Foreign Perspectives

Many places tend to treat repeat customers specially through offering discounts, extra services, or whatever.

However, they remain customers and one of the key things about that is that you need to get money off them for whatever goods or services that you sell, even if they are both a repeat customer and a large one.

One trap to fall into is to be more lax with the payment terms. Unless you habitually offer credit then you shouldn’t offer it to even the best of customers as sooner or later it’ll just cause needless friction between you and a good customer. If it’s pay on delivery for everyone else then that should be the case for even the best customers too as your sales contract probably doesn’t allow for any credit in such circumstances: a recipe for trouble collecting the cash if ever there was one.

So, yes, offer better discounts to better customers. Yes, offer, additional services to better customers. But, NO, don’t change your payment terms.

I’ve been looking at the ASUS range for quite a while now but really couldn’t see the point of getting a baby computer with only at most 20GB storage. Sure, it would have sounded a lot a few years ago but when you start thinking about photos and videos it just doesn’t cut it these days and that’s before you even think about software.

All these little computers are tagged as “netbooks” meaning that they’re intended primarily for use as portable Internet browsers. Certainly for those with 8GB or less “disc” space you’d not get much in the way of applications loaded up but when you’ve 120GB of hard drive to play with what you’ve got is a smaller version of a laptop ie they can do pretty much everything that their bigger brothers can do.

Typically these small computers come loaded with a custom version of Linux although you can also get versions with XP and Vista loaded too (they’re usually £20 or so more expensive). The Linux versions usually come with OpenOffice (the Linux equivalent of Microsoft Office), photo and video display software and, of course, games. In other words, the software that most people use. Note that the Linux software is free you don’t get hit with the extra cost of buying MS Office that you would with the XP or Vista versions.

Out of the box the Aspire One seems like a closed system but it’s easy enough to open things up: just press Alt+F2, type xfce-setting-show and press enter, click on Desktop, then Behavior and finally Show desktop menu on right-click. Now, right-clicking on the desktop will give you the full range of options and in particular going to System, Add/Remove software will give you oodles of choices to extend the functionality of your system.

Incidently, don’t think that going down the Linux route will cut you off from the Microsoft world because there are emulation packages available that’ll let you run pretty much all XP/Vista based software.

For personal reasons I’ve ended up pretty much commuting between the UK and France over the last three weeks or so and it’s left me with a backlog of both e-mail and post like you wouldn’t believe.

What’s slightly depressing about this is the speed with which I’ve been able to make serious inroads with the backlog thanks, of course, to the massive amount of it that is junk mail. It’s going to be a longer slog with the post though as it’s not nearly so easy these days to identify what’s junk and what’s real stuff.

Still, at least I can see the bottom of the junk e-mails for the moment.

When you look around in a new country you generally bring all your preconceptions as to what a bank is with you.

Typically, the assumption is that a financial organisation is a bank if it issues credit cards, debit cards and cheque books whereas it’s a building society if it largely confines itself to savings accounts and mortgages. Of course, in many countries such distinctions don’t exist 100% of the time and there’s usually something of a graduated scale between building society and bank in most countries these days.

In fact, a more realistic distinction these days is probably based on size (however that might be measured) and perhaps the extent of international activities. So, for example, although most people would call the likes of the Halifax in the UK a building society in fact in both legal and practical terms it has been a bank for many years. For example, it has been issuing cheque books since the first world war if not before and has had international activities for a substantial time too.

On the other hand, the various Credit Agricoles in France are clearly in the building society camp. Yes, they issue cheque books but their debit cards aren’t run by themselves and their international activities are nil, at least as far as the regional Credit Agricoles go.

Spain by contrast has the fairly substantial La Caixa which is a savings bank in name only although with few international activities up to now.

Rental prices tend to lag the corresponding rises in house prices, essentially because rental contracts are generally 6 to 12 months in duration.

With the incredibly strong rise in house prices in Northern Ireland over the last year to 18 months it could only be expected that the rents being asked for would make a move after the customary time lag. Now, the house prices have levelled off at the moment but that’s not stopped the rents starting to shift upwards.

For example, in one estate which we have a vested interest in, a typical house was £130k in September 2006 vs £225k now. The increase in rents being asked is also heading upwards over that time from a typical £425 last year to £495 now. So far that’s only a 16% rental increase compared to the 73% price rise but I suspect that it’s merely a taster of things to come from the landlords as they test the water for reactions to that rise. Certainly if the prices of the houses resume their progress upwards I would be surprised if there wasn’t a certain amount of catching up happening this time next year with the rents.