Unlocking the power of financial data
Last week on 5/24 at the NJ accounting show, we previewed the 2007 version of Office Small business accounting and announced 3 new marquee collaborations with eBay, PayPal and Equifax. Details of the announcement can be found at this link. The innovations in the next release continue to add new value for all our user communities including the small business users, the accounting professionals and the ISV eco system.
I am super excited to take this opportunity to share a few thoughts about the upcoming release and the meta themes behind it. At the end of the day, our goal is very simple. Our innovations must add real value to small businesses in their day to day activities. This is what we set out to do five years ago and continues to be the overarching mission that guides us.
With SBA 2006, we introduced the newest, cleanest, most user friendly financial application in the market. Bar none. It is the attention to detail, the simplicity of deployment and the super ease of use that has already set it apart and helped catalyze a new wave of innovation in the industry. At the same time, we did something that no one else had done before. We very carefully unlocked the power of the financial data for greater insight and efficiency within a small business. Example, the ability of a sales person to issue a proposal with the right product details, to bill time from outlook, to see a 360 view of a customer from within business contact manager, to convert opportunities to invoices or simply drill down into a financial document for a customer they are working with right from within outlook with BCM (of course if they have been granted security access by the owner or the business manager J)
SBA 2007 takes these capabilities to a whole new level. The release has four central themes to it:
1) A key goal for the release was to help the small business take advantage of the power of the internet and marketplaces to sell their products and services to customers anywhere in the world. In order to accomplish this we built a powerful integration to ebay enabling SBA inventory to be syndicated with just a few clicks and for transactions to be seamlessly updated in SBA after an auction. This now enables small businesses to access the 168M buyers and sellers in this huge marketplace and expand beyond their local geography for conducting business. In addition to help small businesses sell outside the physical boundaries of the USA, we added the ability to deal with customers and vendors in multiple currencies yet manage the books and post transactions in US $ (or currency of choice).
2) Another important goal for us is to add another dimension of ease of use for SBA. With that in mind, we are super excited to open up the ability to customize forms, layout and security for the app such that it is even more tailored to the very specific needs of an individual business
3) The team also worked super hard to introduce inventions that would make the small business even more efficient in their daily tasks. We built strong partnerships with two like minded companies PayPal and Equifax to introduce two breakthrough innovations that are already winning rave reviews from those who have used and tested it. With Paypal we are introducing the ability for our users to electronically present and receive payments for invoices and not have to re-enter any transaction data redundantly !. With Equifax we are introducing the ability for our users to subscribe too and have visibility to credit worthiness of their customers and vendors with a lot more precision then ever before and make decisions like payment terms, finance charges etc with this rich insight. A key third area of breakthrough we are introducing as part of this release is even deeper integration of the rich financial data with outlook w/business contact manager that enables a sales or marketing user to access key SBA reports from within outlook and to even create and launch marketing campaigns with the information and insight from SBA.
4) The fourth key pillar of the release is a suite of new features and capabilities that add a whole dimension of value for our accounting professional users. This includes the introduction of a powerful multi client navigator, online sharing of files, new reports, new batch entry journal worksheet and an outsourced payroll offering.
With development on the new release now complete, the team is working round the clock (literally) to fine tune the code and prepare for the general availability in a few months from now. I could not be more excited and proud of the work that has gone into the release and all of us on the team are really gratified at the early reaction from those who are helping us test drive the product in their real life deployments. More on that later….
