Got your mind on your $?
You should. And to help you Microsoft offers a wide variety of applications to help you manage that money. Now some small businesses start with Excel or some Access DB to manage cash flow. Usually they also use these tools to manage projects or time or the production of widgets, etc. We have seen some extremely elaborate spreadsheets in our time. Others either graduate to or go straight to the green box. Full disclosure here, Annabel Watters, PC is a Certified Pro Advisor for that company, and gets a fair amount of business supporting it. Others may look at a fruit bearing solution from a wise old person. Here too, we support and maintain a decent business doing so. Moving up the food chain, there's Microsoft Small Business Financials. For most small businesses a great solution, but for micro to small businesses, this is overkill.
For customers looking for an alternative to the green box or looking for integrated solutions, then there's Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting. We can all go to the Office Small Business Accounting Page and get all the marketing we can handle. I'll try to look at some of the functionality in terms of business flow and integration. By the way, what do I mean when I say integration. In it's simplest form I mean, eliminate double entry of data. Make it so information flows from one application to another, from one user to another, from one process to the next.
So what seperates SBA from other applications in this space? From an IT standpoint, that's simple, it is built on a Microsoft SQL DB engine. Why is this important, and what about that sets it apart from others. It is designed for multi-user. Other applications may be built on SQL, other apps may say they are multi-user, but SBA truely delivers on a client-server based deployment. Our internal test show between a 25% and 50% improvement in performance when the DB is placed on SBS Premium 2003 (w/SQL) over when running locally. Well other apps don't suffer that, perhaps not, but we are looking beyond today to the future. Another thing that sets it apart it Data Analysis. Out of the box it has Data Analysis tools built on Microsoft Office applications like Access and Excel. Why is that important? Well, perhaps you need to decide between buying a new Truck for local delivery or repairing the existing one. The pivot charts and tables allow you to look at data in a variety of ways to get a better view of your financial situation. Larger firms pay huge dollars for this type of information flexibility. Other players in this space require a third party application to perform this analysis. Better yet, you could hire a CPA firm to do that for you. We can, but SBA offers it out of the box, so even if you do hire a CPA firm to perform some analysis, they can do it faster and with greater accuracy than with other applications in this space. In regards to integration, SBA is designed to plug in with Business contact Manager for Microsoft Outlook. I'll discuss BCM in another post, but basically it allows say sales and support people to enter time, communicate with clients, etc without going into the accounting application, yet still share a central DB of information. A sales person can look at the financial history of a customer before agreeing to say a 90 day payment, or make sure that the customer is up to date before selling any new widgets to them. A customer service person can look at the history of a customer to determine a course of action for a support issue. A sales person can create an opportunity, convert it to a quote, then on to a sales order without entering the data into the accounting application. Once the order is fullfilled accounting can invoice the order and ship it. Pretty simple and very little data entry is done along the way. So you have a retail outlet? SBA has an integration path with Microsoft Point of Sale. Growing? Microsoft SBA can go straight into Small Business Financials or Great Plains.
Small Business Accounting has a wide range of features, starting with strong Accounting principles built into the system. It is built from the past, allowing you to migrate off the green box or up from Excel or Access. It is built for now, to help you maximize productivity by eliminating double entry of data. Further it is built for the future, by providing a clear upgrade path as you outgrow it, you can stay in the family.
I haven't even mentioned the price-point. Extremely aggresive for the space, and cannot be ignored. We recommend that SBA be installed/deployed as part of a larger effort to stremline operations. As such, please consult a Microsoft Small Business Specialist about what it can do for you. Always, no matter what the Accounting application, have your CPA set it up properly for you. We do a pretty good business 'cleaning' people's databases while preparing tax returns. People, until trained properly will mislabel things and cause their CPA tax prep bill to skyrocket, simply because they were not diligent on their day to day entry of data into the accounting system.