Continue the QuickBooks Installation

I've managed to get a hold of an administrator account to allow me to install QuickBooks on my laptop.

Now it says something about the installation being interrupted before. Perhaps I need to download the whole thing again.

Ok I'm download the 550MB file again and hoping for the best. Only have to copy and paste that long license key into 5 boxes again and I am set to go!

It's all beautifully installed and in my start menu.

Importing your WestPac online banking feeds is now made easy with Nominal Accounting.

Nominal Accounting is a business accounting software that is used by thousands of Australian micro businesses and offer features that will save you time and earn you money. One of the latest feature we added is the ability to connect to your Westpac online banking account using your Nominal accounting software and reconcile your banking records with your Nominal records.

Westpac is one of the biggest banks in Australian and many Australian businesses use online banking with Westpac. Nominal now allows you to easily and securily reconcile you Westpac online banking with your bookkeeping software.

As part of our market research we tend to review what our competitors are doing well and more importantly how our customers can value from our increased learning on what they like and don’t like.

So I wanted to spend a little time (hopefully it is not going to turn into a day's worth of work) and download and try the small business accounting packages for both MYOB and QuickBooks.

I thought it will be a nice touch to share with you this little experiments and the finding on comparing MYOB and QuickBooks.

Online banking feeds are here to help!

One of ths most important tasks in keeping your books correctly and up to date is bank account reconcilation. The main purpose being to make sure that all your bank account (real) transactions have been recorded and accounted for within your business records.

• Online sharing - the ability to share and open an online company data file. This makes sharing your files with your accountant or working from multiple locations much easier.

• Top view dashboard - this unique dashboard allows you to view the health of your business at at glance. Including sales, purchases, accounts, contacts, KPIs, reports and more.

• More bank feeds - Nominal now support online bank feeds with the following banks:  ANZ * BankWest * CBA * NAB * St George * WestPac

• Simpler bank reconciliation - generating invoices, purchases, spend, receive and transfer transactions from your bank records has never been easier. Simply select one or more of the records and Nominal will suggest the right details according to your previous decisions.

• Google Docs - you're now able to save and share your invoices using Google docs

• EBay Orders - In addition to our existing PayPal integration we now support (beta) the synchronisation with your EBay records to generate invoices and purchases.

Thanks,

Uri

Good morning,

I would love to hear from anyone running a business on EBay about the experience and preferences with managing their EBay books.

Do you use any software or excel to record sales? do you make sales and purchases/expenses on ebay? How do you handle the different costs of shipping, handling, insurance, savings etc?

EBay record have breaks it down to:
AmountPaid,Subtotal,Total,Shipping cost,Intl shipping cost,Actual handling,Actual shipping,AdjustmentAmount ,AmountSaved

Would you generate invoices for the sale and expense for the fees for each record?

Does it even makes sense to integrate to EBay itself when you can get all of the details from the PayPal integration?

I will probably take the advice of the "lean startup" and build an MVP and see if anyone actually needs it :-)

Thanks for your help!
Uri

Hi,

Lately we've started to spend some efforts in providing more integrations with online stores/shopping carts solution to simplify (our moto!) the bookkeeping tasks of small businesses online.

We already have a good integration in place for Pay-Pal (cards, items and transactions) and releasing one for Magento this week (cards,items)

I was hopping to get some feedback on the kind of integration that you think we be usefull and the kind of shopping carts/software you're using.

Looking at the VirtueMart earlier this week in response to another post, I am still searching for creative ways to create a simple integration.

During the past few months I've started a blog/newsletter where I try to go over some of the basic bookkeeping concepts and their impact on your accounts.

Things like chart of accounts, expenses, invoices, billing for time etc.
It's really a basic explanation of the most basic things that are required by a business owner to 'do their books' - nothing about taxataion etc

We currently send one email a week to our subscriber list.

I am looking for contributor writers, if you're an accountant, bookkeeper or a business owner with something to say about 'simple bookkeeping for small businesses' I would really love to hear from you.

There are some benefits for this arrangement:
1) Our readers will benefit from your knowledge and point of view
2) Our company will benefit from the relationship with our readers
3) You will have your name in front of highly relevant audience

Would love to hear your comments or receive your posts .
http://www.nominal.com.au/blog

(at keeping their books)


I'm contemplating this new line. It was usually something like: "we make bookkeeping simple"

What do you think?

And while I'm here (as if there's a day when I am not :-) ), I am thinking lately about segmentation and positioning and trying to come up with the best market segments to try and tackle first.

So something like accounting software for 'IT and Web professionals' or 'Marketing and business consultants' etc

I actually analysed the flying solo directory for some data and found:
Category Share %
--------------------
*Coaching, Consulting & Mentoring 9.23%
*Web Services 8.56%
*Advertising & Marketing 5.68%
*Health & Wellbeing 5.66%
*Technology 4.70%
*Other 4.34%
*Design & Illustration 4.26%
*Finance & Insurance (-accountants) 3.95%
*Beauty & Fashion 3.87%
*Office support & Administration 3.55%

Which group(s) would you think be an ideal candidate for a market segment?
The goal is to be the BEST alternative for this market. So actually dedicate resources and commit to perfecting the product to benefit the target market in a way that will make it easier to buy from us.

A good group would need to be easy to communicate to, share information with each other, have some common problems etc

What do you think #2 ?

must be good enough for me :-)

I'm going through yet another marketing book at the moment:
"Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind" by Al Ries

And in my typical way I jump to conclusions and try to implement after reading only the first half of the book :-)

The book talks about finding the niche in the mind of the customer not in the product or in the factory and about simplifying the message to try and make lasting impact. (and some other things in the 2nd part of the book, LOL)

Anyway one of well known examples is Avis, who where trying to compete with Hertz without much success, until they started positioning themselves in 2nd place - 'we try harder' which made all the difference for them.

So this week our company climbed to the 3rd place and I thought we should try to use the same principle. Here is an example:




It's only missing one piece of information... what do you think?

You can read about it as well as more on positioning attempts here http://blog.nominal.com.au

I don't like our current logo so much, not sure why, it just doesn't mean anything to me.

I want a logo that says, this company/product is simple and it relates to me as a small business owner in some way.

Before learning here that crowd sourcing is evil, I went on choosa.net and asked for design ideas. I've received so many and narrowed it down a bit.

Being the community oriented person that I am, I would love to get some feedback on which one I should go with. And being the nerd that I am, I've wired a little A/B testing to count the results.

So if you have 2 or 3 seconds to spare, I would love it if you go to http://blog.nominal.com.auand click the logo you like. If you have even more spare time on your busy day you're welcome to comment here.

(unless you want to say that I am evil design crowed source'r)

I've been struggling with finding our unique selling proposition and although I know that our product is better than the competition, I also know it doesn't mean a thing as long as it doesn't own a position.

And where do you find this position? by talking to your customers of course, after all the position and the brand lives in the mind of the customer and not in your marketing materials.

So thanks to lots of digging I think we got it:
* Nominal is the ONLY micro business management software
* It is built for Micro Australian businesses
* Assists with your quotes, sales and invoicing
* Purchases and paying bills
* Business expenses and income
* Payroll, leave, super and payslips
* Manage your government obligations (TFN/BAS/PAYG) using SBR
* Time sheets and time billing for services and others
* Business dashboard including KPI, reports and charts.
* Double entry bookkeeping system to keep track of GST,PAYG etc
* Integrate to your online sources: Salesforce, Highrise, SugarCRM, PayPal, Magento, ZenCart, Freshbooks, Harvest, VirtueMart and more coming up.

Now we have a position and are ready to build a brand.
We even have a new logo that YOU helped us select, It feels great!


I'm adding the photo below, just in case anyone is less familiar with latin, LOL :-)
(Wasn't is strange that the guy from Masterchef never heard of William tell?)

Continuing the thread about advertising I was wondering if anyone can provide details on the benefits of 'outsourcing' your Google ads management.

I've received a quote for building a landing page, creating the ads account and monthly fee and am a bit skeptic as to the added value.

On the other hand doing it yourself tends to mean - not doing it at all :-)

This forum has been great with me during the last couple of years and it is kind of a community within the community.

This is why I fell it is the best place to try this out:

The first ever Flying Solo advertising competition, where we you can pitch your best ideas as copywriter, marketing guru, sales master or a well informed community member.

We talk about marketing day in and day out but can you really create the best ad?

The plan is to try and find the best advertising idea for this ad.

We will select the best 3 ideas from this thread and put them to the test. Click like on the ones that you LIKE.

The task is simple we need the copy for a text ad and the winning ad is the one that gets the most clicks from readers.

The price is still to be determined but will be of value of $200

I would really love to get some feedback on that and would love if the lovely forum moderator can help with spreadin the word :-)

I will add the specific details for the ad length.

What do you say?