Tag Archives: Intuit Inc.

About 852 days ago Mobility Tips and Tricks

The Smartest Credit Card Ever Made: Your Phone

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Credit cards are extremely low tech — they contain simple data to authenticate a transaction. Now, several players, including banks to mobile carriers to financial networks, are looking at a new transaction device: your smartphone. Indeed, financial institutions such as PayPal and MasterCard have issued some customers adhesive chips for their phones. The credit card information is stuck to the phone and can be used at any of the 200,000 contactless readers in stores around the nation. That’s the low-tech version. What’s really a hot topic now, though, is Near Field Communication (NFC), which allows two-way wireless communication between a chip inside a phone and a receiving terminal. This means that soon, if you have a phone that supports NFC, you’ll be able to not only pay for a purchase by waving your phone near a contactless reader, but you can also get instant loyalty points, coupons and rewards. While the idea is intriguing for consumers and merchants alike, the question is whether NFC will work for US merchants — and work well. “Technology is usually only one small component that leads to the success or failure of ventures like this,” said Charles Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research, explaining that the technical infrastructure, customer adoption, and low fees must all line up as well.  Smarter smartphonesEven though countries like Japan and South Korea have been using mobile phones for payments for a while, paying with a smartphone is off to a slow start here, mostly for financial reasons.  “It’s a business model problem,” said Omar Green, the director of strategic mobile initiatives at Intuit, a company highly interested in using NFC with its millions of small business customers, who explained that there is still uncertainty about how merchants will actually be charged to use mobile payments from smartphones. That said, several indicators point to 2011 being the year when mobile payments and NFC reaches a tipping point. First and foremost: Samsung now offers the Nexus S as the first NFC-enabled Android phone. Nokia says its smartphones will support NFC in 2011. Visa’s head of mobile Bill Gajda says the company has been holding pilots with four of its largest issuers. As part of that, all New York City taxis — a whopping 13,000 — now have a contactless readers in the backseat. Chicago and Boston taxis are also being outfitted with about 3,800 readers so far. In fact, transit is a no-brainer for mobile payments. Most people have their phone in hand all the time anyway so waving it past a reader to get through a turnstile seems beautifully efficient.  Mobile commerce expert David Eads of Kony Solutions, writing in his blog, says the iPhone 5 is expected to support NFC when it comes out. In the blog post, he points out that, considering the trillions of dollars run through financial networks annually, Apple stands to increase revenue dramatically by getting involved in processing payments for things out in the real world. Conveniently, iTunes already has payment information for its 160 million customers. That’s a match made in Heaven for Apple. Most impressive, though, is an announcement from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. In November, the companies announced that they’re working together with Discover to build a NFC contactless payment network called Isis for the cell phone companies’ 217 million customers. While holding hands with the competition might raise eyebrows, it’s actually a brilliant idea. According to Jaymee Johnson, the director of strategic development at T-Mobile who is also the Isis spokesperson, the joint venture has worked to provide a single unified platform to consumers, merchants, and banks that will streamline adoption of NFC. They realize that mobile payments using NFC aren’t going to work if the merchant is seeing a different interface for every customer that walks through the door, says Johnson. Intuit’s Green says they’re also trying to figure out how to deal with transaction fees. Once they are low enough, a smartphone will be an ideal transaction device. About those fees, Forrester’s Golvin said, “There is a going rate that is established for transaction fees on payment. I would be extremely surprised to see a merchant fee schedule for these payments that was radically different from what currently exists from the existing acquiring banks and payment networks.” Using a smartphone for transactions makes sense, especially for merchants who can capture new information about a customer, such as buying habits and preferences. According to Jeff Miles, the director of mobile transactions at NXP Semiconductors (www.nxp.com), the company that invented NFC with Sony in 2002, NFC tags in stores are another tool that will benefit merchants and their customers. ”Think of a small hardware store,” says Miles. “I walk in and I’m looking at a new drill and Bosch has a promotion, so they put a smart tag in the store. I tap the tag and it gives me some product information and potentially could give me a coupon.”  Consumer concernsThere are concerns with using a phone to pay for goods. For example, some wonder: what if your phone is stolen? “[It would be] probably no worse than someone stealing a credit card and perhaps somewhat better because you can password protect a phone,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, adding that the Web service a consumer would be using with a NFC-enabled phone would likely contain financial information and it would not be on the phone itself.  Whether people will be eager to adopt NFC is another question. “Consumers are used to using existing methods of payment and as a race we are not very fond of change,” Enderle said. Golvin agrees. “The engrained behavior that people have for paying is pretty deep and it takes a lot to change that,” he said. The coupons and loyalty rewards that would come along with NFC phone payments will help, he said. “Those things do make a big difference. If you can do all of that in the transaction, now you’ve given the customer a real incentive to change their behavior and use this alternate payment method.”  Experts aren’t sure at what point the average consumer will be paying for things with a wave of a smartphone. Regardless of when, it stands to chance that while today our phones rule much of our lives, tomorrow they just might control our money as well.

About 1510 days ago Business Accounting Software

Online Accounting: Numbers in the Cloud

Financial management is the delicate balancing act that transforms marketing success, operational results, and managerial savvy into a viable, durable business. In order for a small business to be efficient and effective in managing its finances, computerized accounting and digital financial services tools must become part of its daily kit. While such tools are traditionally desktop-based software programs, a new breed of online financial management applications has emerged in the last few years, taking advantage of the growing confidence that businesses are developing in the Web as a safe business environment. Now that entrepreneurs are indeed becoming comfortable with the “software in the cloud” model and the inherent benefits it offers, they are in growing numbers starting to look beyond e-mail or office productivity to more sophisticated and sensitive applications like financials. Web-based financial management applications are not new — think online brokerage and banking. But fully featured online packages are just now fully blooming, not only rivaling in functionality their desktop-based counterparts, but also extending their usefulness through value-added online services such as bill payments, electronic checks issuance, digital invoicing, or customer credit verification. Moreover their collaborative features, such as multi-user access and accountant view make it a natural fit for the “on the go” lifestyle of most modern small business managers. Accounting online The heavyweight of small business accounting, Intuit, has launched an online alternative to its Quickbooks software that can be finally considered a valid option. While its previous attempts were not very successful, the current version of Quickbooks Online, priced from free to $34.95/month, is a quality product that, while not as powerful as the desktop version, does a pretty good job. Peachtree, a longtime small business favorite, also has debuted a well featured online version starting at $150/year and representing a very viable alternative. Notable new online-only accounting packages for small businesses include Clarity Accounting and Less Accounting which is nicely integrated via mashups with Web favorites such as Basecamp, Shopify, and PayPal. Almost ready to re-launch is NetBooks, a product with a bit of a troubled history, but with a very interesting and complete set of features and now in final Beta release. Accounts can now be opened and used for free. A truly superb product, designed for mature small businesses is Intacct. Created from the ground up as a Web-based application, it provides very sophisticated accounting features and it natively integrates with a number of other Web-based software offerings such as Salesforce.com. For even more mature and large organizations, requiring not just accounting but a comprehensive online suite of business management applications, NetSuite is the leader in the space. Online bill payment If you think for a moment about what it is truly involved in paying your business bills using the traditional checkbook and snail mail, it is not difficult to imagine that there must be a better way to do it. Well, there is, and it is called “online bill payment.” While banks have offered similar services for quite a while as part of their online banking offerings, there are independent services that go well beyond the electronic check, and make the process of receiving, screening, tracking, and paying bills extremely efficient. Both Paytrust — owned by Intuit — and CheckFree can receive bills on your behalf, scan them, make them available to you in digital format via a secure Web interface, and allow you to pay them with a click of the mouse, issuing an electronic check or an EFT order.  This approach can be adopted for all vendors and all invoices, and cuts the average time needed to process a bill by more than 50 percent — in my experience — and greatly simplifies the record keeping aspect, eliminating paperwork. Online invoicing When it comes to get paid, or at least to efficiently issue and send invoices, there are a plethora of Web services available. The most notable is Freshbooks, a pioneer of the Web 2.0 era, which allows for efficient time tracking, billing, quoting, and more.  Intuit has its own offering tightly integrated with Quickbooks online called Billing Manager, while Zoho Invoices comes as part of the Zoho online productivity suite. A roster of other minor offerings fill various professional niches and differentiate on price and unique features, including: Free Agent, Simply Invoices, Invoice Place and Billing Orchard. The Web is opening the doors to scores of new software developers every day, reducing the costs to develop new products and services, creating competitive opportunities for better, less expensive products. Online financial software is just now entering the realm of full acceptance among small businesses. Expect an explosion of new, more tailored applications from large players such as Google and Microsoft as well as upstart companies. New products will surface on the horizon in the next couple of years offering true integration with banking, invoicing, billing, and all the other financial services that small businesses use every day, together with more robust ways to analyze performance, giving way to a new generation of well managed and more robust small enterprises. Andrea Peiro is the Small Business Market Expert at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Founder of the Small Business Technology Magazine, a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses, he has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. You can reach him at us.andreap@gmail.com.

About 1906 days ago Business Software

HR Software: Technology to Manage People

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The Internet has changed a lot about how small businesses handle human resources back-office processes, starting with how employees get paid. Today, companies can use a payroll service bureau with a Web-based front end, or an online payroll provider. Or they can turn over their entire payroll department to a preferred provider organization to manage. Companies have been farming out payroll since the advent of the first computers back in the late 1940s, and payroll continues to be one of the most commonly outsourced business practices at companies of all sizes. Lisa Rowan, human resources (HR) technology analyst at at IDC, the Framingham, Mass. market researcher, estimates 53 percent of companies with 1,000 or fewer employees use an outside service. It’s not uncommon for companies with five employees — or even one — to use an outside payroll provider, according to Rowan and payroll service vendors. One reason: small businesses would rather reserve their time and resources for revenue-generating activities. “There’s a war for talent, a shrinking labor pool, rising costs for health care benefits, more regulations to deal with. At the end of the day, more demands are being put on them to do more with less. It’s a natural fit to outsource,” says Rich Watson, major account division vice president of marketing at ADP, the national payroll processor. Another bonus: outsourcers figure and pay payroll taxes, so business owners don’t have to. “There’s no upside to running perfect payroll, people expect it. But there’s a whole lot of downside if you don’t pay people or your taxes,” Watson says. Different levels of service Once business owners decide to ditch spreadsheets or Quickbooks, they have to decide what to use instead. According to industry analysts and other experts, their choice will depend on: How much, or little, they want to be involved in the process What they want to spend What, if any, other HR functions they want to outsource too, such as benefits, workers compensation, time and attendance and recruiting. After making those determinations, they can choose between the following: Payroll service bureaus At this most basic level of payroll outsourcing, companies send timecard data to a service bureau that calculates payroll and withholdings and either sends back paychecks — or deposits them directly into employees’ bank accounts — or sends payroll data to companies who cut their own checks. National service bureaus such as ADP, Ceridian, and Paychex account for 40 percent of the payroll industry, with the remainder made up by local vendors, according to analysts and industry experts. These days, many service bureaus use a Web-based interface, and provide online training and support. Service bureaus charge monthly fees based on the number of employees covered and how many other services a customer signs up for. Online payroll providers Think of online payroll providers as the do-it-yourself alternative to a payroll service bureau. Small businesses license Web-based software and pay a flat monthly rate of anywhere from $30 to $65, according to Rowan. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) payroll software is best suited to companies with at least several hundred employees because they need some level of HR and IT staff to provide services and tech support to go with the software, she says. The buzz over SaaS means lots of companies are offering online payroll, including startups such as PayCycle and SurePayroll, and Intuit, which just introduced its service. Banks, which once sold payroll services but got out of the business, are offering it again as a way to lock in local business customers. Bank of America and other top institutions offer online payroll and use online payroll vendors like PayCycle to run it for them, Rowan says. Preferred provider organizations Companies that don’t want the hassle of managing a payroll department can outsource the entire thing to a third party. Referred to as preferred provider organizations (PPO), these companies become co-employers of a business’ employees. In the arrangement, a PPO becomes the employees’ employer of record, handling payroll along with health benefits administration, workers’ comp, and payroll taxes, while the business continues to manage the employees’ daily activities. Some companies that provide total outsourcing include ADP, TriNet, and Gevity. By aggregating thousands of employees from dozens of clients, PPOs can offer prices for payroll services and other HR processes at rates significantly lower than an individual small business owner could find on their own, says Nov Omana, product manager at TriNet and an HR industry veteran. Covering so many employees also means companies like TriNet can afford to build a back-end HR platform that rivals those found at much larger companies, another advantage for small businesses, Omana says. TriNet’s customers aren’t just mom-and-pop shops but professional and financial services and technology companies, including “lots of venture-based startups,” he says.

About 1935 days ago Business Software

Accounting and More: New Financial Software

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Thanks to its new pumped-up software, business at Menomonee Falls, Wis.-Holland Bulb Farms is … well, blooming.  After years of using a combination of Intuit’s QuickBooks and Microsoft’s Excel to track accounting, inventory and expenses, the 32-person company, which sells specialty flower bulbs, boutique fruit and vegetable plants, and seeds, decided it needed more expansive software to support its first foray into the world of e-commerce. So three years ago, Holland Bulb Farms purchased Everest Software’s Advanced, an integrated accounting, inventory, point-of-sale and e-commerce package. In addition to handling accounting and payroll, the system tracks every aspect of what the company sells, ships, and needs to order, sending internal email notification to the appropriate departments. It also offers customer relationship management (CRM) features that allow the company to notify customers of special offers and promotions, or greet them on birthdays or special occasions. Holland Bulb installed the Everest system just before going live with its website, explains Erik Thomas, the company’s director of e-commerce, at a cost of between $1,500-$1,800 per year. “I’d say we had a 300 percent return on investment in the first month of the site going live,” he says. Buying the On-Premise version as opposed to the hosted On-Demand version, Thomas said, is giving the company more flexibility to customize the product. Everest’s new tutorials, he adds, make it much easier to train new employees on the system. Integrated software a growing trend Integrated financial software for smaller businesses is part of a growing trend, notes Gary Chen, a senior analyst specializing in small and mid-sized businesses at Yankee Group, a Boston-based research firm. “There’s definitely a trend…as the Internet and technology changes, you have traditional accounting packages expanding. It’s definitely a good place to start, because every business needs accounting,” he notes. Companies like Dulles, Va.-based Everest and Rohnert Park, Calif.,-basedNetBooks, whose CEO, Ridgely Evers, founded QuickBooks while with Intuit, thinks providing a complete business management model to smaller businesses just makes sense. “If accounting is all you need, you can’t get better than QuickBooks,” Evers says. “But QuickBooks is designed for transactions. NetBooks is designed for interactions,” he adds.   NetBooks offers a web-based service for $200/month for five users, documenting everything from incoming orders to outgoing shipments, CRM, and payroll and accounting, too. NetBooks even offers access to a marketing coach through partner Duct Tape Marketing. Evers notes that NetBooks is tailor-made for small businesses without IT departments: “companies where I-T still spells it,” he quips. Intuit in the act, too Even QuickBooks’ maker, Intuit, would seem to agree with the wisdom of building on basic accounting apps, notes Chen, who notes that Intuit recently purchased Homestead, a build-your-own-website software package with CRM features. QuickBooks’ 2008 version also includes more flexibility, such as breaking out data in ways that can be used for sales and customer service. While the newer offerings are more integrated at present, stealing market share away from QuickBooks will be difficult, says Chen. “It’s pretty difficult to knock Intuit off its pedestal,” he says. In the end, “the accounting department has to be comfortable using whatever software is being used, and a lot of accountants are comfortable with QuickBooks.” SIDEBAR: Integrated Business Software: Who’s Got It? Intuit, which offers both QuickBooks and now Homestead, a build-your-own website package. NetBooks, offering marketing, sales, inventory and finances in one software-as-a-service system. Everest Software Inc.’s Advanced, winner of SIIA’s Best Business Software Product in 2004, is offered as On-Premise or On-Demand, calls itself an all-in-one business operating system, offering accounting, e-commerce, point-of-sale, inventory, shipping, and CRM.

About 1966 days ago Tools on Managing Technology

Essential Tools for the Solo Entrepreneur

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In last year’s Future of Small Business study commissioned by Intuit, the phrase “personal business” was used to describe the increasing number of one-person businesses, making up roughly 70 percent of the nation’s businesses.  Many individuals started these businesses to have more control of what they do, how they do it, when they do it, and where they do it from.  Mompreneurs, mothers who start their own home-based businesses to have a better work-life balance, are great examples of professionals opting to “go it alone” instead of climbing the corporate ladder.  In the past, a good number of people were forced into entrepreneurship, or in this case solopreneurship, due to layoffs and downsizings.  But now more than ever people are gladly stepping out on their own — and not just to do business with those in their local communities. These entrepreneurs can conduct business half way around the world.  With cheap, high speed Internet access, not only can you reach a greater number of people, you can do so in a more meaningful way. Just as important, you can make it easy for them to reach you. With the infrastructure in place for cheap broadband access, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is making it possible for solopreneurs to utilize tools and services that would have been unavailable to them just a few short years ago.  Marketing, ecommerce, Web conferencing, and other applications are now easier to use than ever before. Plus these tools are also inexpensive, easy to pay for on a monthly basis, and in many cases come with no long term contractual commitments. So everything is in place for solopreneurs to reach a worldwide audience. Here are a few tools the aspiring international solopreneur can use to build up their  Web credibility. Tools to build your Web presence This may seem a bit obvious, but you need a location on the Web that is yours.  However even in 2008 upwards of 50 percent of all small businesses still don’t have a website. If you’re planning on being a successful solopreneur, you’ll have to have a either a website, blog, or possibly both. For those with basic website needs, check out Microsoft Office Live or Google Apps for Domains.  For those with more complex needs like selling products online or working with affiliate partners, companies like Homestead and Web.com have made it pretty simple to set up a fully functional website quickly.  And if the website templates provided by them don’t do it for you, stop by Template Monster and pick out one.  Or use a service like Elance.com and place your web design project up for bid, at your price and timeframe.  You’ll be surprised at how many people are willing to meet your price.   If you’re looking to build a platform in order to be viewed as an industry expert, it takes all of five minutes to get a blog set up, allowing you to syndicate your knowledge to a worldwide audience.  Blogger is a free tool from Google you can use to get started.  However, if you don’t mind kicking out a few bucks for a more professional looking blog, you may want to consider Six Apart’s TypePad service, used by many popular bloggers.  And if you have a little more tech savvy and are looking for even more control over how your blog looks and functions, you can step up to WordPress or MoveableType.  And don’t forget to check out WidgetBox.com and pick up a little free “bling” to your blog to add style and functionality with just a few clicks. Tools to create interesting content Whether you choose to start with a blog or a full blown website, the content you create needs to attract the kind of people you’re looking to do business with.  And people expect great content to be delivered in multiple formats, allowing them to consume it on their terms.  That means in addition to the traditional whitepapers and slide decks, you’ll need to use a tool like Adobe’s Captivate to create compelling interactive demos and puzzles.  The popularity of podcasting is making it important to create audio content for people on the go.  Audio recording software Audacity or Apple’s GarageBand, along with a USB microphone, can quickly turn you into an industry commentator.  Or you can use a nice webcam like the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, with a tool like Adobe’s Visual Communicator to create full-fledged professional looking video presentations.  And then add that video to your site, blog and YouTube as well. Tools to build your presence on the Web As important as it is to build your own Web presence, it’s equally as important to interact with people on their turf — meaning the rest of the Web.  Especially if you want all that great content you create to reach a lot of people.  According to Alexa.com, six of the top ten sites are social sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.  According to Internet research firm Comscore, almost two-thirds of all iIternet users visit MySpace at least once a month.  And over half of these folks are older than 35.  Facebook has over 100,000 users older than 64.  And these sites are doubling in population at ridiculous speeds. Social sites have made it easier for us to leverage our relationships and connect with people on a much deeper level than we could have imagined a few years ago.  All because it’s very easy to collaborate and share information. And this can be as simple as answering a question on LinkedIn Answers, Digg-ing someone’s blog entry, or writing a book review that everyone in your Facebook network can see. Even share your Powerpoint slide decks with the world by uploading them to SlideShare.net.    These are just a few of the tools and services you can use to build your reputation and become a world-renown, international solopreneur.  Find the ones that let you create the kind of content that help those needing your services to find you anywhere on the Web. Brent Leary is a small business  technology analyst, advisor, speaker and award winning blogger.  He’s the host of “Technology… for Business $ake”, a weekly radio program on BusinessTechnologyRadio.com.   His popular blog can be found at www.brentleary.com.

About 1966 days ago Tools on Managing Technology

Essential Tools for the Solo Entrepreneur

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In last year’s Future of Small Business study commissioned by Intuit, the phrase “personal business” was used to describe the increasing number of one-person businesses, making up roughly 70 percent of the nation’s businesses.  Many individuals started these businesses to have more control of what they do, how they do it, when they do it, and where they do it from.  Mompreneurs, mothers who start their own home-based businesses to have a better work-life balance, are great examples of professionals opting to “go it alone” instead of climbing the corporate ladder.  In the past, a good number of people were forced into entrepreneurship, or in this case solopreneurship, due to layoffs and downsizings.  But now more than ever people are gladly stepping out on their own — and not just to do business with those in their local communities. These entrepreneurs can conduct business half way around the world.  With cheap, high speed Internet access, not only can you reach a greater number of people, you can do so in a more meaningful way. Just as important, you can make it easy for them to reach you. With the infrastructure in place for cheap broadband access, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is making it possible for solopreneurs to utilize tools and services that would have been unavailable to them just a few short years ago.  Marketing, ecommerce, Web conferencing, and other applications are now easier to use than ever before. Plus these tools are also inexpensive, easy to pay for on a monthly basis, and in many cases come with no long term contractual commitments. So everything is in place for solopreneurs to reach a worldwide audience. Here are a few tools the aspiring international solopreneur can use to build up their  Web credibility. Tools to build your Web presence This may seem a bit obvious, but you need a location on the Web that is yours.  However even in 2008 upwards of 50 percent of all small businesses still don’t have a website. If you’re planning on being a successful solopreneur, you’ll have to have a either a website, blog, or possibly both. For those with basic website needs, check out Microsoft Office Live or Google Apps for Domains.  For those with more complex needs like selling products online or working with affiliate partners, companies like Homestead and Web.com have made it pretty simple to set up a fully functional website quickly.  And if the website templates provided by them don’t do it for you, stop by Template Monster and pick out one.  Or use a service like Elance.com and place your web design project up for bid, at your price and timeframe.  You’ll be surprised at how many people are willing to meet your price.   If you’re looking to build a platform in order to be viewed as an industry expert, it takes all of five minutes to get a blog set up, allowing you to syndicate your knowledge to a worldwide audience.  Blogger is a free tool from Google you can use to get started.  However, if you don’t mind kicking out a few bucks for a more professional looking blog, you may want to consider Six Apart’s TypePad service, used by many popular bloggers.  And if you have a little more tech savvy and are looking for even more control over how your blog looks and functions, you can step up to WordPress or MoveableType.  And don’t forget to check out WidgetBox.com and pick up a little free “bling” to your blog to add style and functionality with just a few clicks. Tools to create interesting content Whether you choose to start with a blog or a full blown website, the content you create needs to attract the kind of people you’re looking to do business with.  And people expect great content to be delivered in multiple formats, allowing them to consume it on their terms.  That means in addition to the traditional whitepapers and slide decks, you’ll need to use a tool like Adobe’s Captivate to create compelling interactive demos and puzzles.  The popularity of podcasting is making it important to create audio content for people on the go.  Audio recording software Audacity or Apple’s GarageBand, along with a USB microphone, can quickly turn you into an industry commentator.  Or you can use a nice webcam like the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, with a tool like Adobe’s Visual Communicator to create full-fledged professional looking video presentations.  And then add that video to your site, blog and YouTube as well. Tools to build your presence on the Web As important as it is to build your own Web presence, it’s equally as important to interact with people on their turf — meaning the rest of the Web.  Especially if you want all that great content you create to reach a lot of people.  According to Alexa.com, six of the top ten sites are social sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.  According to Internet research firm Comscore, almost two-thirds of all iIternet users visit MySpace at least once a month.  And over half of these folks are older than 35.  Facebook has over 100,000 users older than 64.  And these sites are doubling in population at ridiculous speeds. Social sites have made it easier for us to leverage our relationships and connect with people on a much deeper level than we could have imagined a few years ago.  All because it’s very easy to collaborate and share information. And this can be as simple as answering a question on LinkedIn Answers, Digg-ing someone’s blog entry, or writing a book review that everyone in your Facebook network can see. Even share your Powerpoint slide decks with the world by uploading them to SlideShare.net.    These are just a few of the tools and services you can use to build your reputation and become a world-renown, international solopreneur.  Find the ones that let you create the kind of content that help those needing your services to find you anywhere on the Web. Brent Leary is a small business  technology analyst, advisor, speaker and award winning blogger.  He’s the host of “Technology… for Business $ake”, a weekly radio program on BusinessTechnologyRadio.com.   His popular blog can be found at www.brentleary.com.

About 1966 days ago E-Commerce

Essential Tools for the Solo Entrepreneur

our beautiful site

In last year’s Future of Small Business study commissioned by Intuit, the phrase “personal business” was used to describe the increasing number of one-person businesses, making up roughly 70 percent of the nation’s businesses.  Many individuals started these businesses to have more control of what they do, how they do it, when they do it, and where they do it from.  Mompreneurs, mothers who start their own home-based businesses to have a better work-life balance, are great examples of professionals opting to “go it alone” instead of climbing the corporate ladder.  In the past, a good number of people were forced into entrepreneurship, or in this case solopreneurship, due to layoffs and downsizings.  But now more than ever people are gladly stepping out on their own — and not just to do business with those in their local communities. These entrepreneurs can conduct business half way around the world.  With cheap, high speed Internet access, not only can you reach a greater number of people, you can do so in a more meaningful way. Just as important, you can make it easy for them to reach you. With the infrastructure in place for cheap broadband access, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is making it possible for solopreneurs to utilize tools and services that would have been unavailable to them just a few short years ago.  Marketing, ecommerce, Web conferencing, and other applications are now easier to use than ever before. Plus these tools are also inexpensive, easy to pay for on a monthly basis, and in many cases come with no long term contractual commitments. So everything is in place for solopreneurs to reach a worldwide audience. Here are a few tools the aspiring international solopreneur can use to build up their  Web credibility. Tools to build your Web presence This may seem a bit obvious, but you need a location on the Web that is yours.  However even in 2008 upwards of 50 percent of all small businesses still don’t have a website. If you’re planning on being a successful solopreneur, you’ll have to have a either a website, blog, or possibly both. For those with basic website needs, check out Microsoft Office Live or Google Apps for Domains.  For those with more complex needs like selling products online or working with affiliate partners, companies like Homestead and Web.com have made it pretty simple to set up a fully functional website quickly.  And if the website templates provided by them don’t do it for you, stop by Template Monster and pick out one.  Or use a service like Elance.com and place your web design project up for bid, at your price and timeframe.  You’ll be surprised at how many people are willing to meet your price.   If you’re looking to build a platform in order to be viewed as an industry expert, it takes all of five minutes to get a blog set up, allowing you to syndicate your knowledge to a worldwide audience.  Blogger is a free tool from Google you can use to get started.  However, if you don’t mind kicking out a few bucks for a more professional looking blog, you may want to consider Six Apart’s TypePad service, used by many popular bloggers.  And if you have a little more tech savvy and are looking for even more control over how your blog looks and functions, you can step up to WordPress or MoveableType.  And don’t forget to check out WidgetBox.com and pick up a little free “bling” to your blog to add style and functionality with just a few clicks. Tools to create interesting content Whether you choose to start with a blog or a full blown website, the content you create needs to attract the kind of people you’re looking to do business with.  And people expect great content to be delivered in multiple formats, allowing them to consume it on their terms.  That means in addition to the traditional whitepapers and slide decks, you’ll need to use a tool like Adobe’s Captivate to create compelling interactive demos and puzzles.  The popularity of podcasting is making it important to create audio content for people on the go.  Audio recording software Audacity or Apple’s GarageBand, along with a USB microphone, can quickly turn you into an industry commentator.  Or you can use a nice webcam like the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, with a tool like Adobe’s Visual Communicator to create full-fledged professional looking video presentations.  And then add that video to your site, blog and YouTube as well. Tools to build your presence on the Web As important as it is to build your own Web presence, it’s equally as important to interact with people on their turf — meaning the rest of the Web.  Especially if you want all that great content you create to reach a lot of people.  According to Alexa.com, six of the top ten sites are social sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.  According to Internet research firm Comscore, almost two-thirds of all iIternet users visit MySpace at least once a month.  And over half of these folks are older than 35.  Facebook has over 100,000 users older than 64.  And these sites are doubling in population at ridiculous speeds. Social sites have made it easier for us to leverage our relationships and connect with people on a much deeper level than we could have imagined a few years ago.  All because it’s very easy to collaborate and share information. And this can be as simple as answering a question on LinkedIn Answers, Digg-ing someone’s blog entry, or writing a book review that everyone in your Facebook network can see. Even share your Powerpoint slide decks with the world by uploading them to SlideShare.net.    These are just a few of the tools and services you can use to build your reputation and become a world-renown, international solopreneur.  Find the ones that let you create the kind of content that help those needing your services to find you anywhere on the Web. Brent Leary is a small business  technology analyst, advisor, speaker and award winning blogger.  He’s the host of “Technology… for Business $ake”, a weekly radio program on BusinessTechnologyRadio.com.   His popular blog can be found at www.brentleary.com.

About 2058 days ago Business Software

Online Travel Expense Reporting Takes Off

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At RiskMetrics Group, two full-time employees were spending each day processing the company’s many travel expense reports. All day, every day. That is, until the New York-based risk management firm started using Concur Expense, a Web-based travel expense solution. Using Concur, those two RiskMetrics employees — one in London and one in the U.S. — spend perhaps one hour a day on expense reports, notes Michael Ciaccio, travel and expense manager for the 300-employee firm. That’s important because the company is in the process of tripling in size due to acquisitions. “This has really opened up their time so they can work on other projects,” he says. The Concur Expense product, an on-demand Web solution, can start gathering travel expense information from the moment an employee books their travel, explains Chris Juneau, vice president of product marketing for Redmond, Wash.-based firm. Concur Expense includes a travel booking tool and a direct link to the company’s corporate bank card. The more employees use their corporate card to pay for their expenses, the less they need to keep track of receipts, dates and locations later. Employees just add in their cash expenditures, and print off or email their report. “Our product eliminates receipts, eliminates keystrokes, and can eliminate paper expense reports,” Juneau says. ROI in “soft dollars” While the return-on-investment attributable to these solutions are in “soft dollars” — not hard cash — admits Tim Dougherty, sales director of Irvine, Calif-based ExpensAble, they can be significant. “You have employees doing something other than spending their Friday afternoon doing an expense report,” he notes. “And you have the accounting staff able to do something else, too.” For small businesses especially, where many employees wear several hats, finding ways to save the time associated with developing expense reports can be a godsend. Many smaller companies suffer through the travel expense process, perhaps using Intuit’s QuickBooks or free services offered by their bank card. Often, those services don’t go far enough. Dedicated on-demand travel expense services or software can help a small company do a better job. And on-demand services can even help companies that lack an IT staff. Products such as Concur’s Expense can run from $1,000-$5,000 in set-up fees, and from between $250/month to $5,000/month in service fees, depending on the size of the business and the number of users. ExpensAble offers several small-business options: its Enterprise on-demand product for 20 users or less for a $1,200-$3,000 one-time fee, or its Desktop software option at $700 per 10 licenses, and has off-line options as well, according to Dougherty. A third provider, CyberShift, also offers on-demand and licensed products, but does not make its pricing models public, according to spokeswoman Pamela Marshall. The sales force may grumble, but… For companies accustomed to having the accounting office manage their expense reports from start to finish, however, asking employees to shift over to a do-it-yourself model can be met with resistance. “At first, our sales team grumbled … they thought it would take away from time doing sales,” admits Ciaccio. “But right now, everyone’s pretty receptive,” he added, noting that RiskMetrics has put tutorial information about Concur on its website to help employees work through it more quickly. In addition to saving RiskMetrics time, Concur also helps keep managers in the know about their departments’ travel costs. “We can provide detailed reports to the managers, so they know just what they’re spending on travel.” Concur’s Juneau adds that many of his clients find that their employees’ travel expenses  drop significantly after the Concur system is in use. With increased use of the corporate card, it becomes harder for employees to “pad” their expenses, he notes. In sum, dedicated travel-expense solutions could drive savings to your business in terms of time, money, and hassle.

About 2088 days ago Online Marketing

The Push to “Pull” in Online Marketing

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Consumers are being bombarded with so much advertising today, from TV commercials to e-mails to logos on coffee cups and pizza boxes. People are kind of overwhelmed. So when they want information, they go out and get it themselves — “pulling” it. “I don’t think push marketing is going away,” says Gary Chen, an analyst for the Yankee Group, of Boston, who specializes in the small and mid-sized business market, “but you’re going to see a lot more pull.” Rather than accepting what’s being pitched to them, consumers are going out and finding information themselves. They’ll go out and look for comparative information on other products and services. A recent report, the second installment of the Intuit Future of Small Business Report, sponsored by Intuit and authored by the Institute for the Future, argues that technology will transform the small business sector. Key for customer acquisition will be the online presence. Here’s what you need to know to make your company’s presence online work for you: Join the conversation Accountants have done this for years, says Brad Smith, senior vice president and general manger of Intuit’s Small Business Division, taking their expertise on the road, offering advice with the goal of people being so impressed that they hire them. Take a page from their book and go to the (virtual) communities where these conversations are happening. Show up and give advice for free. Say someone has a question about a particular topic that’s in your field, go on there, and say, “I have a small business that does that. Here is what you need to know…” If all goes well, the group will consider you an expert in your field. And, of course that impression will extend past the particular group, thanks to search engines and connectedness of the Internet. Forrester Research has deemed this such an important form of marketing for businesses that they produced a report aptly titled, “Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement.” Author and analyst Brian Haven writes, “Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.” Enter a virtual world Virtual world sites, like There.com and Second Life are great places for small business owners. “It’s a good place to find out what’s resonating,” Smith says. You can get on there and, through trial and error, determine the right pricing for items and test new products. People in the virtual worlds, also have lives in the physical world where they may remember your business and spend real money. You’ve got a reputation to protect Just like in high school, reputation is everything. “It’s the number one way that people select a small business,” says Smith. People are talking around you whether you know it not. Better to know what they’re thinking. Go to chat rooms and find out what customers are saying and figure out what it is that you have to improve. In short, as the “Intuit Future of Small Business Report,” succinctly puts it: “It’s all about providing customers and prospects with the right information in the right context at the right time.”

About 2180 days ago E-Commerce

Charge It! Options to Credit Card Terminals

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In the Internet era, processing credit card transactions with landline-based hardware terminals may no longer make sense to the bottom line. These old-fashioned devices can be costly and time consuming and, given the ubiquity of high-speed Internet access, there are other options for small and mid-size businesses these days. Virtual terminal — software that runs on PCs or point of sale kiosks and emulates a terminal device — process transactions online and can streamline your reconciliation — providing you take the necessary security precautions. Virtual terminals verify credit card transactions through Internet gateway services by allowing merchants to enter a customer’s credit card information onto a computer, either keying in the data or through a portable reader that relies on “swipe” technology. Processing transactions over the Internet can cut precious seconds from each credit card transaction, increasing employee productivity and reducing telecommunications fees. Landline-based terminals can still make sense for businesses that perform few monthly credit card transactions. Credit card terminals, which range from $150 to more than $400 for a wireless unit, often result in extra charges per transaction in addition to telecommunications costs for dialing in, which can increase the costs compared to Internet-based services. At the same time, keyed-in transactions are sometimes charged a higher percentage to process than swiped cards, so business owners need to weigh the different factors before deciding which credit-card processing technology to choose. Internet-era transaction processing Using Internet-based credit card processing requires a combination of software and services that, while more complex to implement, offer greater reporting capabilities than terminal hardware. Businesses that take payments in person use card readers that send credit card data to virtual terminal software. This software connects with Internet gateway services that authorize payment by connecting to credit institutions.  Virtual terminal applications submit credit card information to transaction processing software such as ICVerify, Verifone’s PCCharge, and TPI Software’s Smart Payments run on both PCs and point of sale (POS) workstations. These applications offer up-to-the minute reporting capabilities to track recent transactions. They can also create payment data files in industry standard database, spreadsheet and text file formats that can be exported to accounting software to save time by eliminating re-keying in data. These applications verify payments through real time Internet gateway services that authorize the transaction. To make it even more confusing, some applications combine the virtual terminal, credit processing, and Internet gateway functions. The downside is that these workstations need to be designed to store all credit data on encrypted servers because workstations can be compromised if stolen or hacked into, according to Julie Bruber, the president and founder of transaction processing company Bank Credit Services Worldwide. Several states now have laws requiring companies to report data breaches to all of their customers. Companies should only purchase POS or PC products that are security certified as Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP) if they want to accept Visa and Mastercard payments. Software accounting programs from vendors such as Intuit and Cougar Mountain Software eliminate the batch processing of transactions. These programs complete a credit card transaction from within the application itself by connecting to credit processing services. They verify the transaction and create the ledger entry simultaneously, so companies can track performance on a continual basis instead of weekly or monthly reconciliation, according to Cougar Mountain chief operating officer Cary Welsh. His company’s credit card processing software sells for $439 and has the added benefit of being able to process charge backs for returned items. To swipe or not to swipe Companies that accept both phone and in person orders should continue using card readers because of the difference in the discount rate charged (its based on the amount of the purchase, not really per transaction) by credit card companies. Card-swiped transactions are charged at a lower rate because they are seen as less susceptible to fraud. The discount rate can range from less than two percent of the transaction for card-swiped transactions to as high as five percent for keyed-in authorizations. Keying in all transactions instead of using card readers can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month, depending on the volume and amount of transactions. While virtual terminals are often more cost-effective, small business owners must calculate their expected volume versus the upfront hardware cost and monthly service fees to determine the best option.