9 Specialty Products to Help Your Clients Work Smarter, Not Harder

From the June 2010 Issue

Today’s small businesses are learning how to run lean all of the time. This isn’t necessarily a new reality, but the tight economy of the past few years has certainly caused small business owners to be increasingly aware of every dime they spend and every one they bring in. Both of these dimes are equally important to the potential success of the business, but at the end of the day you hope to have more in the “bring in” column than in the other.

Fiscal responsibility is a good thing, of course, and always has been. But working harder doesn’t always equal greater productivity or a stronger bottom line. As the saying goes, sometimes it takes money to make money, and sometimes you’ve got to spend in order to achieve better savings in the long term. The key is to ensure that these expenses are investments that will result in better efficiency, productivity or other positive effects that will produce the most beneficial return on the small business’ investment.

There are simply too many technologies on the market that promise to help businesses run more efficiently to possibly cover them all here. And no one has the time to weed through all of them, especially when each one may have greater or different benefits depending on the kind of small business for which it is used. For accounting professionals whose small business clients often turn to them for technology advice, this can be particularly challenging. That’s why, each year, we dedicate some of our time and space to highlighting a handful (or two) of technologies that may be useful to some or all of your small business clients.

Since your profession depends on your clients’ success, it’s in your interest to help them find ways to run smarter. Likewise, it’s in our best interest to help you help your clients. With this year’s roundup of small business specialty products, hopefully we’ll achieve a win-win-win.

EXPENSEWARE

Target Small Business Type: Small and mid-sized businesses with 1 to 1,000 employees, with expense tracking needs.

Overview: As its name would suggest, ExpenseWare is geared toward tracking and reporting of expenses, but the system offers several additional benefits for businesses. Since it is web-based, users can access it from anywhere, which helps get rid of the excuse of lost receipts and paperwork because the business or client expenses can be immediately entered as they are incurred.

ExpenseWare provides several customization features that let small and mid-sized businesses set up the program to allow for expense allocations by category, company departments, company clients, jobs/projects or other factors, as well as the ability to split or itemize expenses. After entry and allocation of expenses, a supervisor approval process can be used based on an employee’s position and security level rights, with supervisors having access to reporting and the ability to flag individual expenses, add comment or return the expense report to the employee to clarify questions, with optional automatic email alerts that keep staff and management informed of the process. After entry and approval, the business’ bookkeeping or internal accounting team receives the expense report in a format that allows data import and entry of transaction items into QuickBooks or other small business accounting programs.