Austin Merritt over at Software Advice wrote a great article about the future of accounting software, go and read it here and then come back.
I disagree on one part though. Very small businesses (VSB) are starting to look for a more customized option for their own accounting. They may not want a full blown ERP but they are looking for the same features that larger enterprises are getting. They want to have their CRM, inventory, and accounting all integrated. VSBs want to be able to whip out their iPhone or Android device and make up an invoice and then swipe a customer’s credit card and be done with it. This is similar to what Google Apps is doing, VSBs are using the same spam filtering, document management, and the rest of the suite as large enterprises have for a long time only had.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is really starting to change this as your seeing a an accounting solution with a mini-ERP starting to pop-up for every industry. And the costs are affordable for VSBs.
The Rhino Accounting team is going to be in San Francisco all this week so we can attend Google i/O, Google’s yearly developer conference.
If your also attending shoot us a message on twitter @rhinoaccounting or send us an email support@rhinocloud.com and we’d love to meet you.
Hey Everyone,
We’re looking at translating Rhino Accounting into a few new languages but need your help translating it into your local language. If your interested please email us at support@rhinocloud.com
Thank you for all using Rhino Accounting even if we haven’t quite polished everything to how we would like it. Today we launched some major changes to Rhino Accounting that you might of already seen when you logged in. I wanted to highlight just a few below.
Google Contact Sync
With just a few clicks of a button you can now have all your Google Apps contacts in Rhino Accounting. You can find our more information at our help desk.
Different Currencies
We had a lot of people signing up from around the world that we didn’t quite expect. Many of you saying you’d love to use us if we could display reports and everything else in pounds, yen, and euro. So today we also rolled this out, you can find out how to do this at our help desk.
Help Desk
We’ve had lots of questions on getting setup on Rhino Accounting and even basic accounting questions so we’ve setup an area to have public discussion and a start of our Knowledge base. You can find this at help.rhinoaccounting.com. Feel free to post any questions your having even if they are general accounting problems. You can also use this system to privately request support.
Thanks,
Rhino Accounting Team
The Staples Blog had a post on whether to have a home office or office-office. I posted in the comments and thought I’d repost it here.
I find the routine of just going to an office gets me going in the morning and I get a lot more work done in a shorter amount of time.
For those on there on there own the idea of co-working places have sprung up. Basically you share an office, board room and some times a little coffee shop with 20-30 other people. For somewhere between $300 – $500 a month you get a desk, chair, internet and access to a boardroom, kitchen, and toilets.
Some of these in Canada
Calgary – www.coworkyyc.com
Joliette – www.coworking-joliette.com
Montreal – www.station-c.com
Ottawa – www.thecodefactory.ca
Toronto – www.camaraderie.ca
Vancouver – www.thenetworkhub.ca
When you’re a small-business just starting up, or when you’ve been working by yourself for a while and decided you need some more help, putting people on payroll can be a lot of work. Dealing with deducting income tax, CPP and EI to the government, sick leave, pension plan can make any small-business owner see why a contractor can be a big help; but in most places having an employee calling them a contractor is not allowed. Here, a few tips to tell whether or not you can have this person as a contractor or have to do payroll.
1. They work for multiple companies.
2. The tools they use are their own, the computer, space, supplies is all theirs. Their business card says their company name on it.
3. Time limit, its easier to have the government decide you have a contractor if the contract is less than a year.
4. Integration, how integral to your work is this contractor?
None of these rules are clear either way, you just have to think clearly about this and use a little common sense. If you have questions you should consult your accounting. Below is some more ideas from NACUBO
Test on Employment Status
trained on how job should be done
uses own experience, expertise to do job
works within campus environment
works alone - not part of campus “team effort”
hired to work as an individual, based on skills, talent, and potential
hired to provide service many times, regardless of who actually does work
has indefinite employment status
hired for a set time period only
works under set hours
sets own hours
works for one employer at a time
can work for several employers at a time
works mainly on-site; employer-directed off-site
can work either on-site or off-site, without employer direction
works in employer-established order to allow for supervision
works any way desired to provide required service or product
reports on work efforts as part of supervision
reports only as agreed upon
compensated regularly, at specified time periods
paid on per-job basis in a lump sum
has work-related expenses paid by employer
pays own expenses out of expected compensation
has tools and supplies provided by employer
provides own tools and supplies
does not own or control work site
may own or control work site
generally does not work on profit / loss basisgenerally works on profit / loss basisgives employer exclusive effortworks for many contractors at oncecannot offer efforts to general publicmarkets services to anyone who wants themcan be fired at employer’s discretion (subject to employment agreement)can be fired only if work falls short of expectationscan end employment at any timeresponsible for completing job as agreed upon
Source: NACUBO Business Officer, August 1992
1. Switch your phone system to VOIP. Save about half the cost and it does twice as much. Find a local company that does that and also provides hosted Asterisk services so you have a PBX as well.
2. Buy Apple computers, save a bunch of money on your local IT guy.
3. Cheap tables. I’m currently working at a dining room table, Ikea has some good deals.
4. Google Apps email. Best spam filter around and rarely goes down. You will love this and save a ton of money.
5. Website. If your just starting out you don’t need a fancy website for $5k, get something done and get it up. There are even a few services out there that do this for a low monthly fee.
The goal is to get rid of your unneeded expenses, you’re a small company you don’t need an IT guy do a much as you can to get rid of him. Everything you have that is technical try and outsource. You don’t need your own custom anything, focus on your main business everything else you want a number to call when something goes wrong.
Now this isn’t saying be cheap on everything just look at what your spending it on. Having VOIP phones doesn’t make you any less professional, printing your business cards yourself does.
One of the greatest marketing tool happens to be also the easiest to do. Many people forget about it with all this social media buzz (Facebook, Twitter and the like), but email is still your best tool for your small business.
You’ve set up your small business’ website and you even have some traffic going to it. The sales just quite coming in yet. The problem is most people will find your site when they are ready to buy, most of them will see it in the research stage or even when they are just looking around. You need to keep in contact until they get to that point.
Monthly newsletters with good content, deals, and information keeps your name and URL in people’s minds. Maybe that one deal will get you that buy.
There are a few companies that have made this even easier for you. MailChimp and CampainMonitor are the two that I recommend you use.
MailChimp is the one I’m going to talk about because it’s the easiest to use. They offer a free version if your list is under 500 subscribers, although they put a tiny logo in the bottom of every email.
One of the toughest problems people find in sending out a list is designing the email, MailChimp (and CampainMonitor) have a large selection of templates that you can edit and customize to your liking.
The big point of using a service instead of just sending it through your email is they track how many times your email was opened, what the click rate was and a lot of other stats. Also, they pay all the big ISPs to be white-listed so your email has the greatest chance of landing in person’s inbox.
