vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"Sales tactics for permanent insurance policies can get pretty sleazy. Sending home a flier from school is a way for an insurance salesperson to get his/her message out to 800 families without any effort at all, and very little advertising cost (just a ream of paper and some toner). The biggest catchphrases used are the ""just pennies per day"" and ""in case they get (some devastating medical condition) and become uninsurable."" Sure, both are technically true, but are definitely used to trigger the grown ups' insecurities. Having said that (and having been in the financial business for a time, which included selling insurance policies), there is a place for insurance of children. A small amount can be used to offset the loss of income for the parents who may have to take extended time away from work to deal with the event of the loss of their child, and to deal with the costs of funeral and burial. Let's face it, the percentage of families who have a sufficiently large emergency fund is extremely small compared to the overall population. Personally, I have added a child rider to my own (term) insurance policies that covers any/all of my children. It does add some cost to my premiums, but it's a small cost on top of something that is already justifiably in place for myself. One other thing to be aware of: if you're in a group policy (any life insurance where you're automatically accepted without any underwriting process, like through a benefit at work, or some other club or association), the healthy members are subsidizing the unhealthy ones. If you're on the healthy side, you might consider foregoing that policy in favor of getting your own policy through an insurance company of your choice. If you're healthy, it will always be cheaper than the group coverage."
Thanks. I was trying to keep it pretty simple.  I would mostly agree with you, and 100% on the first part. That gets as much into cost allocation methods as anything else though (a topic I just didn't feel like going into haha. You could do a whole managerial accounting course on it).   My caveat is the only time when C-suites screw up transfer pricing and division economics are if they don't fully understand the cost allocation going on behind the scenes. I've seen too many get bogged down with analysts pressing against unprofitable divisions without FULLY taking into account the intricacies of various costing methods (some of which are better than others!).  I think 90% of the time the C-suite gets it. I've just seen a number (ESP small companies) who don't, and end up really screwing things up.  Again though, GE is the master of accounting.
Hi, Few basic things: Identify needs and process paths e.g.,  - customer queries  - payments, returns , complains  - orders Identify and setup routes : email, phone, chat, etc. Setup escalation paths , e.g. phone triage -&gt; sales department -&gt;sales manager Set SLA(service level agreement) and other measurement KPIs, also set up roles responsible for achieving them. Train your stuff and keep them on constant learning path. Use automation software, there is a number of ready or easily configurable products available (don't want to recommend any of them publicly). You can easily integrate and set up systems like email-to-case, web-to-case, chat, etc.
I was looking for ideas on what the usual figures are in such positions. Something like market value, or other terms such as changing slab percentages in compensation. Not sure what the best practices are in this situation.  Not sure what you are referring to.
"It sounds like ""gross receipt tax"" is essentially the same thing most states call ""sales tax"", which is always handled this way -- prices displayed are pre-tax, tax is added when the final price is calculated.  One reason for doing it that way is that most prices result in taxes that involve fractions of pennies, and calculating from the total produces a more accurate result than calculating tax on each item individually. It is theoretically possible to set prices so the numbers come out evenly when tax is added. But that requires that the prices be in fractional cents,  potentially to many decimal places. And in fact in some places it is illegal to display (only) the with-tax price. Otherwise I'm sure some stores and restaurants would be willing to deal with the mils and micros, purely on principle or as a marketing gimmick. Since customers have learned to expect sales tax, it really isn't worth the effort to fight it. The closest I've seen has been occasional ""we'll pay your sales tax"" offers, or statewide sales-tax holidays once a year."
Future income would impact the price you'd negotiate for the sale. And it may turn to profit for the buyer, but it has no impact on you today.  You have the sale price, and whatever cost hasn't been written off. The time you put into it doesn't matter either, an hour to write the program or 5 years. Only your out of pocket cost is written off against the sale price.  If the sales are steady, why so low, 13 trailing month's revenue, with potential for growth, is a very low multiple. It's in the store, what is your cost to maintain the product?
Here are the main ways of doing this that I've encountered. I've met advocates of each. You might be interested in this set of articles: http://www.slate.com/id/2281885/ which looks at some different ways of doing this and the financial - and other - effects.
"Getting a specific service recommendation is off-topic, but the question of what type of professional you need seems on-topic to me.  You may be looking for more than one professional in this case, but you could try these to start your search: Different people do things differently, but I think it would be pretty common to have a relationship (i.e. contract, retainer agreement, at least have met the person in case you have an ""emergency"") with a business law attorney and either a CPA or tax attorney.  You may try not to use them too much to keep costs down, but you don't want to be searching for one after you have an issue. You want to know who you're going to call and may establish at least a basis working relationship."
Well, it also discusses other traditional valuation techniques such as the economic profit model and it has a chapter on real option valuation. But I would not label those exotic valuation methods. However, I would say that the CFA challenge is much about standard valuation methods due to the limited page limit and considering that there should properly also be an analysis of the external and internal environment to determine the future prospects of the given company.
This is a reasonable idea and many people have done it. But there are some risks that you need to mitigate. This is a viable business model, but it is a business and you need to treat it as such and expect to work quite hard at it.
How about opening a Coffee shop section in the bookshop to generate some cash flow per month to offset some of the expenses ? Off course success of this venture will depend on where the location of shop is, how big it is and whether people are coffee enthusiast in that region. Since the rent/mortgage ( the major expense) is already taken care of all you have to do is invest in one time expenses for : Interior (hip these days - rustic expose brick walls, nostalgic filament light, chalk board menu, etc ) Seating (big communal table, lounge couch, some regular table chairs,some out door seats if weather is good) ...and the ugly licencing and approval. Throw in some social media marketing, SEO, yelp,urbanspoon, tripadvisor, etc If the bookstore is old, I am assuming it might have the old world charm & character which could attract lot of coffee enthusiast. The unique and competitive edge of this coffee shop could be its historic charm , which no other competitor can achieve. Would definitely beat the staryuks. Even if no one shows up , only recurring additional expense will be barrista wages. The interior , seating and coffee m/c costs can be minimized by savvily shopping stuff on community sites like craigslist, gumtree etc. I beleive if you are in US , everything could be set up under 6K. Later on premade food items like bananacake, raw cacao balls, toasted panini sandwich etc. can be added. If one has 3 key ingredients in food industry - Location, Vibe and taste, then there is high probability that they will succeed. At the same time one should be cognizant that 95 % of business fail in first 3 years and therefore they should have an exit plan. Unfortunately if your business does not work, then you exit cost would be just getting rid of the equipment & furniture. Just to put in perspective, some Dunkin Donut shops that I was researching in North East were clearing between 1/2 to 1 mil per year. As it is the current damage per month is 10k, if this business offsets even some of the damage it would be worth while. So the cost of keeping the pride of 91 yo dad can potentially reduce from 10k to 2-3 k.
I wonder if there will actually be a two-way debate on this.  Discriminatory pricing is a tried-and-true financial and economic concept that is widely employed to great success across the globe.  Even utilities have variable pricing based on needs and demand.  Net neutrality is actually a threat to one main subset of the economy:  The free content model.  If your business model does not account for the cost to deliver your content, and instead relies on free distribution, then it's the business model that is questionable - not the model of distribution for cost.  Something to think about.  I welcome a debate here.
I think it would be a wise move on the part of the 3D printing small businesses if contingency plans were put in place: Plan on alternate locations with backup printers, or better yet, print offsite in several undisclosed locations and employ couriers to transport the parts to the final customer. A dispersed mechanism is much harder to squash, and if a business starts by using satellite printers in the first place it's much easier to bring previously unused resources online in the event of a disruption. Better yet, subcontract the printing to individuals around your area that have the capabilities, giving them a steady stream of income in return for a reduced rate. I anticipate demand for this sort of service will pick up as both variety of materials and performance characteristics of output products improves. This will last until 3D printing is so ubiquitous that Epson and HP are selling units as cheaply as you buy Inkjet printers now. By that time, smart printing services will have figured out alternative ways to stay in business instead of fighting to stay on top just like the older business models they usurped.
It's hard to say for smaller cap firms because they are all so different. Take a look at SandP or other rating agencies at about the BB range. Then decide how much of a buffer you'd like. If all goes to hell, do you want to be able to cover all you salaries, debt etc for three months? Six? What kind of seasonal volatility does your industry face? Do you plan on any significant investment or FTE uplift any time soon? This will all play into how much retained earnings you will chose to have.
You're welcome to disagree. Lol, and actually it'd be fairly easy to do an artificial markup on labor expense on a P&amp;L, then show you price increase necessary to maintain margin, assuming a constant volume increase year over year. I've done many similar exercises.   My family has a small business too, yay. They probably wouldn't hire outside help at $15 an hour. I've worked for minimum wage before for multiple years, it's not like I got some small loan for a million on birth.   Also, I'm referring to a blanket national minimum wage increase. It would wreck small companies in cheap areas if too high.
I think his conclusions apply only to sole proprietorships that provide cheap, commoditized services.  My story is a little different.  I've been a sole proprietor, writing software and providing services related to that software, for 15 years.  Over that time, I closed two IP sales to large competitors.  One of those was an 8-figure deal.  I never provided commodity services, saved as much of my consulting income as possible, toughed out the fallow periods, invested years of unpaid time inventing new ideas and writing new software, treated my customers very well, and always negotiated hard for value.
There is no need of the conventional advertising methods, which include cost of– Land, capital, work, and businessperson to enhance the promotion of your product. You can start with blog promotion, web-based social networking, and email advertising of your services with lesser investment.
The answers you'll receive are going to be largely subjective. I can't tell you which option would be best for you, but there are plenty of things to consider. Do you know how to sell a home? If your market is hot enough, FSBO may make sense as you won't need the marketing power and expertise of an agent. In very hot markets, you'll end up with potential bidding wars if you price your house correctly. But that's where things start getting tricky. Do you know what your house is realistically worth in your market, or are you making assumptions based on Zillow (or similar)? Do you know what paper work is needed to complete a FSBO sale? Are you any good at negotiating? There are certainly plenty of resources out there for FSBO sellers to learn how to do it, but it can be overwhelming. FSBO isn't really fee free. If the buyer has an agent, they'll want a percentage (3%) for setting up their part of the sale. Without experience in negotiation, you may be leaving a decent amount of money on the table. Also, in negotiations, an experienced agent may nickel & dime you with contingencies all the way up until closing. Then there's anything you might need to pay for marketing materials and time off from work (if needed) to have the house shown. However, if you're in a market where people are literally walking up to your door to ask if you'd consider selling and for how much (which just happened to a friend of mine), then it might actually be a pretty painless process. Traditional agents charge a fee, but that fee goes towards marketing and their experience in sales and negotiations. They do the work of getting your property in front of the right people and setting up house showings. The work is done on your behalf, and you won't need to alter your personal work schedule anywhere near as much as you would with FSBO. They only get paid if the house sells. Limited service agents are a bit of an unknown to me, but it's more than likely the buyer will have an agent, so assume the higher fee.
In Canada I think you'd do it as a % of square footage. For example: Then you can count 20% of the cost of the of renting the apartment as a business expense. I expect that conventions (i.e. that what's accepted rather than challenged by the tax authorities) may vary from country to country.
"I think the survey needs to be broken down to ""as a consumer..."" and ""as a merchant...""  I'm not sure any service like the one you propose can be really implemented on the consumer side.   In particular, I suspect few if any consumers would pay for the privilege  You might look into the company ""Neat"" who sold a specialized scanner and software package designed around organizing reciepts a while back.   Retailer buy-in is a huge factor too.  You can create a platform and encourage retailers to send reciepts via email or whatever, but at the end of the day, a lot of retailers still see value in a reciept 5x as long as it should be to itemize the 22 ways you ""saved money"" and the 19 cross-promotions or coupons they want to inform you of.    Unless you can provide equal percieved value for them, they won't be interested, even if consumers like the concept.  The classic example in this debate is the US chain ""CVS Pharmacy""-- whose long reciepts are the butt of many jokes, but persist because they're part of an elaborate reward scheme where they give people coupons in the hopes of them coming back to use them.  As for the smaller vendors who may not be as tied to such strategies, they're also likely going to be less technically equipped to cope with  a new feature.  You almost need to target the POS vendors like NCR and IBM-- if you can make ""electronic reciept"" a feature in their platform, it becomes something that hundreds of stores are getting built into their systems for ""free"" and they just have to turn it on.  That's a lot easier than selling to every single retailer one at a time, and it would be a big enough launch that you could start to get customer preference"
It’s a great concept. You skip the whole margin disaster in retail. Clothing etc. is mostly at a 200-300% and more margin because of risk nobody buys it after a while so hey can go down with the price for discounts. If you yourself sell it to the customer those 200-300% are now your profit. I only would run my own stores. The profit difference make it totally worth it setting up a store and hiring 20 people.
"First would be, that depending on the stuff you are selling, you are likely to get a better response from Craigslist or Kijiji. For many things, the shipping cost will outweigh the value, so any kind of local transaction would be preferred.  The standard ""will combine shipping"" can be an ebay-offered incentive for people who want more than one of your things. Smaller high-value items would of course be the exception to the previous rule.  There the broad reach of eBay might well bring you a better price.  Standard consumer electronics, however, would likely not fit into this category, as they change so quickly. Depending on the amount of stuff you have, two other ideas come to mind.  There are likely local flea markets that charge just a few bucks for tables to sell whatever you like.  And don't forget the garage sale; a favourite weekend pastime for many in Canada :-)"
If you need to shop coins, you could do your personal improvement, however, this may be tricky because of even easy documentation errors fee extra. For many little employer proprietors, the high-quality picks the use of a business enterprise company, which is a fee-powerful preference to make sure your documentation is accurate and filed right away with conditions. If you're concerned in Delaware LLC with as little quotes as viable, begin with the aid of considering conditions wherein you'll include. You do no longer require work within the state you select, however it may be more reasonable for pick out your home circumstance.
To summarize: - You want a service that charges you nothing - Does all the work of expertly managing and investing your capital - Takes on part of the risk you would normally bear - (on top of their usual risk and liability) - Agrees to do so solely for a percentage of any return (where higher returns will likely involve a higher degree of risk) - AND that guarantees, after just 1 year, you'll get X% of your capital back, no matter what. Win or lose. - Even if the market crashes and all your capital, and theirs, is wiped out Superbest, um, to be serious briefly: what you're proposing is, if nothing else, inherently unfair and inequitable. I believe you intended it as a mutually beneficial scenario, but the real-world imbalance in risk and reward prevents it being so. Any financial service that would accept those terms along with the extra degree of risk would be fiscally irresponsible. From a business standpoint it's an untenable model, and no company would build on it. It would be tantamount to corporate suicide. The requirement that a service promise to give you back X% of your money, no matter how great the loss, makes your proposal impossible. You need to think about how much all this costs, realistically, as well what kind of returns you can actually expect. And that more risk for higher return is exactly what a service could NOT take a chance on if it had to ""share"" investors' losses. Besides, it's not really sharing, now is it? They will always lose more than you, always end up in a negative situation, unable even to recoup costs. Circumstances beyond their control could result in a drop in the value that not only wipes out any profit, but requires them to pay YOU for work performed and expenses incurred on your behalf. Why would they let anyon double-dip like that? Yeah, we all prefer getting something for nothing...but you want valuable services and for them to pay you money for the privilege of providing them? I totally agree that would be fantastic, but in this world even ""free"" doesn't come cheap anymore.
"I agree completely.  ""I don't always agree with John Cochrane, but when I do, I agree completely.""  I think heavy reliance on either approach to pricing is generally a bad idea.  Equilibrium models always include something that you're supposed to inherently know, but never do.  No-arbitrage models don't necessarily *say* anything that you don't (in some mathematical sense) already know.  So you're either stuck with unknown parameters, or you can't explain why you're something is worth what you say it is beyond, ""Herp derp, other people are doing it.""  So I think if buy-side people made some use of no-arbitrage models, they'd have a better understanding of the parameters they're making up, and if sell-side people sometimes used equilibrium models, they'd have a better grasp of what's going on economically.  Also, it would have the beneficial effect of reminding people that their models are always wrong, even if they're frequently useful."
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to respond, let me see what I can answer to help give you a bigger picture.  * I am the rental manager but like I say, it's a small unit where the operations team is only 5 strong. We all have a hand in everything really and it was my precedent for implementing procedures in the past that triggered them to ask me into looking into this.  * Honestly, I don't think I have much of a budget. That being said, if there's a price to anything and I can justify the company spending the money, they will be fair.  From a personal perspective, I never even considered that third party software would be required for this kind of thing. If there's any you could recommend (licensed or open sourced) that would be greatly appreciated.  * From what I can tell, the people in charge want a process in which we can fully understand CSAT from both a service and product standpoint. We can use the information gathered from our service feedback to improve ourselves and we can use the information gathered about the vehicles we lease (the products) so we can market them correctly in the future. Seeing how the customer feels on the vehicle's fuel economy, performance, comfort on the driver, downtime, etc. which can lead us to marketing the vehicles better or influence what vehicles we purchase moving on.  * For the most part, I think the working processes are going to remain the same, where the customer support manager will have a more active role in getting these calls/visits/emails out to the customers and react accordingly.  Again, thank you so much for your help.
You need to look at the financial statements, talking to the executives, and have some sort of discussion about price.  Then you would have to do due-diligence to make sure that they are not hiding stuff.  Bear in mind, the company isn't going to go through all of this unless you can convince them that you have the means to complete the transaction.
Thank you, finally somebody else who is able to explain this basic premise.   It's odd how many people operate on the assumption that businesses operate on a margin so thin that every $1 of increased cost must be added to the product price. It just bears no resemblance to reality...
Let's make a few assumptions: You have several ways of achieving (almost) that, in ascending complexity: Note that each alternative will have a cost which can be small (forwards, futures) or large (CFDs, debit) and the hedge will never be perfect, but you can get close. You will also need to decide whether you hedge the unrealised P&L on the position and at what frequency.