How Helping Your Clients Can Help Your Firm
The system offers full integration with the chart of accounts, lists and transactions in QuickBooks, and allows import of checks, deposits, receipts and payments, while other key features include the ability to split transactions, display debit and credit totals, filtering tools and tracking and billing of customers for expenses, with the added ability to set billable status for each transaction. The vendor also offers a credit card data import system that allows importing of those transactions into the QuickBooks register.
Potential Benefits: eZ Account Import and eZ Credit Card Import help small businesses transfer financial data into QuickBooks in a fast and accurate way, helping to reduce data-entry time and erros, and also helping speed reconciliation processes.
FreshBooks
Target Small Business Type: Small businesses, especially self-employed contractors and professional services companies who want a simple invoicing utility with e-delivery, management and collaboration tools.
Overview: FreshBooks was one of the original web-based customer billing systems, giving users a quick tool for creating invoices and estimates, and offering multiple templates and options for customization. The system goes further, however, by providing interactive tools that allow the customer (the person/business being invoiced) to log into a secure portal where they can view, download and upload data, based on the permissions and settings that the FreshBooks business has predetermined. Single- and multi-user versions are available, and user-level access rights can also be set up for differing staff and employee roles.
The online application also provides dozens of reporting options and allows managing of up to four tax rates. Users can set up default email messages, late payment reminders and other customer communications. FreshBooks has built-in online payment functions that work with PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, iTransact and other merchant services.
Customer data can be imported from CSV files and contact management programs, and users can create groups of companies and contacts, including multiple contacts per company, with varying levels of log-in access rights. FreshBooks also offers support for project management and vendors, with those contractors able to log in to submit time and invoices. Additionally, the program has inventory tracking tools and per-item tax settings. Other tools include built-in timers, expense tracking and billing, support tickets, and specialized apps for all major smartphones.
Potential Benefits: FreshBooks makes it easy to manage invoices and offers good reporting options for a web-based SMB invoicing program. Multiple user settings and customer portal access and payment options really further its collaboration capabilities, allowing small businesses to get paid faster, while also managing customer relationships.
NeatReceipts
Target Small Business Type: Any business or individual who is frequently mobile and deals with incoming paper-based data that needs to be transferred into their computer.
Overview: NeatReceipts is a program that works with a scanner to automatically identify the information scanned on a document, particularly receipts, business cards and forms, and then organizes that information. The result is a scanned PDF document instead of an image, and with all of the words on the document searchable and easily organized.
As its name might imply, the program specializes in receipts, simplifying the input of expense reports. The optical character recognition (OCR) functions automatically looks for the date and amount of the transaction, sales taxes, the vendor name and contact information. NeatReceipts is equally adept at business cards, with the system capturing contact name, company, phone, email and other contact information. It then allows users to create a contact in their Outlook or other content management system. For other documents, the PDF output offers simple keyword searching. NeatReceipts offers export of data into PDF, Excel, Quicken and QuickBooks.
Potential Benefits: NeatReceipts can help speed up and increase the accuracy of expense reporting and provides good digital records for tax purposes; much better than a shoebox. For professionals who receive a lot of business cards, the system can save considerable time by virtually eliminating manual data entry when creating new contacts.
