Author: Eliza

Main Street indicators show holiday season slowdown?

Economic indicators and recent interest rate hikes have sent mixed messages about short-term expectations around inflation and the likelihood of a recession.

Continued slow downs in hours worked and employees working at small businesses have diverged from prior years, likely a result of decline in holiday spending.

In the past quarter, interest rate hikes and economic indicators on inflation and employment have led to widespread speculation that a recession is to be expected in 2023. To understand how the broader economic environment has impacted small businesses and their employees during the 2022 holiday season, we analyzed behavioral data from more than two million employees working at more than one hundred thousand SMBs.

Summary of findings: Homebase high-frequency timesheet data indicate continued slowdown in hours worked and employees working across most industries and major metro areas.

  • Our key Main Street Health Metrics — hours worked and employees working — have
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10 Best Business Phone Apps in 2023

Top 10 business phone apps

As remote work becomes more common, it can be difficult for employees to separate their work lives from their personal lives, especially if they’re using their personal devices and phone numbers for work calls.
Businesses looking to improve how their employees make and receive work calls may begin researching for a business phone app. These apps allow users to have separate phone numbers, known as virtual phone numbers, that are used solely for business communications.
Your virtual phone number can be accessed via a mobile or desktop app, and calls can be taken in the office or on-the-go without interruption. These numbers are also easy to set up and more lines can be added as your business grows.
To help you choose the right option for your business needs, we’ve compiled the top 10 business phone app options on the market today.

Top 10 business phone apps

  1. Nextiva
  2. Sideline
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Domo + Jupyter for the Window Into App Sentiment




 / Domo + Jupyter for the Window Into App Sentiment














Earlier this year, one of our users made a post about how she used Domo and Jupyter Notebooks to run emotion detection, a type of sentiment analysis, on app reviews from the Android App Store.

We decided that we wanted to share with everybody some code on how this works. For this analysis, we collect reviews and attributes from some of our favorite food delivery apps, combine the information into a dataset, and create a dashboard showing the sentiment analysis of each review.

Kendall Ruber shared her code with us, and we have recreated a dashboard below in Domo using our Jupyter Notebook integration. Our Jupyter integration allows for more advanced analysis techniques and models to be developed and deployed entirely within Domo with ease.

For instance, instead of doing something out of the box such as a word

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Slash Your Heating Costs This Winter

Use these low-cost and no-cost ways to lower your heating bill, regardless of your heat source. Read on if you’d like to save 20% or more on your heating bills this winter.

The cost of heating your home — and your home office — could put a huge hole in your budget this winter whether you heat with oil, gas, or electric. Even if you get the best price for heating oil in your area, for instance, you might need to spend more than $5,000 to keep your home warm.

But there are steps you can take to potentially save you 20% or more on heating costs when those penetrating arctic winds start to blow. For those on limited budgets, there are many ways to lower heating bills that don’t cost a dime. There are also weatherization applications that require anywhere from a small to middling investment of cash, yet

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Guide to hiring family members for small businesses

You may consider nepotism unethical, but you’ve also probably shopped at a “family business” in your local area at some point. Those considerations might make you wonder if you can hire family members to work for you as a small business owner.

When you’re getting your business off the ground, it’s normal to lean on family for help. After all, you know their work ethic and already have an established relationship. But how will you create boundaries between your personal and professional lives? Will you struggle to stay objective about your family member’s work performance? And how will this whole situation impact your other employees?

Hiring family members is a legal and acceptable practice in many businesses, but you have to deal with it carefully to avoid legal complications and unhappy employees. So in this guide, we’ll explore the ethics, legality, advantages, drawbacks, and what to consider when hiring family Read more

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