You are now able to obtain more insights about your business opportunities. In this release two standard reports are available:

✓ Pipeline Report. Based on your customised business process reports the total value of opportunities (Profit & Margin), average confidence and weighted values for each stage of your custom sales process.

✓ Task Report. Shows colour coded tasks grouped by Opportunity within each Customer. At a glance see which tasks are overdue, due today, to be done in next seven days or scheduled beyond that date.

Reports are produced as PDF documents and are instantly displayed on your device but can also be emailed to yourself or others in your team and then printed.

This section will be extended further based on user demand for additional reports and also a custom report writer.

This release has been submitted to Apple on 21st October 2011 and hopefully will be approved and released within the next week.

Working alone it is sometimes easy to overlook your own success. Those that know me know that I am not afflicted by modesty, but even so.  The original plan for the Apps business was to develop a series of Apps that would all fit into the Finance section. In fact that was not a “well formed objective” – in other words it was wrong!

Not sure exactly when, but at some point this morphed into developing Apps for Sales Professionals that use iPhones and/or iPads. This is a much better definition. In fact I can refine this further;

1. Primary Market: Sales professionals working with medium to large businesses who sell B2B (business to business) products and services. They are probably part of a sales team. The entire team might be between 10 and 30 people so not huge. They will spend a high proportion of their time out with clients (so road worrier types) and will be tech savvy. Geographically they could be anywhere, but they will be using English as their primary language.
2. Secondary Market: Sales professionals outside of the B2B sphere.
3. Tertiary Market: Business owner / managers who have to undertake “selling” within the course of their day to day business activities. They may not see it as selling and they may use different vocabulary to real Sales People.

So having defined the target customer, this simplifies many other problems;

• What product(s) shall I develop. Simple anything that a typical B2B sales person would need.
• How do we generate sales? Simple, “be everywhere” that a typical B2B sales person would be. What would they read, what events and so on.

Many friends and colleagues, talented people, spend a lot of time trying to spot a golden opportunity or to invent a dream product. This is probably a waste, a waste of their professional lives and skills. The simpler route is to define a target customer segment (only criteria is it should be one that you know something about!) and then set about providing solutions to problems they encounter. Having thought about this I can not think of any customer segment that doesn’t have some problems that could be fixed using technology…

Right. Now it must be time to crack on with the new Reporting section for Sales Planner.

Where before, Facebook users had to use their computers for most of their Facebook gaming and app needs, now they should be able to play and participate from almost any device with a Web browser. And they may get a better experience if it happens to be an Apple iOS device.

The combined native and Web app experience is only available on iOS for now. On Android and other phones with Web browsers, users will default to the Web experience. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told AllThingsD that Facebook is also working on an update to its native Android application.

Read the rest of this article on AllThingsD where it was originally published.

May this year saw Sales Planner become the #1 highest grossing App in Egypt and also 64th highest grossing App over all. Other countries that have been also shown strong sales have been The Netherlands (2nd highest grossing Finance App September 2011) and Portugal (9th highest grossing Finance App in April 2011).

It has been interesting to note that Sales Planner has no local language support and is only available in English. So in light of this I an doubly pleased with it’s performance.

There are many new features that I plan to introduce to Sales Planner (not least or which is enhanced reporting), given its current success and rapidly growing user base, I shall have to try and prioritise these.

It always feels good to be appreciated and have your work recognised. I was delighted to read a recent user review left in the UK Store:

Sales Planner V2.0 - Great application …. easy data entry which provides easy and customizable interface for managing sales pipeline. Simple drill down of data which can be grouped by customised catergories and regions. Also links directly to contacts which is a nice feature. Support from developer is very good and they have been responsive to requests for changes and additions. Recommend for anyone needing easy CRM type solution for managing sales pipeline and forecasting. Planned introduction of report writer will make app even more powerful.

Quite simply, Gross Margin Calculator has been an outstanding success and is outperforming all of my other Apps hands down. One of the key performance indicators I use to measure my business is “Average Units Per Month / Per App”. On this metric, GM Calc proves itself as a hugely valuable App to my target users.

Having bought an iPad2 as soon as they came out, justified by the fact that I ‘obviously’ needed a device for testing on, it seemed long overdue that I should actually create an iPad App.

I considered a universal version of the existing Gross Margin Calculator, but that did not fit with a viable commercial model. An iPad version could support many additional features over the iPhone release and warranted it’s own product lifecycle. I should stress that none of these wondrous new features actually made it into version 1.0 – but that is just the mad world of Software Development at its best

Also decided to try a new pricing tactic. The App will eventually sell for circa 4.99 GBP, but I have elected to go with a launch price of just .69GBP for the first 500 downloads. With a little luck, the plan is to raise the price at the same time that the new super-improved version hits the store… We will see.

So now I just need Apple to approve the App and we are off to the races.

I wrote VAT Sales Tax Calculator for two reasons:

1. I wanted a reasonably simple first project, allowing me to focus on learning the key aspects of Objective-C rather than becoming to concerned with complex application logic
2. One of my pet hates through-out my career, and even now, is filling in expense claim forms and finding a receipt that doesn’t have a VAT break down. OK it is not too hard to use a calculator to work out what the VAT element is and then deduct this from the gross amount… but it is hassle. Computers are mainly supposed to remove hassle from humans lives. The iPhone is a computer.

Therefore the core function of the VAT calculator must of course be to add or deduct VAT from an amount giving the VAT element as well as the computed answer. But this is in effect exactly what all percentage calculators do. In my opinion, a VAT calculator must try and address all questions and tasks associated with VAT – that is what qualifies it to be specifically about VAT rather than being about percentages. Perhaps a subtle, but I think important, difference. VAT Sales Tax Calculator does this in two ways:

1. The App includes a database of Sales Tax rates and supporting relevant materials for many countries around the world. At the time of writing this blog the database has all US States listed, all EU countries and many key economies in the remaining parts of the world. Why is this useful? Well for most of the time it isn’t! But, if you were trying to work out an international pricing strategy for a consumer targeted product then being able to quickly understand the different sales tax regimes would be handy. It is something you might need to know about Sales Tax so in order for the App to be the subject domain authority it should assist you with it.
2. The App allows you to verify a Sales Tax registration numbers. This goes beyond validating a check digit, the App checks to see if the number has been issued and if so returns you the name and registered address of the company in question. This is done by querying an EU database. The limitation being that this feature of the App can only check EU registrations as I am yet to find an equally accessible database for the US or other parts of the world.

And that is basically it!

I applied my standard architecture ethos that as much of the App as possible should work with no Internet access and absolutely no use of HTML! Clearly checking the EU database is completely dependant on having Internet access, but the databases are stored locally and updated via App updates. (More about why that makes sense another time!).

Of course I do now also have a percentage calculator too – one of too many that are currently in the App store! Perhaps I will blog the back story to that another time If you have any questions or comments please just ask them by leaving a comment below.

• Amongst adults 58% of males owned a smartphone compared to 42% females.
• Amongst teenagers, ownership was spilt 52% female and 48% male.
• 32% of adults said that the iPhone was their favoured device, but amongst teenagers Blackberry was the preferred brand (37%).
• 89% of respondents sighted sending email as their most popular use of the mobile internet.
• 61% are using their mobile phone to do online banking.
• 45% use their mobile to watch TV on.

The vast majority of smartphone users (81 per cent) have their mobile switched on all of the time, even when they are in bed, with four in ten adults (38 per cent) and teens (40 per cent) admitting using their smartphone after it woke them.

smartphone users are more likely to take part in work calls while on holiday or annual leave – Ofcom report

Over half (51 per cent) of adults and two thirds (65 per cent) of teenagers say they have used their smartphone while socialising with others, nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of adults and a third (34 per cent) of teenagers have used them during mealtimes and over a fifth (22 per cent) of adult and nearly half (47 per cent) of teenage smartphone users admitted using or answering their handset in the bathroom or toilet.

When it came to privacy only 6% of 16 to 24 year olds said they had any concerns where as 13% of older people (55 – 64 year olds) had concerns.

Highlights from the q3 earnings call include;

• Record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion
• 20.34 million iPhones were sold which is 142% increase over last year
• iPad sales up 183%
• Gross Margin was strong at 41.7%
• International sales accounted for 62% of quarterly revenue

Please note that GROSS MARGIN CALCULATOR does not perform currency conversions. Therefore, changing the Regional Format will only change the symbol displayed and in no way alters the values being used.

The MultiBuy screen has been added in version 3.1 to meet the needs of retailers who buy products in volume and then split a “pack” to sell individual, or small numbers of units. This screen enables you to specific how many units are purchased at set price and how many units are sold at a set price. Gross Margin is then calculated. In addition profit is calculated on the basis of one retail unit being sold and also the profit generated from one buying pack. Values from MultiBuy are integrated into Discount and Margin Calculator. Please note that when these values are passed they are shown as the value for a single item. When passed back to MultiBuy they are multiplied back up.

Example: I buy a case of dog food with 24 cans in it and sell them in individually. Gross Margin now solves the margin and profit calculations for this scenario.