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Small business tech chekclists

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Anyone who operates a small business, home-based business, or even a home office knows that tax time can be stressful. However, investing in the right equipment and technology can help a small business navigate tax season – and every season – smoothly and efficiently. Some tips to make technology work for you at tax time:

  • Digitize: Making the transition to digital documents can be a big step for a small business, but converting documents to digital is becoming increasingly simple and popular.Advantages of scan-to-digital at tax time include less paper to sort through and easy access to a variety of records.
  • Go mobile: Try using a mobile device or laptop and a portable scanner to digitize tax documents while on the road.Portable scanners can save space in the office setting as well, by reducing the amount of space needed to store paper records and documents.Printing from a mobile device or laptop to a wireless-enabled printer also helps save time, especially during tax season. And many printers have security features for output management and ease of use.
  • Convenience: Equipment that is easy to set up and use saves valuable time for small businesses. For those on the go, portable products such as the Canon image FORMULA handle document scanning for individuals on the road or working remotely. A lightweight design allows for easy document digitization from a range of locations, such as a hotel, airport, offsite meeting venue, or a home office.
  • Confidence: Investing in technology with a trusted reputation means less worry that an office solution – hardware or software – might fail at a crucial time. The technology of scanners designed for small businesses has improved in recent years.”Small businesses with limited resources demand reliability and dependability in their document management technology,” says Nobuhiko Kitajima, VP and general manager of Canon USA Inc.’s Business Imaging Solutions Group.One example, the Canon image FORMULA, provides small businesses with reliable and efficient performance, and comes with an industry-leading, five-year warranty.
  • Protection: Data security is essential, especially for businesses that work in the cloud. Be sure to choose products with security features, such as password protection, multi-factor log-in and output file encryption.

Concrete and abstract thinking

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The maxim enjoined upon teachers, “to proceed from the concrete to the abstract,” is perhaps familiar rather than comprehended. Few who read and hear it gain a clear conception of the starting-point, the concrete; of the nature of the goal, the abstract; and of the exact nature of the path to be traversed in going from one to the other. At times the injunction is positively misunderstood, being taken to mean that education should advance from things to thought—as if any dealing with things in which thinking is not involved could possibly be educative. So understood, the maxim encourages mechanical routine or sensuous excitation at one end of the educational scale—the lower—and academic and unapplied learning at the upper end.

Actually, all dealing with things, even the child’s, is immersed in inferences; things are clothed by the suggestions they arouse, and are significant as challenges to interpretation or as evidences to substantiate a belief. Nothing could be more unnatural than instruction in things without thought; in sense-perceptions without judgments based upon them. And if the abstract to which we are to proceed denotes thought apart from things, the goal recommended is formal and empty, for effective thought always refers, more or less directly, to things.

Yet the maxim has a meaning which, understood and supplemented, states the line of development of logical capacity. What is this signification? Concrete denotes a meaning definitely marked off from other meanings so that it is readily apprehended by itself. When we hear the words, table, chair, stove, coat, we do not have to reflect in order to grasp what is meant. The terms convey meaning so directly that no effort at translating is needed. The meanings of some terms and things, however, are grasped only by first calling to mind more familiar things and then tracing out connections between them and what we do not understand. Roughly speaking, the former kind of meanings is concrete; the latter abstract.

To one who is thoroughly at home in physics and chemistry, the notions of atom and molecule are fairly concrete. They are constantly used without involving any labor of thought in apprehending what they mean. But the layman and the beginner in science have first to remind themselves of things with which they already are well acquainted, and go through a process of slow translation; the terms atom and molecule losing, moreover, their hard-won meaning only too easily if familiar things, and the line of transition from them to the strange, drop out of mind. The same difference is illustrated by any technical terms: coefficient and exponent in algebra, triangle and square in their geometric as distinct from their popular meanings; capital and value as used in political economy, and so on.

The young man in business

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A well-known New York millionaire gave it as his opinion not long ago that any young man possessing a good constitution and a fair degree of intelligence might acquire riches. The statement was criticised – literally picked to pieces – and finally adjudged as being extra. The figures then came out, gathered by a careful statistician that of the young men in business in New York City, sixty per cent, were earning less than $1,000 per year, only twenty per cent, had an income of $2,000, and barely five per cent, commanded salaries in excess of the latter figure. The great majority of young men in New York City—that is, between the ages of twenty-three and thirty—were earning less than twenty dollars per week. On the basis, therefore, that a young man must be established in his life-profession by his thirtieth year, it can hardly be said that the average New York young man in business is successful. Of course, this is measured entirely from the standpoint of income. It is true that a young man may not, in every case, receive the salary his services merit, but, as a general rule, his income is a pretty accurate indication of his capacity.

Now, as every young man naturally desires to make a business success, it is plain from the above statement that something is lacking; either the opportunities, or the capabilities in the young men themselves. No one conversant with the business life of any of our large cities can, it seems to me, even for a single moment, doubt the existence of good chances for young men. Take any large city as a fair example: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago, and in each instance there exist more opportunities than there are young men capable of embracing them. The demand is far in excess of the supply. Positions of trust are constantly going begging for the right kind of young men to fill them. But such men are not common; or, if they be, they have a most unfortunate way of hiding their light under a bushel, so much so that business men cannot see even a glimmer of its rays. Let a position of any real importance be open, and it is the most difficult kind of a problem to find any one to fill it satisfactorily. Business men are constantly passing through this experience. Young men are desired in the great majority of positions because of their progressive ‘ideas and capacity to endure work; in fact, “young blood,” as it is called, is preferred in nine positions out of every ten, nowadays.

The chances for business success for any young man are not wanting. The opportunities exist, plenty of them. The trouble is that the average young man of to-day is incapable of filling them, or, if he be not exactly incapable (I gladly give him the benefit of the doubt), he is unwilling to fill them, which is even worse. That exceptions can be brought up to controvert I know, but I am dealing with the many, not with the few.

The average young man in business to-day is nothing more nor less than a plodder,—a mere automaton. He is at his office at eight or nine o’clock in the morning; is faithful in the duties he performs; goes to luncheon at twelve, gets back at one; takes up whatever he is told to do until five, and then goes home. His work for the day is done. One day is the same to him as another; he has a certain routine of duties to do, and he does them day in and day out, month in and month out. His duties are regulated by the clock. As that points, so he points. Verily, it is true of him that he is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. No special fault can be found with his work. Given a particular piece of work to do, he does it just as a machine would. Such a young man, too, generally considers himself hard-worked—often overworked and underpaid; wondering all the time why his employer doesn’t recognize his value and advance his salary. “I do everything I am told to do,” he argues, “and I do it well. What more can I do?”

This is simply a type of a young man to be found in thousands of offices and stores. He goes to his work each day with no definite point nor plan in view; he leaves it with nothing accomplished. He is a mere automaton. Let him die, and his position can be filled in twenty-four hours. If he detracts nothing from his employer’s business, he certainly adds nothing to it. He never advances an idea; is absolutely devoid of creative powers; his position remains the same after he has been in it for five years as when he came to it.

 

By Edward Bok

America’s first businessman

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Let our schools teach the nobility of labor and the beauty of human service, but the superstitions of ages past—never!

—Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper was born in New York City in the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-one. He lived to be ninety-two years old, passing out in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three.

He was, successively, laborer, clerk, mechanic, inventor, manufacturer, financier, teacher and philosopher.

If Robert Owen was the world’s first modern merchant, Peter Cooper was America’s first businessman. He seems to have been the first prominent man in the United States to abandon that legal wheeze, “Caveat emptor.” In fact, he worked for the buyer, and considered the other man’s interests before he did his own. He practised the Golden Rule and made it pay, while the most of us yet regard it as a kind of interesting experiment. I have said a few oblique things about city-bred boys and city people in general, but I feel like apologizing for them and doing penance when I think of restless, tireless, eager, brave, honest and manly Peter Cooper.

When that New York City woman, last week, observing a beautiful brass model of an Oliver Plow on my mantel, asked me, “What is this musical instrument?” she proved herself not of the Peter Cooper tribe. She was the other kind—the kind that seeing the pollywogs remarks, “Oh, how lovely—they will all be butterflies next week!” Or, “Which cow is it that gives the butter-milk?” a question that once made Nathan Straus walk on his hands.

Although Peter Cooper was born in New York City and had a home there most of his life, he loved the country, and for many years made Sunday sacred for the woods and fields. Yet as a matter of strictest truth let it be stated that, although Peter Cooper was born in New York City, when he was two years old, like Bill Nye, he persuaded his parents to move. The family gravitated to the then little village of Peekskill, and here the lad lived until he was seventeen years old.

Next to Benjamin Franklin, Peter Cooper was our all-round educated American. His perfect health—living to a great age—with sanity and happiness as his portion, proves him to be one who knew the laws of health and also had the will to obey them. He never “retired from business”—if he quit one kind of work it was to take up something more difficult.

He was in the fight to the day of his death; and always he carried the flag further to the front.

 

Business and education

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James Jerome Hill has one credential, at least, to greatness—he was born in a log house. But let the painful fact be stated at once, without apology, that he could never be President of the United States, because this historic log house was situated in Canada. The exact spot is about three miles from the village of Rockwood, Wellington County, Ontario.

Rockwood is seven miles east of Guelph, forty from Toronto, and a hundred from Buffalo.

Mr. Hill well remembers his first visit to Toronto. He went with his father, with a load of farm produce. It took two days to go and two to return, and for their load they got the princely sum of seven dollars, with which they counted themselves rich.

James Hill, the father of James Jerome Hill, was a North of Ireland man; his wife was Anne Dunbar, good and Scotch. I saw a portrait of Anne Dunbar Hill in Mr. Hill’s residence at Saint Paul, and was also shown the daguerreotype from which it was painted. It shows a woman of decided personality, strong in feature, frank, fearless, honest, sane and poised. The dress reveals the columnar neck that goes only with superb bodily vigor—the nose is large, the chin firm, the mouth strong. She looks like a Spartan, save for the pensive eyes that gaze upon a world from which she has passed, hungry and wistful. The woman certainly had ambition and aspiration which were unsatisfied.

James J. Hill is the son of his mother. His form, features, mental characteristics and ambition are the endowment of mother to son.

It was a tough old farm, then as now. As I tramped across its undulating acres, a week ago, and saw the stone fences and the piles of glacial drift that Jim Hill’s hands helped pick up, I thought of the poverty of the situation when no railroad passed that way, and wheat was twenty cents a bushel, and pork one cent a pound—all for lack of a market!

Jim Hill as a boy fought the battle of life with ax, hoe, maul, adz, shovel, pick, mattock, drawshave, rake and pitchfork. Wool was carded and spun and woven by hand. The grist was carried to the mill on horseback, or if the roads were bad, on the farmer’s back. All this pioneer experience came to James J. Hill as a necessary part of his education.

 

The armed fleets of an enemy approaching our harbors would be no more alarming than the relentless advance of a day when we shall have neither sufficient food nor the means to purchase it for our population. The farmers of the nation must save it in the future, just as they built its greatness in the past.

—James J. Hill