Microsoft Small Business Applications : office accounting

Office for Small Business

Rajat Taneja — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 02:28:00 GMT

There are some very detailed and thoughtful reviews just getting published covering the use of Office Accounting, Business Contact Manager and the rest of the Office suite for small businesses. Here is a sampling of these write ups:

http://www.crn.com/software/203103087

http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/news/article.php/3711386

http://www.smallbiztechnology.com/avantgo/2007/11/are-software-software-as-service-power.shtml

http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=175535&d=1025&h=1023&f=1026&dateformat=%25o%20%25B%20%25Y

http://www.laopinion.com/negocios/?rkey=00000000000002662210

And the winner is ......

Rajat Taneja — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:36:00 GMT

This morning at 9:30 AM, live on NBC's TodayShow, we announced the winner of the ideawins.com ultimate challenge. The four finalists along with the three judges appeared with Al Roker in a really great segment highlighting the contest. It was a real fun experience for me to interact with the finalists who represent the best spirit of entrepreneuism, passion and creativity. The four made it to the final short list out of nearly 5,000 entries and are all winners just for getting this far. On behalf of Microsoft and the Office Accounting R&D and marketing teams we extend our best wishes and heartiest congratulations to the grand prize winner ..... THE MAYHEM POETS led by Kyle Sutton and the second prize winner Given Campbell and her business idea CUSTOM DESIGNED WALLPAPER. We look forward to following their business adventures and the exiciting journey that is about to begin. We hope our small business software and services suite will make life a little easier and allow them to focus on their idea and bringing that to life.

One MILLION downloads of Office Accounting Express in 90 days !

Rajat Taneja — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:02:00 GMT

On Oct 30^th, 2006 we released Office Accounting Express 2007 on http://www.ideawins.com/ as a direct and free download from Microsoft. Our dream was to help millions of small and home based businesses move from excel, word and paper to a powerful and modern business software + service suite. We are delighted that in just the first 3 months since our launch, there have been over 1 million downloads of Office Accounting Express. The momentum continues and has accelerated since the general availability of Office Accounting Professional which along with the express product are available in nearly 7,000 retail and online outlets across the USA. We are also thrilled to see the 8 internet web services that we put so much effort to design and develop within the software are helping our customers take advantage and benefit from the power of the web.

We hope that with the availability of both Outlook with Business Contact Manager 2007 and Dynamics Point of Sale V2.0, our customers can further simplify and run their entire business from end to end on a single easy to use suite. Now all processes across the front and back office of a small business can work as one, with all relevant information available to anyone who needs it and in the form they want to use it in.

IdeaWins RV tour is off and running !

Rajat Taneja — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 03:01:00 GMT

We had incredible fun today launching the Ultimate Challenge bus tour from Manhattan, NY. The launch of the tour kicked off at Hello Deli and was hosted by one of the most famous small business owners in America – Rupert Jee who many of us have come to know and admire via his frequent appearances on the late show with David Letterman. Rupert gave a heartfelt speech about ideas and the spirit of entrepreneurism. He is a big fan of Microsoft software and was extremely gracious and hospitable as he interacted with the vast numbers of budding entrepreneurs who had lined up to submit ideas in person. We were also honored that Carolyn Kepcher who was a judge on the NBC show Apprentice and Liz Lang a successful business woman with her own line of maternity clothing at Target, joined Chris Capossela, Vice President Office Marketing as co judges. What a fantastic team of judges !. I also want to express my gratitude to Rob Walsh, Commissioner of Small Business for the state of NY who attended the event to support all the small businesses who have ideas and want to start their own enterprise. But most importantly, on behalf of the entire Microsoft small business R&D and marketing team, I want to thank all the small business entrepreneurs who came in to meet us and submit their ideas in person. Everything we do is all about them and we are overwhelmed by the positive response to the launch Office Accounting 2007 and the ideawins campaign.

Ideas have been pouring in at www.ideawins.com and we continue to be inspired by the passion and spirit of the small business entrepreneurs.

Launching Office Accounting 2007 with SEVEN web services !!

Rajat Taneja — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 21:38:00 GMT

Its an exciting day !. We just released our second generation financial software designed for small businesses. We also just announced that the software will now be available in two flavors:

Office Accounting Express 2007
Office Accounting Professional 2007

The express version has been built for small home based and early start up companies and is incredibly easy to use and set up. Professional which is the successor to Office Small Business Accounting 2006 is geared to more established small businesses and their needs. Express includes all the basic financial features like invoicing, payments, accounts receivables, accounts payables and several powerful reports. Professional includes everything that express has and additionally has features like inventory management, multi currency, multi user access, jobs, budgeting, dashboard and a larger suite of reports.

Both express and professional include seven integrated web services to help our customers take advantage and benefit from the power of the internet. The seven services are:

Ability to automatically sell items on ebay and process and fulfill transactions in the accounting software
Ability to electronically invoice customers and receive payments online via paypal
Ability to monitor the credit history of their customers and vendors all within the accounting application
Ability to send books and collaborate with their CPAs via online integration to a hosted web site from OfficeLive
Ability to process payroll and taxes via integrated service from ADP
Ability to open and enable online merchant accounts
Conduct online banking from within the software

The services range in price from 4.95 upwards depending on the specific package being subscribed too. There is no charge for the online banking service and upto 1000 listing/downloads per year from ebay are free.

Office Accounting Express 2007 will be free and can be downloaded immediately from http://www.ideawins.com/.

Office Accounting Professional 2007 will have a list price of $149 and will be available in retail and other channels early next year. In the interim users can upgrade and try the professional version from within express for four months on a trial basis.

Upgrading from express to professional is a snap. Users can simply purchase a product key and enter it in express to open up the professional features. It takes less then 5 minutes and there is no additional install or download. The user experience is the same. The data storage is the same. And all services remain the same. The new features just add on to express.

Each feature and each line of code that we wrote was based on the value it would add to our customers and the benefits it would provide. We are super energized to release this labor of love to our customers and hope that it helps businesses who are starting up, using paper, excel or word to run their operations or simply struggling with harnessing the power of the internet really benefit from these innovations.

There are no strings attached. We hope you will download and try the software and services from www.ideawins.com.