Internet or Voice Over IP phones are the future. Plug in and make calls anywhere. We’ve tested and rejected Skype and similar services. Too much messing around and poor reliability. The old phone companies are trying to prop up their margins by selling VOIP replacements for old fashioned phone systems – they sell you a system box and still charge for lines, maintenance etc.

We use Voipfone. We fell upon Voipfone by accident 5 years ago, tested their service and moved our phones over to them 4 years ago. They supply £50 black business desk phones or cordless DECT phones that plug into your router, not a phone line. You then buy local phone numbers from them at £1.99 per month (the numbers can be on any exchange of your choice - that explains why our numbers are Bath 01225 numbers yet our office moved from Bath to Frome (01373) a number of years ago) or they’ll port your numbers. You then buy Extensions at £1.99 per month. Each extension can dial out - the need for a “line” per person doesn’t exist. In fact, the notion of phone lines disappears. Calls between extensions are free. An IVR (interactive Voice Response – 1 for sales, 2 for support) is £1.99 per month. Call quality is fantastic, reliability great. It has allowed us to have a very geographically diverse team. 

The configuration of our phone system is:

2 x inbound numbers at £1.99

31 extensions at £1.99 each (these extensions are all over the place – Portugal, Cornwall, West Midlands…)

1 x IVR at £1.99

And then very cheap calls – as cheap as Talk Talk or the other discount providers.

Everything is controlled from a simple web site. We can even record our calls.

We’ve saved thousands. Lots of customers use Voipfone. If only they’d give us commission!

For more information, visit www.voipfone.co.uk.

Ravensworth are the biggest and most successful estate agency printing business. Expert Agent creates a PDF file for brochures and then sends it to them. They print and deliver back in 24 hours. They can do all the stuff you can’t do – edge to edge printing, laminating etc. There’s no point in buying or renewing that enormous copier – most clients send a fraction of the number of full details that they once did.

They also offer a number of other services to estate agents - to find out more, go to www.ravensworth.co.uk.

You can track orders at any time from the Marketplace Dashboard, accessible from the Properties top menu:

The dashboard looks like this:

You have three tabs – your Pending Orders, Reconciled Orders and Unreconciled Orders. Each tab has column totals at the bottom showing you the difference between what you will be paying and what your vendors have been charged – so you can easily work out how much money to expect in due to marking up orders.

Pending Orders are orders that you have put into your basket, and then used the ‘Save and Close’ option to store for later. Once you want to process the order, you would return to your basket, place the order and this would move the order to the Unreconciled Orders tab:

The purpose of this screen is to enable you to keep track of any money you are owed by our service providers, if any, so you can ensure you invoice for it. The difference between the two totals at the bottom would tell you how much you have marked up recent orders by and therefore how much you are owed. Once you were happy you had invoiced for what you were owed/received the funds you would reconcile the entries by ticking items in the left hand column and using the ‘Reconcile Selected’ button on the right hand side. This will move the orders onto the Reconciled tab.

Your order history including the prices charged is available through Configuration. See the Expert Agent Market Place chapter for more information on this.