As a business owner I know that providing the right level of customer service takes quite a bit of effort and sometimes a lot of money.  You have to make sure the correct systems are in place and more importantly the correct people are in place to service your customers the way you, the owner, want them serviced.

So what happens if it isn't the staff who are providing less than ideal customer service, but the manager or owner who is?  Do you tell them how much they are costing themselves?

Firstly, my apologies to all of you who tried to access our website last week, only to find blank white pages.  It turns out that someone hacked into our site and although they didn't quite succeed, they did manage to take the website down for a day.

My IT people assure me that this should be viewed as a sign of success, that hackers only attempt to hack good websites but this is an area I don't understand.  I think the IT team realise I just have to take their word on this one.

Logging onto my computer on Monday morning's is always a tad exciting, I never know what emails have come in over the weekend.  This morning was definitely worth the excitement as one of my emails was advising me that Boutique Money is a finalist in the Australian Home Based Business Awards.  How good is that for a Monday morning email!

The awards will be held on Monday 18 August in Melbourne, wish us luck and keep watching this blog to see how we go.

Those of us who have fairly simple tax affairs, income from our job and maybe a couple of deductions, are often quite happy to do our own tax returns online through the tax office website.  So how do you know if you are claiming all of the deductions that you legally can for your job?

Cosmopolitan magazine has released a bumper issue for September 2008.  The issue includes Cosmo's financial fitness campaign where Jody provided personalised spending plans to 3 lucky readers. 

You can read about the girls and their plans,  here [pdf].