C
Chris Leeds, MVP-FrontPage
Small Business Nirvana:
Outlook 2003, Small Business Accounting 2006, and Business Contact Manager 2
Initial Impressions:
I've recently been messing with some MS stuff and wanted to share what I
found.
Some time back I tried Business Contact Manager (BCM) and didn't really "get
it" BUT recently installing Small Business Accounting 2006 (SBA 2006) and
realizing how awesome it'd be to have to enter people's info only once for a
contact card and an accounting software system forced me to look at BCM a
little harder.
This time I downloaded BCM2 free from MS (free to everyone with Office 2003
Small Business or Professional Edition).
This version is much nicer than the previous and whether it was easier to
"get" because of interface changes or my mindset from having first installed
SBA, it's pretty nice.
I think MS ought to simply include BCM with SBA and if the client machine
has an appropriate version of Office and ask them if they want it installed.
You can link phone calls to contacts and tell the accounting software to
bill them, you can link emails, create invoices right out of the Outlook
interface, etc.
This combination of BCM and SBA is totally awesome!
Some of my early SBA findings are these:
It's the nicest user interface that I've used (Peachtree and
Quicken/QuickBooks).
It's really easy to set up.
It does a stellar job of sucking up Excel (.xls) files and creating
accounting records.
For instance, I opened Peachtree and had it spit out the customer list as an
..xls, then had SBA slurp it up, very easy and flexible.
That Peachtree to SBA conversion inspired me to try it a little harder.
I went to my online shopping cart and had it export that customer list (just
html on a web page) right clicked it opened the table in excel, made a few
changes because of how SBA was expecting to see the data (not as first name,
last name separate fields, doesn't seem to want a customer ID #, etc) then
had SBA suck that up.
The reason I did it twice is because sometimes someone will order something
on the site with a credit card, that makes it into Peachtree because that's
how I clear the credit card charge, but if they use PayPal or something
there isn't anything that makes me add them to Peachtree.
SBA dealt with the duplicates pretty well, and it was easy to delete the
duplicate records that did make it through.
Not too bad, about 20 minutes and my client list from Peachtree accounting
and the web based shopping cart were compiled into the SBA accounting
system.
That'd be a pretty good thing by itself but open Outlook, hit business
tools/ accounting tools/ set up connection to accounting and BAM now all
those customer records are right there in the outlook interface as not only
accounts, but also contacts (which is something that baffled me when I tried
to use BCM without the SBA but is crystal clear after working just a little
in SBA).
This rig kicks butt!
I'm going to try out the credit card clearing interface in SBA well as a few
other features, see how BCM synchronizes with a Pocket PC phone addition,
etc but this particular combination of Outlook, BCM, and SBA look like a
total winner.
Expect more reviews shortly!
--
Chris Leeds,
Microsoft MVP-FrontPage
ContentSeed: great tool for web masters,
a fantastic convenience for site owners.
http://contentseed.com/
--
Outlook 2003, Small Business Accounting 2006, and Business Contact Manager 2
Initial Impressions:
I've recently been messing with some MS stuff and wanted to share what I
found.
Some time back I tried Business Contact Manager (BCM) and didn't really "get
it" BUT recently installing Small Business Accounting 2006 (SBA 2006) and
realizing how awesome it'd be to have to enter people's info only once for a
contact card and an accounting software system forced me to look at BCM a
little harder.
This time I downloaded BCM2 free from MS (free to everyone with Office 2003
Small Business or Professional Edition).
This version is much nicer than the previous and whether it was easier to
"get" because of interface changes or my mindset from having first installed
SBA, it's pretty nice.
I think MS ought to simply include BCM with SBA and if the client machine
has an appropriate version of Office and ask them if they want it installed.
You can link phone calls to contacts and tell the accounting software to
bill them, you can link emails, create invoices right out of the Outlook
interface, etc.
This combination of BCM and SBA is totally awesome!
Some of my early SBA findings are these:
It's the nicest user interface that I've used (Peachtree and
Quicken/QuickBooks).
It's really easy to set up.
It does a stellar job of sucking up Excel (.xls) files and creating
accounting records.
For instance, I opened Peachtree and had it spit out the customer list as an
..xls, then had SBA slurp it up, very easy and flexible.
That Peachtree to SBA conversion inspired me to try it a little harder.
I went to my online shopping cart and had it export that customer list (just
html on a web page) right clicked it opened the table in excel, made a few
changes because of how SBA was expecting to see the data (not as first name,
last name separate fields, doesn't seem to want a customer ID #, etc) then
had SBA suck that up.
The reason I did it twice is because sometimes someone will order something
on the site with a credit card, that makes it into Peachtree because that's
how I clear the credit card charge, but if they use PayPal or something
there isn't anything that makes me add them to Peachtree.
SBA dealt with the duplicates pretty well, and it was easy to delete the
duplicate records that did make it through.
Not too bad, about 20 minutes and my client list from Peachtree accounting
and the web based shopping cart were compiled into the SBA accounting
system.
That'd be a pretty good thing by itself but open Outlook, hit business
tools/ accounting tools/ set up connection to accounting and BAM now all
those customer records are right there in the outlook interface as not only
accounts, but also contacts (which is something that baffled me when I tried
to use BCM without the SBA but is crystal clear after working just a little
in SBA).
This rig kicks butt!
I'm going to try out the credit card clearing interface in SBA well as a few
other features, see how BCM synchronizes with a Pocket PC phone addition,
etc but this particular combination of Outlook, BCM, and SBA look like a
total winner.
Expect more reviews shortly!
--
Chris Leeds,
Microsoft MVP-FrontPage
ContentSeed: great tool for web masters,
a fantastic convenience for site owners.
http://contentseed.com/
--
