Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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While Business Contact Manager must be installed with a full copy of certain versions of Office 2007, Office Accounting Express can be installed as a free standing version and downloaded independently. Better yet, the Express version is free for the time being..

With Office Accounting Express you can organize all your customer, vendor, employee, and financial information in one place and use over 20 customizable reports. The reports can then be imported into Excel for more complete analysis, including the use of conditional formats.

You can also share your books with your accountant through Office Live or by using the accountant export wizard in the program.

The idea is that you can intuitively manage your finances by leveraging other Office programs — import data from Excel and other financial programs like Quicken, and generate quotes and invoices in Office programs like Word, seamlessly email the files using Outlook.

Like other online accounting programs like Quicken, you can connect to a business or personal bank account and reconcile your statements automatically. You can even generate your checks and send them electronically.

Payroll management is also included in the Express package in what is called a Payroll Center, although this involves a paid subscription to ADP Payroll Services.

A very cool feature for those professionals who bill by the hour is the ability to combine Accounting Express with Business Contact Manager to establish a rate of payment for a particular customer, and then catalog your billable hours through Outlook’s appointment and calendar system.

When you begin the program you can import data, start a new company, or get an idea about the program with a sample company.

Figure 1241

The main interface seems complex but chances are, so is your business. In the center is a task oriented menu that lets you generate a quite or invoice, issue credits and refunds, write letters (in Word), receive and process payments and cash sales.

Figure 1242

You can easily add a customer in the program under More Tasks. While BCM is oriented toward information Accounting Express includes tabs for financial summary, financial history and a user defined area.

While BCM handles your customer service needs in terms of communications, Accounting Express deals with the money.

Figure 1243

The customer database in Accounting Express tracks financial as well as personal information. It gives you a single interface where you can quickly see who is paying the bills, how much they owe, and how to get in touch with them.

Figure 1244

Besides people like customers, vendors or employees, the express package also lets you track Items like inventory, non inventory and service costs.

This can make it a very handy financial addition to the projects you plan in Business Contact Manager and also keep tabs on the costs of the projects and marketing campaigns.

Figure 1245

A very cool features of Accounting Express is the ability to generate pre set and customized reports, and more important, to export them directly to Excel where they can be analyzed more comprehensively and you can use features like conditional formatting and charts.

Figure 1246

Besides ADP for payroll, the program can also facilitate setting up a credit card payment processing service. You may like the convenience of these added services, but it’s probably why the program is free. At the same time, you will need to disable a welcome screen which tries to induce you to upgrade to the more robust professional version.

Nonetheless, the free version seems very feature rich for those who have not implemented an electronic accounting system or are starting a new small business.

If you’re a Quicken user, you know about the nice feature of generating instant reports for different situations and date ranges. This program has a similar feature and you can generate any number of reports instantly, as stated above, and send them to Excel.

In terms of integration, you need to set up a new company to combine the accounting program with Business Contact Manager. Each program creates and manages its own database.

While you would hope that one program would be able to connect to the other’s database, I didn’t see that as an option — instead there are utilities that let you import information from one to the other; for example, a comma delimited file of customers from the Business Contact database can be reused in the Accounting Express package by importing it.

So really you are managing two separate processes: in Business Contact Manager you are trying to manage sales processes mainly by tracking and following up leads and appointments and closing sales.

Then the financial aspects of those transactions can be managed in the accounting package. If you are also running an online business with Office Live and selling goods or services through it, those transactions and the people they involve (customers and vendor) can be downloaded and managed in Office Accounting Express as well.

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