card. Call 08457 782 677. Minimum order value is £35 and postage of the stamps to you is free.
Paper shredding
Finally, once all that paper outlives its usefulness it is just in the way. But dumping it in the bin leaves all sorts of personal and financial information open. So shred it.
You can pay for high security shredders that produce a good imitation of sawdust but, as we are business people, not Eastern Bloc spies, thin strips should do.
That means spending £30 to £50. The result is a bag of something the recycling plant will love, and peace of mind for you.