Microsoft Small Business Applications

After years of intense hard work and dedication, the moment of truth for a software group arrives when the product(s) are finally available to its end users and hit the retail shelves, the OEM manufacturing lines and the reseller community. It really and truly “takes a village” to build and release software. From the first moment of epiphany to the general availability of the product, the journey is intense and fraught with challenges. And it is only worthwhile if the benefits of the labor do in fact translate into real life. Each company and team ensures this in different ways, after all no one wants to build software that wont be used J. At Microsoft, in order to be really sure we were envisioning and building the right product for our beloved small businesses, we worked closely with representatives of real businesses from day 1. The R&D effort was guided by a strong contingent of end users, CPAs and ISVs. Hundreds of meetings, emails and discussions took place with the representatives of our user base during the development of the product. At every step, we tested the features being built, the ease of use of the software, the simplicity in setting up the program, ease of modifying preferences, accuracy in migrating data and down to specifics like terminology, colors, placement of fields etc etc. As the first full build of the product set became available in the spring of 2004, we decided to invite in an additional 30 accounting professional partners, doubling the size of our advisory councils. Just a few days before Memorial Day 2004, we gave each of our advisory council members our first cut of the software and asked them to take it with them and test it in the real world environment by using it in parallel with their current software. For the next several months as we worked on the fit and finish of the software, our partners were test driving SBA, BCM, our payroll solution, our credit processing module and the supplies ordering system. I looked forward to the weekly debriefs on comments we were receiving and kept a running count of the number of transactions we had run thru our “engine” J. It was only in early fall and after our advisory council and internal test team had run over 250,000 real world transactions thru our software did we as a team begin to feel comfortable with our design and implementation. The over 1 million lines of code that had begun with that white board and a small conference room was finally getting to a point where we could begin the final glide path to shipping. On May 16^th, 2005 we finally cut the gold discs and sent them over to building 123 where the kits are prepared for manufacturing and our OEM partners. Even though BCM had been released as a standalone version back in 2003, we had now finally put our initial vision in place with a full product suite encompassing front office, back office and services solution. Over the next few weeks the product reviews began to pour in from analysts, industry experts, our broader ISV channel, CPAs and most importantly our end customers. Waiting for these reviews and comments after all the hard work is quite an experience and one that I may talk about at a later stage in more length. Suffice to say, all of us on the team can relate to perhaps an author of a book or the crew of a film and how they might feel when their work is ready to be reviewed by the world at large J. Wherever art and science come together, it is the interpretation of the work that makes the difference. In the words of Albert Szent Gyorgi, a noble prize winning laureate, “discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else…….but thinking something different !”

Here is a broad sampling of comments on the product:

The Reviews :

Microsoft's New Accounting App Takes on QuickBooks

PCWorld.com (September 7, 2005): "Office SBA is Microsoft's best effort to date to meet the accounting needs of small businesses, using easy-to-understand flowcharts that guide non-accountants in its use."

Microsoft Plays Numbers Game

Small Business Computing (September 7, 2005): "It's rare for a debut program to offer a competitive alternative to programs that have evolved for years. But Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006 is a viable package that can support the needs of small businesses."

Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006

PC Magazine (September 8, 2005): "The company has produced a small-business accounting package that holds its own against the long-established rival products available. Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting 2006 will serve many small businesses well, especially in view of its tight integration with Microsoft Office."

Microsoft's Office SBA Takes Myriad Applications Into Account

CRN (September 16, 2005): "SBA is a complete accounting application designed to work closely with Office tools for inter-application workflow scenarios... It has a clean interface, a clear process flowchart, many wizards and myriad highly customizable features."

Microsoft Wants You: The Software Giant takes on Intuit—Again

BusinessWeek Online (subscription required) (September 19, 2005): "But you can also open up the books—selectively, of course—to the rest of the staff if you're running the contact manager version of Outlook 2003 with SBA. That's something you can't do with QuickBooks."

The Small Business Users weigh in:

“With our integrated financial and customer information, we can now make more efficient marketing decisions. For example, we used Small Business Accounting recently to identify our very best customers. We created gift certificates for those customers, and within a week of sending them out we garnered U.S.$25,000 in new business.“

-           Konrad & Phyllis Haskins, Co-Founders

Teddy Bears BBQ (Retail)

Monroe, WA

“Instead of staying at the store until 8:00 or 9:00 at night, I can leave at 6:00. Compared to the amount of time I spent on QuickBooks, I’m working much more productively. “

-           Chris  Schatte, Co-Owner

Texoma Home & Garden (Retail)

Vernon, TX

 “I estimate that Small Business Accounting 2006 has helped us increase our administrative efficiency by 15 percent. This helps us to handle more sales in less time.”

-           Richard  Jarvis, CEO

U.S. Export Store (Import/export)

Framingham, MA

“Starting up my practice didn’t leave a lot of time to learn new software. Compared to Peachtree, which took a couple of weeks, with Small Business Accounting 2006, I was up and running in a couple of days.”

-           Jack  Chen, Owner

      Impressions Dentistry (Healthcare)

      Renton, WA

“With Microsoft Office Small Business Management Edition 2006... I can focus my time and attention on working with partners and expanding the business, and not on trying to make the software work.”

-            Rob  Gorski, CEO

JBG General Contractors (Construction)

Canton, OH

“Small Business Accounting makes our lives a lot easier, and it has really cut back on the number of hours we have to spend on accounting tasks.  I used to spend 10 to 15 hours a week working with my assistant on these tasks. But now she can get it all done herself.”

-           Danah Trammel, Executive Director

Agape CDC (Non-Profit)

Winder, GA

“Automating payroll is a huge timesaver and benefit for me. Small Business Accounting 2006 saves me several hours every two-week pay period, equating to four or five hundred dollars of my time. I can focus more on my business and less on worrying about getting the numbers right for the IRS.”

-           David Kaplan, CEO

Online Video Editing (Publishing)

Jupiter, FL

“The Company Home Page is a giant leap forward for me. It shows everything I need at a glance, with bar charts and graphs. I couldn’t get close to that much information before without wasting a lot of my staff’s time.”

-           Noel Hanson, Owner

Hanson & Company (Consulting)

Pasadena, CA

“I’m a traditional accountant that works with debits and credits in the traditional way. Using its double entry features, Small Business Accounting 2006 provides me with more control than I had with QuickBooks.”

-          Mae Farrow, Office Mgr

Ironwood Self-Storage (Retail)

Idaho Falls, ID

“It’s the same Microsoft Office interface I am used to, and it’s just one interface that I am dealing with, instead of two - Microsoft Office and QuickBooks. This easily saves 20 percent of the time I spend on administrative and management tasks..”

-          Stefano Colasanti, CEO

IID Corp. (Import/export)

Miami, FL

The ISVs comment :

“We have taken apart most major accounting software to do integration with, and this is the most exciting software that has been created in the past five years.”

—      Dan Banning

Marketing Manager

WinEstimator Inc.