Endless Solutions Inc – Susan R. Davis

With its new features, Intuit QuickBooks Accounting Solutions are hands-down the smartest, easiest way to help your business succeed. With the new features built into the various financial software versions, you and your accountant will be able to work more productively, and save yourself time and money.

QuickBooks is the #1 Small Business Financial Software on the market today. Nearly 70% of users say QuickBooks helps their business to be more profitable, based on a 2008 survey of QuickBooks Pro & Premier customers who expressed an opinion. Over 3.5 million small businesses use QuickBooks every day to take care of their financial accounting needs.

New Features in QuickBooks 2010

One of my personal favorite features is the improved “Company Snapshot”. This is a combined dashboard of real-time information about your company where you can see a variety of information at a glance. Online Banking and bank reconciliations have been beefed up in QuickBooks 2009 and QuickBooks 2010, and Intuit has added additional multi-currency support so that it supports global currencies.

I am really excited about the new Document Management System – it is really helpful for finally synchronizing your non-QuickBooks files with the data in QuickBooks. You can finally have other types of important, relevant documents at your fingertips rather than hunting all around your computer or paper files for the data!

Save Money on your Accountant Bill

Intuit has added some excellent features that will save your accountant time in making changes and corrections to your company records. You can now add or edit multiple transaction entries from within a spreadsheet view. And the Intuit Statement Writer will cut down on the time for doing financial statements. The Client Data Review gives your accountant improved capabilities at fixing problems in your QuickBooks file more quickly (and at a lower cost to you).

Increased Productivity with QuickBooks 2010

Frankly, you can manage your business better with QuickBooks. It helps you stay on top of your business instead of having to guess at where you are financially, ultimately helping you make your business more profitable.

If you have, or are planning to hire, a staff member to do your bookkeeping, QuickBooks 2010 is the perfect choice. Since it is so widely used, finding a trained employee, bookkeeper, or accountant is much easier than with other financial software.

With the option of easy-to-use integrated payroll solutions and merchant services to take credit cards for your business, you get a comprehensive solution that is still easy to learn and use.

If you need some additional help with setup or some extra training on specific features, a QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor like myself is available to help. If you’re looking for a full-featured accounting program that is easy to use, QuickBooks is my recommendation to you. If you’re not sure which version would be best for you, feel free to email me or give me a call for a short, free consultation.

Intuit offers many different versions of QuickBooks to meet your specific needs. You can get them on a CD, or you can “go Green” and buy a digital download and have your new software on the spot without waiting for the mail to arrive. The file is pretty large, but with broadband, you can set it to go and do something else while it downloads in the background.

You can also compare versions of QuickBooks 2010 here.

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Note for Users of QuickBooks 2007 or earlier

Every year in May, Intuit changes its support policy for older versions of QuickBooks. This helps them to keep support costs reasonable and allows them to continue to offer various versions of QuickBooks at its great prices. This May, QuickBooks 2007 will move off into the sunset. This doesn’t mean that your version of QuickBooks will stop working. What it means is that you will no longer get updates, bug fixes, payroll support, or technical support.

Frankly, it’s a good idea to upgrade every three years or so, since earlier versions of QuickBooks will often not work well on newer operating systems or computers with newer browsers on them. QuickBooks is a complex program, and with the changes in the computer world happening so fast, you should keep QuickBooks up-to-date if you can fit it into your budget.

Are you ready for the new QuickBooks 2010? If you have any questions, call or send me a message through the contact form, or comment here. You can also access my QuickBooks ProAdvisor profile for more information about my QuickBooks 2010 ProAdvisor bookkeeping business.

Tags: financial software, Intuit QuickBooks, QuickBooks 2010, QuickBooks ProAdvisor

For good or bad, video has come to stay on the web. More and more users have access to high-speed internet service, and with that use, more content providers are focusing on video.

But does this video content help or hinder you in your use of the internet?

Many people are ho-hum about this topic. Video is video, they’d say. Nice to have sometimes, but not a requirement for life. Some people just choose to read, or skim, for their content.

However, others are incredibly fanatic about it. Where do you fall on the spectrum?

Video has really become prominent on marketing sites on the internet. No corporate site is complete without its friendly blurb about the company, and no sales site is “complete” without some kind of “video enhancement.”

Positive Aspects of Video Content

The site marketers claim that video is more user-friendly, and that people like to watch rather than read. They feel that video reaches out to an audience that doesn’t want to read anymore. They believe it is easier to display information. They think people hate to read, or don’t have time. Or they spout off the old platitude that it’s easier to show rather than tell. And of course, you can download it and take it with you to watch on your portable device, after all.

With the advent of video-sharing and the popularity of YouTube, more and more online visitors are enjoying video. It can be funny, or enlightening, or interesting, in a different way than the written word. Some people spend hours a day surfing the net on video sites, looking for the next neat thing.

However, not all is rosy in the video content world.

Negative Perspective on Video Content

Opponents cite the fact that written media is as easily accessible on portable devices as video. It is less bandwidth intensive, making for a site that loads more quickly and take less time to digest. Not everyone wants to sit through a 10-minute monologue about what some marketer’s bonus package includes or a health site’s quick tip when the information could be summarized in a reasonably-sized list of bullet points with descriptions – a matter of 30 seconds or less to skim. Also, as one reader mentioned, it’s hard to quietly and discreetly digest “non-work content” in the office listening to a video.

These opponents speculate about who is benefiting from the video. Is it the lazy content provider who takes 15 minutes to dash off a 10-minute video off the cuff, or the user who wants to listen with half an ear while doing something else? Video unfortunately can seduce a provider into the ease of talking off the cuff, instead of taking the time to organize and clearly write down the information. And viewers can pay less attention when listening than they do when reading, because their ears are trained from TV to be able to “kind of” do several things at once. But are those listeners really gaining all of the information conveyed?

Other opponents of extensive use of video like to skim. They want the facts without the fluff of video. It allows them to choose what they want to read (or ignore). Some will even say, “Who wants to sit through a whole 45-60 minute video just to learn information that could be presented with subheads and a long page or two of concisely written text?” A lot of people don’t like to try to force their way through a longer video to gain information surrounded by the fluff of the casual, and conversational, spoken word. A 60-minute video is an hour of your time. A transcript (or even better, a transcript and an MP3) gives you the choice of how you want to digest your information.

Others are concerned about the loss of the written word as the world’s horizons expand and yet shrink due to the accessibility of the internet. They are afraid that as people have “easier” alternatives to reading, they will lose their ability to read and comprehend complex information through a written medium. There have been countless blog posts, debates in forums, and discussions elsewhere discussing what mindless TV has done to books.

So, love it or hate it, video online has become an issue for the world, just as TV did a few decades ago, and continues to be. I personally think it has its place, but I am concerned that the ability to “throw up a quick video” will drive busy content providers to using video exclusively, and thus denying a chunk of their audience a different preferred medium.

What do you think? Do you like videos, or MP3s, or written content, or all three, and in what arenas? Or do you even care?

Post your comments below and let’s see how video stacks up on today’s web…

Tags: video use, videos, vlogging

Beware of outsourcing risks!

Outsourcing topics are big on the internet right now, in both internet marketing and big business. With the economy still foundering, big businesses are turning to outsourcing to maximize their returns and cut costs. Online marketers and developers are also outsourcing to save time on projects and allow them to concentrate on more revenue generation rather than repetitive tasks.

All fine and dandy. But there are risks in using freelancers, and you need to be aware of at least these top two.

Concern #1 – Copyright Ownership and “Work-For-Hire”

This first issue is most insidious, and many businesspeople are unaware of it, unless, of course, they have high-powered lawyers or have been stung before. This is the issue of “work-for-hire” versus copyright ownership.

When you outsource the creation of software, databases, written materials, video, and audio, you are dealing with the development of copyrighted materials. By law, at least in the United States and many other highly-technical countries, copyright of these created materials is automatically owned by the creator, no holds barred. The only way to avoid this copyright infringement is to make the creator do one of two things.

1. Contract the work over to you as “work-for-hire”. This vests all copyright in the person who paid for the work hired out. And you have to back it up with a contract that clearly states that XYZ materials (with specifics) were created as work-for-hire and the creator grants all rights to the purchaser. Keep in mind that money does not have to change hands to meet this relationship requirement. Just a recipient and a creator, even if it is barter.
2. Have a contract with the creator that clearly and specifically grants the purchaser an exclusive, unlimited, permanent license to use the materials created. This is slightly more limited than #1, however, because the creator retains the copyright and you can’t actually “change” anything without their specific permission. You can only use it in whole and not in part unless explicitly granted the right to change the materials.

Any other means of licensing, such as you often see on the internet now with “Resale rights” or “Private Label rights” are more limited versions of #2.

Note: I *am not* a lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV, either. This issue is particularly frustrating since it is tied up in contract law, and when disputes arise (as they will), it is usually the guy with the better signed contract that wins. No contract usually means the more expensive lawyer wins. So, do not stray into the area of outsourced content creation without some kind of professional legal advice (from one of those real lawyers). Even a reasonable, specific, and brief contract can be enough to protect. As long as it is signed by both parties legally, anyway.

One last note on this subject before moving on. If the content creator uses materials obtained from another source (like graphics, music, audio tracks, website designs or Wordpress themes), make sure that *they* have some kind of royalty-free right to use those items or own the copyright (which they also turn over to you or permanently license to you), and that if they are using copyrighted materials from another source, you understand the limitations of their use. You may be required to leave backlinks in a theme, or a watermark on an image, or give credit to the originator in some way. Ignorance won’t protect you from being sued for copyright infringement.

Here’s an example for you. A website developer contracts work-for-hire on a mental illness site (like anxiety disorder) with a graphic designer, who goes to one of the big stock photo repositories for royalty-free graphics. They get a nice image of a happy couple and use it in the header. They don’t read the full site terms, which are long and boring legalese. And the website developer now has a graphic design that they can be sued for using. Most graphics repositories have buried in their terms of use a little phrase that forbids using graphics involving “models” – that’s the people in the picture – in graphics in the mental illness arena, because it negatively reflects on the models themselves. Of course, the graphic designer will probably be sued too, but since you actually used it, you’re in the legal loop as well.

Okay, getting the particularly nasty legal junk out of the way, there is another area of content creation outsourcing that can blow up in your face.

Concern #2 – Your Reputation and Credibility…

When you outsource, you are putting yourself in a more vulnerable position because you no longer control every element of the work being done. You can oversee the process or results, you can review things before release, and you can hold them to standards, but you can’t stop them from taking action in every case.

A blog post on your behalf, a forum post, a blog comment, a nasty bug in the web script they make that blows up a customer’s computer or server – all of these can be nightmares for you and your business. Your customers trust you, and they trust that those you use for help will be up to the same standards they hold you to.

Alas, such is not always the case. This problem alone stops many entrepreneurs from outsourcing. If they need help, they go the more risky and potentially more expensive route of hiring employees. But you really can’t completely control them, either. So when you trust someone else, you need safeguards.

1. Work them into it slowly. Massive oversight early on. Nothing goes out until you see it first. Everything gets tested by multiple users first. Beta test software with customers who understand the risks up front. Do anything you can to make sure that new outsourcing vendors can’t blow up your business.
2. Build a regular review system into your relationship. One entrepreneur I know of gets daily “short summaries” of exactly what projects were worked on, what work was accomplished, any questions or problems, and what is coming up next. This way he can outsource while still keeping his thumb on the pulse.
3. Let them soar on your behalf, but gradually. Approve something and them let them release it. Watch to ensure good quality. If they are good with the written word, let them interact on the help desk if they have the expertise needed. Keep an eye on them.

Gradually, you’ll develop a feel for someone’s abilities, and you’ll come to know their weaknesses and strengths. Once you reach that point, you can feel more comfortable deciding if this is a good long-term fit. But take your time before granting too much control. Like growing a business, this is a necessary risk, but it should be mitigated where possible to avoid bombing your credibility.

One online entrepreneur puts it something like this. “Test and fail quickly, and scale up the successes.” You can do this with copy, or products, or people.

I know this post has been both long and tedious, and I know if you made it this far you either skimmed, or really like to read my posts, or really wanted to know about these issues. All are well and good. I really hope you’ve learned something from this information so that you can continue to grow your business wisely and successfully, and are able to avoid the potential outsourcing risks.

Tags: outsource, outsourcing