Rhino Accounting

TRUSTe Certification

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:34:55 -0400

As many of you know we’re on the Google Apps Marketplace and we Google and TRUSTe partned to bring a certification program for privacy programs for products on the marketplace. I’m happy to announce that we were certified and you can now see our TRUSTe logo and privacy policy on our marketplace listing. Also if you have a few seconds and could leave a review of us on the marketplace it would be a great help.

Rhino Stickers! (click on them to get one)

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:44:00 -0500

Rhino Stickers! (click on them to get one)

More Free Business Cards

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:27:15 -0500

We’re giving out some more free business cards.

Click here and enter you email address to win! We’re going to do two draws next week with the second one happening on Friday!

Get a second entry by tweeting a link to here and mentioning @rhinoaccounting

Win Free Business Cards

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:20:00 -0400

We’re giving away 500 business cards to a lucky Rhino Accounting customer. Just fill in your details below and we’ll pick someone one week from today (Oct 20th).

Click here to fill out the form.

RackSpace launched their new AppMatcher this morning, its their...

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:29:00 -0400

RackSpace launched their new AppMatcher this morning, its their way of making it easier for businesses to find web based applications.

They also have a video to explain it, which I’ve embedded below.

CloudCamp Vancouver is coming back again but this time its...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:25:00 -0400

CloudCamp Vancouver is coming back again but this time its called CloudNite. If your in Vancouver and interested in cloud computing the team here would love to see you there.

You can register here.

CloudNite is for developers, IT or business professional looking to leverage cloud computing for a project or business. Come to BC’s 1st CloudNite! This FREE evening event will be held at the Vancouver Convention Centre - West Building

“Horizontal” Accounting Software

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Rhino Accounting at Google I/O

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:41:05 -0400

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.

Multi-language

Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

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

Launch

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

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

GoogleAppsUsers.com just posted the new Google Apps commercial,...

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

GoogleAppsUsers.com just posted the new Google Apps commercial, see it below.

Moving out of your home office

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

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

Great video from BizLaunch.ca!

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Great video from BizLaunch.ca!

Employee vs Contractor

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

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

EmployeeIndependent Contractorfollows instructions on how to workworks without detailed directions on procedure
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

Save Money at the Office

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

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.

Email Marketing

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

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.