Nina Smith spotlights Billing Boss – a free online billing solution

November 12, 2008 by Wayne Schulz

In her keynote address today at the Sleeter Group conference for Accounting Consultants in Glendale Arizona Nina Smith, President of Sage Software Business Management Division spotlighted a free billing solution that is accessed via the Internet and allows for both online billing and collection of fees.

This service, Billing Boss, first appeared online in July 2008. To access the free service all you need is an Internet connection and a web browser. A recent upgrade to the service expands the number of currencies that are supported from 4 to 51.

Setup of the system is simple with a wizard that walks you through entering in your company data. In a matter of minutes you can be entering and sending your first invoice. The system can create a PDF of your invoice and send it as an email attachment or you can include a link back to the Billing Boss site where your customers view and pay for your goods or services.

So long as your customer has an email address on file, Billing Boss will handle sending out the invoice for you. When a customer receives the bill in their email they have three ways that they can chose to pay via Billing Boss.

Send in a check
Use a credit card – you must sign up with Beanstream merchant services – strangely Sage’s own Payment Services is not supported.
UPDATE: Billing Boss just told me via their Twitter stream that they will integrate to SPS (Sage Payment Services) within the next three months and the reason it is not now integrated is that SPS is not in Canada.
Use PayPal

From The Billing Boss Site:

How much is it?
Let’s get this out of the way first. It is Free. Cool, huh?
What is it?
Billing Boss is a simple online invoicing tool that allows you to send invoices quickly to your customers and get paid online.

Who is it for?
This tool is great for small businesses who want to get invoices out to customers faster so they can get paid faster. Basically, any business can use Billing Boss. Who wouldn’t want this?

What can I do with it?
You can:

* Replace your manual invoicing process and create invoices online using your Internet browser.
* Send invoices to your customers online.
* Stay on top of your cash flow by knowing who owes you money, how much, and by when.
* Keep your customer list online for quick reference.
* Track taxes collected from invoices.
* Grant access to your data to your bookkeeper or accountant.

What can your bookkeeper or accountant do with Billing Boss?
They can:

* Access your invoice and payment information online to prepare your books.
* Get an accountant’s view of your data with information such as taxes collected and total invoices sent.

How will my invoices be sent?
They can be sent either via e-mail or as PDF attachments.

If you choose, you can also print your invoices and snail mail them.

Is my data safe?
It sure is. Billing Boss uses industry-standard 128K SSL encryption at login and payment to ensure the safe transmission and delivery of your data. Billing Boss houses your data in a secure, state-of-the-art off-site data centre that ensures that your privacy and billing transactions are safe.

Why should I use Billing Boss rather than any other online invoicing tool?
We have designed Billing Boss with both you and your accountant or bookkeeper in mind. Where other online invoicing tools do not allow you to easily share your data, Billing Boss allows you to grant your accountant or bookkeeper read only access easily and securely, without having to transfer files back and forth. Since you can see everything online, your workflow and communication between you and your accountant or bookkeeper will be faster, more efficient and more accurate.

You don’t need any accounting experience to run Billing Boss: You will get your data in a way that helps you run your business (a business process oriented view) while your accountant or bookkeeper will get the information from an accounting perspective. You can quickly become one of your book balancer’s favorite clients!

Why else should you use Billing Boss? Did we mention that it’s FREE? Unlike some other online invoicing tools, we don’t have a pricing section for Billing Boss. Use it as much as you need to – the more you use it, the better! More invoices mean that your business is growing – and that’s what we like to see!

When can I access it?
Anytime you are connected to the Internet.

How do I get started?
Just sign up and start using it. You will need either IE 6.0+, FireFox 2.0+ or Safari 2.0+ for your Internet browser and an Internet connection.

Link: Billing Boss

Sleeter Group Accounting Software Consulting Conference 2008 Gets Underway

November 11, 2008 by Wayne Schulz

Day one of the Sleeter Group’s Accounting Software Consulting Conference 2008 gets underway today. I’m speaking on Thursday with the Sage Software follks about MAS90 and how it’s a next step up for anyone formerly using QuickBooks who may need a little more horsepower in their software.

The picture above is from the Monday Night Football Arizona Cardinals vs San Francisco 49ers football game. The hotel the speakers are staying in is a short 20 minute walk to the stadium -which allowed us to avoid the happy masses of football fans exiting the stadium after the 29 – 24 Cardinals win (I had to look the final score up because I left the game early to get some rest after having been up since 2am traveling to Arizona).

I’ll update the site with relevant keynote information and I will be talking to many of the QuickBooks consultants and vendors who make add ons for QuickBooks products .

If you’re at the conference – here’s my session titled Sage MAS 90 and 200: Easier To Use And More Affordable Than Ever.

Link: Sleeter Consulting Conference Schedule (Nov 11 to 14, 2008)

Sage MAS Community continues to grow members

October 31, 2008 by Wayne Schulz

Even though the Sage MAS Community has yet to formally launch, there are already an impressive number of members signed up to the service.

Most of these are Sage Software employees – which is perhaps the most impressive portion of the current user count.

Based on a quick early morning count (as of 10-31-2008) the forum shows 112 members broken down as:

Total Members: 112
Administrators: 8
Members with Sage “badges”: 69
Non-Sage identified members: 42

The image below is a partial publicly available list of forum members. Notice the heavy presence of the green Sage badge which formally identifies the user a Sage Software employee.

These employees likely had to sign up on their own and the extent of those who have done so seems to show a big push by Sage to make this new discussion forum a success.

Messages left late last night in the new forum seem to indicate that the previous SageTalk forum will be slowly wound down with members encouraged to migrate to this new forum. There does not appear to be any plans to migrate the old message database from SageTalk to the new forums.

Sign up for the new Sage MAS Community by visiting the site here. At present (and hopefully for the future) reading messages posted to the site is not password protected – though you will have to create an account to leave a message.

Sage Software has indicated that they intend to leave the access this way which is a change from their previous forum (SageTalk) that required members to log in first to the Sage Software technical support area and then again into SageTalk.

Sage Tip: Get alerts when new messages are posted to Sage MAS 90 message board

October 29, 2008 by Wayne Schulz

One of the most convenient ways to read content on the Internet is via the use of RSS feeds. With an RSS feed you can quickly skim the titles of different articles that have been published online. Most sites – including the new Sage Software Message Boards – support the use of RSS feeds.

For those of you who may be more casual users of the Internet or who don’t want to log onto an RSS reader to check messages – here’s an interesting solution that I’ve been using for the past three months.

The service is called Pingie. It’s presently free and in beta with a limitation of 5 different feeds that may be added to each individual account.

What Pingie does is watch your RSS feeds and send out an alert each time the feed is updated.

This is useful for times when you would like to know that a new message has been posted into a specific forum without having to constantly log into the site and view the list of new messages on your computer.

Here’s an example of how to setup the Core Financial Message Board in Pingie so that every time someone posts a new message (or reply) you will get a notification.

Note: These notifications can be sent to either your email address or to a cell phone via SMS.

Link: Pingie

Sage Software Maintenance and Support Plan Video Online

October 22, 2008 by Wayne Schulz

Looking for a MAS90 phone support plan? Here’s an overview video from Sage Sage Software that tries to sell you on the benefit of their phone and basic maintenance plans.

This raises an interesting question about vendor help desk support and the support offered by a local experienced consultant.

Should your company use a local source of support? Or should you contract with a software vendor’s help desk to answer all of your accounting software technical questions?

Here are my summarized thoughts (feel free to take issue with any or all of them in the comments):

Use vendor support If:

You don’t want to interact with local consultants.
You have very routine support requests that are more often resolved by looking in a knowledgebase and reading the results off the screen.
You are ok dealing with a help desk employee who may not have ever installed a live MAS 90 or MAS 200 system (vendors don’t like to admit this but a high percentage of their help desk employees may not have ever worked in the field setting up the software).
You don’t mind handling emergencies on your own with phone guidance.
You don’t mind tracking and following up with reported issues and installing your own software patches.
You are comfortable installing MAS 90 or MAS 200 on your own (may be needed in some support situations).

Consider A Local Consultant If:

You don’t want to pay twice (once for phone and again if on-site service is needed).
You prefer not to debug issues yourself.
You want to deal with a consultant who has installed MAS90 in a live environment.
You actively seek out second opinions and recommendations versus a reactive help desk.
You want in-depth recommendations versus help desk support.
You want references for different issues you are dealing with.
You want to tap into a local consultant’s network of fellow consultants (for example we have 20+ consultants who do nothing but MAS90 and have joined in a formal alliance to support our clients)

These items that I’ve listed above are general in nature. Not every item applies in every situation. Use the list as a starting point in making your own decision.

I am biased in preparing this list as we offer phone support at the same price point as Sage Software. Therefore I recommend that you take all of the items here with a large grain of salt and make your own decisions about where to obtain phone support for Sage MAS 90 and 200.

Link: Sage Software Support Video

From The Billing Boss Site:

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