Here at Parallels, we love hearing from our incredible users about how Parallels® Desktop for Mac empowers their productivity at work. Business owners deserve to run the software they need on the devices they have. Whether our users are small independent businesses or large enterprise corporations, customer relationship management (CRM) software is a vital tool […]
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Run QuickBooks for Windows on Mac with Parallels Desktop QuickBooks Pro for Windows 10 on Mac with Parallels Desktop Whether you’re a personal finance manager or a small business, you can manage your accounting and financial goals with QuickBook Premium for Windows on your Mac. Mac® devices help businesses solve problems in creative ways. The […]
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With today’s introduction of QuickBooks Online for iPad, small businesses that are mobile by nature will no longer have to save the books for last. Rather, they can get more out of their workdays with an app that helps them work more productively, wherever they are.
“As a wedding planner, I spend 70 percent of my time away from my desk meeting with clients and vendors. At the end of the day, I used to sort through my meeting notes, map out next steps, track payments and expenses, and follow up with invoices,” said Sadie Waddington of Locally Grown Weddings in San Francisco, Calif. “Now, I save time by catching up on accounting during the four hours I commute on public transit each week using QuickBooks Online for iPad. The app also helps keep me more organized and look more professional in front of my clients and vendors.”
Now available in the App Store, QuickBooks Online for iPad brings the world’s No. 1 small business cloud accounting solution to one of the world’s fastest-growing computing devices. It packages the most useful on-the-go business tasks in an easy-to-use, friendly app with a native iPad experience, including integration with the Camera, Contacts, Push Notifications and Location Services.
“Managing a small business is a different game today than it was a few years ago, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets,” said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Financial Management Solutions division. “We found that more than 20 percent of QuickBooks Mobile for iPhone users access the app through iPads. And, customers like Sadie told us they need more than mobile point solutions – they need an all-in-one app that lets them work in a whole new way, and that’s what we created.”
FreshBooks today rolled out Automatic Expense Import which automatically draws expenses in from bank accounts and gives users an easy way to track spending and to see their profit and loss at a glance.
This latest addition to the FreshBooks cloud allows small business owners to connect their financial institutions (including bank accounts and credit cards) directly to FreshBooks and have their expenses imported automatically into their account every day.
“Small business owners want to focus on serving their customers and on doing what they love, not on accounting,” said Mike McDerment, FreshBooks co-founder and CEO. “The ability to automatically import expenses from your bank enables small business owners to effortlessly manage their expenses, which helps them know exactly how much they’re spending and frees up times to work on more important things than paperwork. This is the promise of the cloud – a better way to work.”
Automatic Expense Import includes:
FreshBooks Automatic Expense Import, which has been in use with over 3000 customers since October 2012, is now broadly available in North America with support for more than 9,000 US financial institutions and 61 Canadian financial institutions. Customers outside of the US and Canada can identify which banks they would like supported by completing a form request found on the FreshBooks blog. Going forward, Automatic Expense Import is included with all FreshBooks paid packages, and for a limited time it is also available to existing, free FreshBooks accounts as well.
FreshBooks supports a wide range of service-based small business types: designers, lawyers, marketing and IT professionals, plumbers, interior decorators – any business with 1-10 employees that serves clients with their time and expertise. Whether logging expenses at the coffee shop, on the way from a client meeting or at the airport lounge, FreshBooks Automatic Expense Imports will help small business owners to save even more time managing the money they spend.
As part of FreshBooks shift from online invoicing only to cloud accounting for small businesses, they’ve expanding on their accounting offering with the release of Balance Sheets, a tool at helping businesses prepare to apply for loans, grants, submitting taxes, or seeking investors.
The new Balance Sheet tool allows users to see a summary of assets, liabilities, and equity and easily determine the health of their business.
FreshBooks claims more than 5 million users in 120 countries, and says “No one in North America has more paying users online other than Intuit’s QuickBooks Online. ”
More info on Balance Sheets is available at the FreshBooks Blog.
Finding innovative solutions to problems has always been a hallmark of small and medium businesses keen to differentiate themselves from the pack. Being able to adapt to new ways of working in a modern business environment means looking at emerging technologies such as cloud computing, as well as considering alternative solutions to the traditional working environment such as serviced office spaces. We’ll look at each of these in turn to consider how using both these options work to your advantage in order to maximise the potential of any small business venture.
Cloud Computing
The main advantages of cloud computing for small business users are cost, scalability and flexibility. Gone are the days when it was necessary to purchase and maintain expensive physical infrastructure such as email servers or separate storage systems; cloud computing usually works on a subscription based model and allows your workforce to produce and collaborate on projects no matter where they are based.
Serviced Office Space
An increasingly popular option for small businesses, serviced offices offer all the benefits of more conventional office spaces but with a number of important advantages, chief amongst them being the reduced cost and flexibility that such an arrangement provides.
Fees are usually all-inclusive, saving you the trouble of having to account for additional costs such as building security and office maintenance, whilst giving you access to fully serviced premises. In Scotland, for instance, businesses looking to find Glasgow office space at i2office.co.uk can experience all the advantages such arrangements provide.
Small businesses can only benefit from advances in fields such as cloud computing and flexible working arrangements which allow them to keep costs down whilst providing an excellent service to their customers. Using the two in combination allows users to maximise their profitability at a time when economic circumstances have made it all the more difficult to survive those critical first few years and they are a welcome development for any potential new business.
Marketecture today announced the full platform launch of the Marketecture Business Center 3.0, its turnkey website solution for micro and small businesses, which allows small business owners to establish and grow their business online without having to build their own software or become Internet experts.
Marketecture Business Center 3.0 provides a suite of integrated online business management and marketing tools. The new platform leverages proprietary, scalable software and includes the following features:
“After honing our platform for the past two years, we are thrilled to offer the full integration of the Marketecture Business Center,” said Oliver Bigler, chairman and CEO of Marketecture. “For years, thousands of micro and small businesses have benefited from aspects of our online platform and we pride ourselves in now being able to provide all the essential components needed to thrive on the web. For too long, small business owners have been unfairly offered select solutions by Internet software solution companies marketing their individual app. Marketecture’s all-in-one website solution and business system helps small business owners across the country build, market and grow their online business and adapt to an increasingly Internet-based economy.”
According to a 2011 report by research firm Borrell & Associates, most small and medium business (SMB) owners do not have the time or the expertise necessary to successfully conduct business online; in fact, 46 percent of SMBs in the U.S. have no online presence. Of the SMBs with an online presence, 80 percent are a simple “business card” site without embedded revenue generation. Marketecture addresses both deficiencies in its easy-to-use, all-in-one system, which helps clients build and maintain their website, find and retain customers and generate revenue.
