Nathan Brixius : Office Accounting

Updates for Office Accounting 2007

Nathan Brixius — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 03:47:00 GMT

It's been out there for a few weeks, but I just wanted to mention that we've updated the Marketplace and Payment Services for Office Accounting 2007. If you have a copy of Office Accounting 2007 you don't need to download or install anything to get the updates - that's the magic of services. There are several key improvements in the Marketplace Services to make it easier to efficiently crank out nice looking eBay listings. In particular we've added:

An HTML editor for the item description field
Better listing templates (i.e. we've addressed much of what I talked about here)
The ability to save unsubmitted listings
A view of newly added items at the end of the listing wizard
Better sorting on the Manage Online Sales page
Updated help content
“Powered by Office Accounting” logo

In the next few postings I'll dig into some of these in more detail. It's only been a couple of months but we have already addressed many of the limitations that I pointed out in this posting.

1M Office Accounting Express downloads

Nathan Brixius — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 21:07:00 GMT

One million downloads of Office Accounting Express 2007 in just a few short months. That’s pretty amazing. Listen - there are pros and cons of working anywhere, but it's a unique privilege to write code that reaches such a large community. We're working hard on more updates to the payment and marketplace services; you should see the fruits of our labor soon.

Office Accounting Customer Visit

Nathan Brixius — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 01:53:00 GMT

Before the holidays, everyone on our team visited with various small business owners in the Redmond area in an effort to learn more about how their businesses work, and how Microsoft products help (or hinder!) them. This was the first time I was directly involved in one of these visits. Chris and I met with Ivan Perez at Eastside Executive Transportation. One thing that struck me was how Ivan structured his business in order to focus on his strengths - interacting with customers, handling logistics, delivering personalized service. Technology is usually more helpful you are intentional about how to apply it, and Ivan definitely knows what he wants out of his tools. Ivan had a Windows Mobile device that he seemed to be able to run most of his business off of. While we were talking with Ivan I got a chance to see this happen, and it was fun to watch.

One thing that Ivan mentioned to us was that "simplicity comes from user customization." Customization allows people to use technology to solve problems in ways that make the most sense to them. As Chris put it, "think of what it means if customization is a core tenet of the product instead of just a partially implemented feature." One quick example: as much as many project managers have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft Project, the VBA programming ability on the client and the PDS (now PSI) framework on the server are two big reasons why Project is so widely used. However, customizability is so deeply woven into the fabric of Excel that I think Project users sometimes turn to Excel even when Project could have done the job.

Previewing eBay listings in Office Accounting 2007

Nathan Brixius — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 21:57:00 GMT

We recently deployed our SR1 release of the Marketplace and Payment Services for Office Accounting 2007. The team did a fantastic job getting it out there, especially considering that we didn't have power for most of the weekend! Based on some of the feedback we were getting from the message boards, we added the ability to preview eBay listings in the listing wizard. As I mentioned in a previous posting, there are several ways to customize the look of your eBay listings so it's nice to see what the listing is going to look like before the it actually appears on eBay.

The purpose of the preview is to give a good idea of how the listing will look on eBay.com. EBay does not support “preview listing” functionality ~~through eBay.com~~ or through the SOAP API, see http://dev-forums.ebay.com/thread.jspa?threadID=500002523. As a result we implement the preview page without eBay's help, meaning that it is effectively impossible for the preview to look exactly the same as the actual listing. Also, the eBay SOAP API does not provide support for rendering certain types of listing information (for example, item specifics) in the form that it appears on eBay.com, so we have to omit that information in the preview. But the preview does a pretty good job of letting you see what the listing will look like.

You can preview any listing by clicking on the Preview link in the listing wizard grid, here's a picture. The listing doesn't need to be ready to list in order to preview. Like I said, we can't render the item specifics (such as the publication year for a book) so we stick in a placeholder if your item has item specifics.
The preview displays in a separate window (photo).
Here's what the listing looks like on eBay (photo).

(Updated 1/12/2007: actually eBay.com does support a preview. The SOAP API does not.)

Office Accounting on the front page of CNN.com

Nathan Brixius — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 22:39:00 GMT

I'm just as shocked as you are:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/11/29/microsoft.contest.reut/index.html

This is quite a coup for the Office Accounting marketing team. I haven't watched too many episodes of the Apprentice but it looks like Carolyn got a makeover. One of the other judges is Chris Capossela, who ran the Project team when I was there. He's a good guy so I don't see him playing the Simon Cowell role. I'd congratulate him on hitting the big time, but they misspelled his name in the article!

Note to CNN: Last name is Brixius, B-R-I-X-I-U-S.

Customizing the look of eBay listings

Nathan Brixius — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:24:00 GMT

There are several ways to customize the visual style of eBay listings created with Office Accounting 2007. Let's start with images:

Product Images

You can add up to six images to your listing. Clicking on the Add link under a product image brings up a dialog that lets you upload and insert images. You can upload images from your computer or you can simply select any of your previously uploaded images. (You can also add images by selecting Online Sales -> Manage Online Sales and clicking on the Pictures tab. Here you can rename images, remove images, and organize images into folders. Managing images using folders is very useful if you have lots of images, or if you often list the same items.) The first image you select is used as the primary image for the eBay listing. The other images will be displayed at the bottom of the "Description" section. Ebay normally charges the seller for additional product images, but since we host your images on our servers you can supply additional images without running into extra charges.

Item Description

It's not obvious, but the "Item description" field does accept HTML. This opens up many possibilities for customization. The "Item description" field is essentially the same as the "Enter your own HTML" tab in the Item Description section of eBay's "Sell Your Item" page. The same rules that eBay enforces about item description HTML are enforced by the Office Accounting listing wizard. If you try to insert HTML that eBay doesn't like we'll warn you about it.

Upgrades

The listing wizard supports a number of the standard eBay upgrade options. Note that upgrades often incur additional eBay fees.

Limitations

Ebay has a "listing designer" section on its "Sell Your Item" page that lets you choose a visual theme and layout. The OA listing wizard does not support this; it uses the standard layout and does not use a theme. Ebay.com also lets you create HTML snippets ("inserts") that can be dropped into a listing; snippets are not currently supported. Even so, by using product images, HTML in the description, and upgrades it's not too hard to create professional looking listings using Office Accounting 2007.

Why you can't list your Porsche using Office Accounting 2007

Nathan Brixius — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:02:00 GMT

A customer asked why eBay Motors item categories are not displayed on the listing details page. It's not a limitation of the Express SKU! The reason why we don't include eBay Motors categories is that we currently support listing to the main eBay site only. In the US, eBay considers eBay Motors to be a separate site and therefore does not include eBay Motors categories along with the standard item categories.

This article on the eBay site describes the issue in more detail. (URL updated on 6/20/2007.)

Prepopulating eBay listing information

Nathan Brixius — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:16:00 GMT

In this posting, Isaias wrote about listing items to eBay from Office Accounting 2007. I want to dig a little deeper into the listing process because I've noticed there have been questions about it on some of the eBay forums. Just to summarize, the basic flow for listing items to eBay is:

Signup using Online Sales -> Set Up To Sell Online.
Create the items you want to list.
Run the listing wizard: Online Sales -> List Items To Marketplace.
Pick the items you want to list.
Edit the eBay listing information by providing categories, payment methods, shipping options, etc.
List the items.
Online Sales -> Manage Online Sales.
View the status of your eBay listings.

One obvious benefit of using Office Accounting to list to online marketplaces is that all of the tracking associated with listing and selling the item happens in one place, but another is how OA streamlines the process of listing items to eBay.

One way we do this is by using data from past listings to prepopulate new listings. If you relist the same product, the listing wizard will copy all data from the previous listing into the new listing. This means that in many cases you can skip step 5 and just list the item with a couple of clicks (three clicks to be exact; that hasn't been patented yet). If you are listing a different product, the listing wizard copies over many of the properties from your last listing in order to help you along. We don't copy over everything because some fields (such as costs) are not likely to apply to different products.

Here are the fields that the listing wizard prepopulates, assuming you have already listed an item to eBay:

Item location
Ship-to locations
Sales tax (all fields)
Shipping methods

Shipping type
Shipping methods (but not costs)

Payment methods

These fields are not prepopulated:

Shipping insurance
Listing upgrades
Other listing details (like price, quantity, description, etc)

We've tried to design the listing wizard so that the amount of manual data entry is kept to a minimum. If you have other ideas for improving the experience, I'd love to hear about them.

Office Accounting blogs and resources

Nathan Brixius — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 23:21:00 GMT

You can download a free copy of Office Accounting Express by visiting the ideawins site. I noticed we whittled down the download size to 208 MB -- it used to be 300+ MB. I'd be interested to find out how we got rid of 100MB (and what it was)!

Our team has been working on the online services portion of the product which allows small businesses to list their items to online marketplaces like eBay, handle orders from online marketplaces, and process payments. Rajat Taneja writes about the release in this blog posting. Isaias from the Office Accounting team has written a detailed entry about listing items to eBay (which I worked on). I'll have more to say about listing to eBay in the days ahead. Also:

Satya is our VP and has been posting about Office Accounting recently.
Andrew is across the hall from me -- we worked on several features together.
Martha Arellano is a developer on the Office Accounting team.
We've had close contact with the Office Live team, here's their blog.

Office Accounting Early Reviews

Nathan Brixius — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 23:08:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been working on online services for Office Accounting. It's the end of week 1 and I've been eagerly keeping tabs on what people have been saying. A nice thing about working on a services team is that the feedback comes back fast and furious. (But if something goes wrong, you'd better be prepared to fix it ASAP...none of this 'wait till next year' stuff.) Over on this SBA blog there's a nice list of some of the early reviews and articles. Here are a few more, with my favorite quotes:

· Microsoft Accounting Takes the Free Way, Mixes in Service

"It's an important announcement," Joe Wilcox [a senior analyst with Jupiter Research] said. "Microsoft is doing with software what other companies are doing with Web 2.0."

· Microsoft Mixes in eBay With Its Accounting Software

This type of integration promises to both save time (especially if you're a Power Seller offering hundreds of products) and reduce the risk of error from manually entering eBay results into your accounting system. For multiple channel businesses, this level of integration holds great promise.

· CNET Review

If you're new to accounting software in general, then the free Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 is worth a try--and it's a better pick over a QuickBooks app if you're an eBay power seller who moves a lot of merchandise via the online auction giant.

· Tammy Lenski

When I saw that Microsoft has released a free business accounting software package, I was sure I must be mistaken. Then I visited the download page and found both music and a sort of Web 2.0 look. I realized I was seeing Microsoft starting to reinvent itself before my very eyes. I guess a little healthy competition with Google is yielding some good outcomes for all of us.

· Review: Microsoft's New Office Powerhouse: Office Accounting 2007

· Microsoft releasing updated accounting software

· Entrepreneur.com blog posting

· Digg posting