If tough economic times are affecting your realty business and leaving you feeling helpless and stuck, you may want to consider trying something unorthodox to attract new business. One of the ways you can do this is by improving the atmosphere in your office in order to make it more conducive to successful business dealings.

Applying feng shui principles to your real estate office may seem like an odd idea, but the practice not only improves the aesthetic of a space, but it also enhances the positive vibrations in a room. People enjoy being in a room where the energy or ‘chi’ is allowed to flow freely. If you correct the energy deficiencies in your office, you and your staff will feel more alert, creative, and confident. In addition, customers will be drawn to your office and its positive atmosphere.

In order to reduce negative energy and replace it with beneficial vibes, the first thing you need to do is to take a look at the layout of the office.

Desks should be placed so that employee’s backs face the walls. Walls act as support and protection, and can help build your team up. If you face the wall, you are left vulnerable to people sneaking up behind you (intentionally or unintentionally). This leaves you on guard and jumpy, particularly when you’re concentrating hard on a difficult task.

Facing a wall also limits your vision and acts as a barrier to success. This can be seen as a symbol for your entire career –that you’ve hit a wall, and there’s nowhere for you to go. If you aren’t able to move your desk so that you’re facing something other than a wall, hang up pictures that make you feel good. Paintings or photographs that show paths or waterways are particularly helpful. They allow your mind to see the future ahead of you, and remind you that there’s more waiting for you out in the world, with new opportunities for success around every corner.

You also want to make sure that desks in the office face the doorway, if at all possible. There are a few reasons for this, including the idea that you can be hit with negative energy called “poison arrows” if the door is behind you. You also want to face the door so you can greet (both literally and energetically) clients as they walk in. If they see your back turned to them, they will feel unwelcome and unimportant. By facing the door, you’re getting ready for any new opportunity that presents itself. It also saves you from feeling like someone could walk in behind you unnoticed. Facing the door puts you in a position of power.

To really infuse the office with vibrant, healthy energy, add lots of lush plants to the mix. Plants help eliminate carbon dioxide and improve air circulation, as well as help ground the energy in the room. The more natural elements you can bring into the office, the better, as they reduce stress and leave you feeling more solid and connected to the earth.

Water features and crystals can also bring in a sense of tranquility to the office, which is very helpful for both you and your clients. Balance these peaceful elements with splashes of red for an energy boost, brown or green to promote prosperity, and white for mental clarity.

Remember that you don’t need to get too carried away with feng shui decor in order experience its benefits. Start with a few small changes and see how the energy improves in the office. The better the energy flow in the office, the more creative and forward-thinking you and your staff will become. This will in turn attract new clients, who’ll be drawn to the positive chi in your real estate office.

Who are they?
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revenue officers (a/k/a ROs) are the elite members of the IRS collection force. There are approximately 6,000 revenue officers operating nationwide. Each is assigned to a particular field group of 10-12 revenue officers, managed by a Group Manager, and assigned a specific geographic area. The IRS grants revenue officers absolute collection authority. This means they have the ability to send notices, make phone calls, make at-home or at-work visits, issue summons (i.e. mandatory, at IRS office meeting), issue levies (i.e. on wages, income, or bank accounts), issue liens, seize accounts receivable, initiate seizure of valuable property, etc. On the other hand, the revenue officer is given wide latitude to resolve tax liabilities by entering payment plans (i.e. Installment Agreements), placing clients into a protected status (i.e. Currently Not Collectible status), or granting extensions to full pay.

When are they assigned?
A revenue officer is assigned to a taxpayer’s case when (1) the IRS is unable to collect from the taxpayer with a back tax liability through the normal collection channels (i.e. IRS Notices, levies, liens, telephone calls, etc.), (2) the taxpayer has a history of thwarting tax return compliance (i.e. has never filed), (3) the taxpayer’s tax liability is due to the failure to pay certain taxes (i.e. payroll taxes), or (4) the taxpayer’s tax liability is incredibly large.

What do they do?
A revenue officer’s number one priority is to get the taxpayer compliant and collect payment in full of the taxes owed. They have a number of tools available to them including levies, liens, summonses, and seizure of property. Unlike representatives in the service centers or Automated Collection Service (ACS), revenue officers have an assigned, limited caseload. They are more likely to stay on top of their notices and follow through promptly with their threats of enforced collection. Revenue officers typically have more training and greater investigative authority than your average call center representative. This can be an advantage or a disadvantage to the taxpayer. On the one hand, they tend to demand more information and substantiation than ACS. On the other hand, this authority affords them increased flexibility and discretion. For a call center employee, the authority to make discretionary decisions is severely limited.

Revenue officers work in “the field” in the sense that there are territory offices all over the country. Cases are assigned to a given office depending on the residence of the taxpayer or the location of the business in the case of business accounts. Furthermore, the revenue officer will often make a field visit and actually go to the taxpayer to try to get first hand knowledge of the financial situation. If a tax account has found its way to a revenue officer, it usually means that collection efforts have been unsuccessful or unresolved at preceding collection stages.

The diploma program prepares graduates to step into their professional life in hotels, resorts, restaurants and convention places. The program also includes a beneficial professional practice of paid industry training, exposing students to the industry and its standards, so that they can implement and practice their theoretical knowledge.

It is a unique course method covering both the practical skills of preparation of food and beverages with a focus on operational management skills. The enclosure of this diploma program enables students to gain fabulous career opportunities in the Hospitality Industry. Diploma in Hospitality Management is ideal for the students who are intended to own their own hospitality business/restaurant. It is a real course for future managers and business owners.

Are you one of many of the millions of Americans now working outside traditional workplaces who have found themselves surprised by how difficult home-office life can be?

Before they were married in September, Nicci Young and Richard Wiese first had to split up. The problem was not romantic, but spatial: Young Wiese, who organizes community development safaris to Africa, and Wiese, a writer and explorer, found that their Upper East Side one-bedroom was not big enough for the two of them after both decided to work from home.

The paperless office has been talked about for a long time, yet never seems to even start to become a reality in almost any sector of business. Look around any office environment and you would be forgiven for thinking that the opposite of the paperless office is evolving, with ever increasing stacks of printed reports and greater need for filing and document storage than ever before. Most companies, and their individual employees, still hold the opinion that copies of documents still need to be retained ‘on file’ to see and read and a continued mind-set of mistrust of digital storage prevails. This is assisted by many government departments inflicting legal requirements for specific accounting and administrative documents being retained and available for inspection for periods of up to six years beyond their production.

All of this document production and storage is occurring in a time when almost everything we generate comes from a digital system, eg. word processing, accounting systems, digital copiers, etc. – and most of these documents are already stored in digital file format on the system that created them originally (Word files, spreadsheets, photographs, accounting systems, etc). Yet there is still a great reluctance to take the final step and commit these paper files into a concise digital filing system and reduce the amount of environmentally damaging paper consumed, as well as reducing the expense committed to vast amounts of wasted space given over to document storage. Much of the resistance to change stems from old and somewhat flawed technology being made available before it’s limitations were determined. Those who tried digital document storage in its infancy had poor experiences, with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and poor scanning facilities producing less than accurate results in the stored documents; bad characters, poor formatting, etc. The previously poor experiences, coupled with localised, instead of centralised, file access has created a resistance to change that still prevails today.

Try the exercise of breaking down the requirements for a digital, therefore paperless, document storage and management system. The majority of businesses will store correspondence, reports and other items produced on a computer-based word/presentation/numeric software program, accounting and auditing documents produced by a computer-based system, email and fax documents transmitted on most occasions via a computer or digital software – and all of these have one thing in common: they are already stored in digital format on the system that was used to create them. Additionally, photographs are either transferred from a digital camera/phone/download/email attachment or scanned (with very good results) into a digital format onto the company’s computer network, so these too are already stored in a digital format. Other documentation, generally received from external sources (customers, suppliers, etc.), will not have an existing digital file format in your business’s computer – these can be scanned into the system and digitally stored with great accuracy using the advanced software that is now available, and retrieved with accuracy when needed for further reference. So almost 100% of the documentation that your business uses every day can be stored in a digital document storage and retrieval system; eliminating the need for stacks and files of papers; cutting the need for expensive storage space; reducing wasted employee time searching for those elusive mis-filed documents.

So why are businesses resisting the paperless office? In addition to any previous poor experiences with early technology, the primary reason seems to be a lack of coordinated facilities. Most companies have a networked computer system, many have digital copier and printer systems and most have scanning facilities. However, the file storage systems are fragmented and often personalised, the copier/printer facilities are not correctly networked and scanning facilities are sometimes inadequate and localised. The resistance towards introducing and operating a paperless document storage and retrieval system is often down to a simple lack of coordination within the business itself, coupled with a lack of responsibility – is it the overburdened IT manager’s job, the office manager’s job, the director responsible for admin’s job, or the ‘Mr Nobody’ who gets lumbered with those tasks no one else has time or incentive to undertake? Yet a great deal of wasted time and money continues to drain from the business resources while this task remains unaddressed.

A straightforward approach to addressing the introduction of a paperless office can have the whole process introduced in little time with comparatively small set up costs, quickly recouped by the savings generated from reduced paper consumption, reduced storage space and wasted employee time. In terms of personnel, one person should be appointed the task of overseeing the implementation of the system and ensuring that the (probably existing) equipment facilities are correctly networked together into the central business computer network. A reliable and efficient document storage and retrieval software system should be sourced and installed onto the business’s network and set up ready for use by everyone who handles documents as a part of their daily routine. Having created this hardware and software environment, the task of transferring/installing existing files and documents (historical documents already stored elsewhere) should be undertaken prior to the central document filing and retrieval system becoming ‘live’ (although this could be done retrospectively over a period of time if necessary). The final stage is to roll out the system to all employees from a predetermined date, allowing for any training/instruction being implemented beforehand.

The software for digital document storage and retrieval is the key to it’s success. Scanning, Archive and Retrieval systems have been viewed by some businesses as a ‘dark art’ or at least with some doubt and suspicion in the past, where poor experiences of older and less stable systems have caused problems with document retrieval. By combining the facilities of the office digital copier/printer/scanner systems (often referred to as Business Hubs due to their networking capabilities), with the networked computer system a good quality software digital document and retrieval program will allow you to store and find that illusive “needle in a haystack”. A quality system will incorporate fast scanning speeds, excellent search and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tolerance, automatic document indexing, fast search and retrieval facility with efficient and easy to use Boolean search commands (Google style searching). One such system is PowerRetrieve, available through Business By Technology Ltd., Manchester and Coventry, along with fully trained and experienced consultants and IT advisors.

Three definable supplier areas are clear for the introduction of a paperless office environment: the networked computer system, the digital office copiers/printers/scanners, and the document storage and retrieval software. Each of these areas have their own specialist advisors who can be called upon for advice and assistance, but some supplier companies, primarily from the office copier/printer sector, now have specialist trained IT advisors who can coordinate the introduction of a paperless office system from inception to completion. A specialist IT advisor from one of these companies is of great assistance when working alongside the internal person charged with responsibility for introducing the paperless office system, from the early planning stages through to final implementation. The paperless office is within the grasp of every business, however large or small, it can create a more efficient working environment and immediately recognisable cost savings from implementation.

An office is not unlike a dysfunctional home, where multiple personalities are forced to exist in close proximity, usually for the purpose of a common goal which only a few are genuinely interested in seeing through to fruition. Managers are the parental units of the group, where employees can range from a child determined to bring home an impressive report card to the proverbial black sheep who rails against any authority. Of course, as is the case with many dysfunctional families, often the managers ineptitude in handling personnel matters is just as much if not more so to blame for the failures of the whole.

Hosted Sharepoint 2007 is a newly developed platform that enables a company to centralize all of its activities into one web-based application. The advantages of this choice are numerous, ranging from improved communication to enterprise content management.

Years ago there was something of a stigma attached to occupying a serviced office. After all, who would want to deal with a company that could vacate its offices at a moment’s notice and without a second thought? Now though the perception is very different. Government departments, law firms, IT companies, financial institutions and many other reputable businesses have suddenly seen the light.