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ContentSeed -> Small Business Nirvana (9/25/2005 21:45:40)
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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!
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