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In spite of people like us, whom look to provide a web based accounting product easier to use and simplifying many processes, at the end of the day the responsibility of the bookkeeping for your small business still relies on YOU.

That’s right. It’s amazing that in this business, we find that there are some businesses out there that still manage to go all year without entering a single entry until the end of the fiscal year where then there’s a mad scramble to fill in whatever entries there were for the entire year. Call us crazy, but that’s just nuts.

So with the New Year, perhaps one of your new resolutions for this fiscal year is to:

• Schedule out a set time slot every month to manage your books.
• Hold that schedule unless there isn’t any accounting to be done.

It sounds strange, but no matter how boring it sounds, or how difficult it may be to put in a few hours in the middle or at the end of the month, you’ll thank us later. Because nothing drives a person mad than trying to figure out whether or not the receipt from last January was part of a project expense or just a petty cash purchase.

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In an effort to create more transparent support, and to just make it easier to answer questions about Merchant’s Mirror, we’ve decided to use Get Satisfaction as our support area. Get Satisfaction puts all of your support needs in an area where the power of the community weighs in. And since there are things coming down the pipeline that have to deal with community… (we won’t get into it here today although we can already here the half-hearted and playful boos), we decided that this was a good shift for us.

When you get right down to it, all small business is people powered, community driven, and the web 2.0 era has re-proven that fact. This allows both the corporate side to show that they’re listening, and not have to be repetitive with question answering which helps users find what they need, (maybe throw in some praise), and move on. The worst that can happen is when we hear about how some business shelled out hundreds if not thousands of dollars on accounting software to find that the company behind it never replies to emails or phone calls.

So if you have questions, comments, or whatever, just head over there and find out what you want to know. If you want to keep it private? There’s a place for that too.

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I have to say that one of the worst things you can do to your company is to not use your own product.

When you’re using it (the product) in-house, there are many things that you encounter as a user that perhaps your own clients have not had a chance to yet use, or was not caught through usability testing. In fact, one of the keys to great interface design is using the product within your company.

With Merchant’s Mirror, we fill a specific need within our own organization by using it since there are things that we’ll be the first to admit… annoy us. And thus, we strive to change the way it functions for the better of our clients. You could almost say that we are our own client so if there are any complaints, we know exactly whose door to knock on and where to rant.

It’s part of the reasons for the minor upgrades that have dotted the development roadmap recently. When it comes to web based accounting, or any other software as a service product, you can never go wrong using it since if it bugs you, it’ll definitely bug someone else.

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Interestingly enough, there are a few things that you can do to build trust in your small business. One is a time factor. The longer you’ve been around, means that you will probably be around in the future to support your product. This is one of the keys to getting a new product line out there for the world to use. But if you don’t have that? What do you do?

You network. Network, network, network.

As a small business, there are many events you can participate in, and all sorts of groups to participate in. I personally would recommend you take a look at Business Networking International (BNI). There are local chapters internationally and they allow you to not only sell your product to the group, but have the group help sell your product. It’s not for everyone, although I believe that the membership fee is probably one of the most worthwhile ones yet that I have encountered when it comes to bang-for-buck.

Overall, the real key takeaway is that you build trust from facial recognition. Even as a younger company, if your face is shown at multiple events, then it reinforces that you’re out to move and shake for your corporation. And if you’re willing to do that, then you’ll eventually build the trust in your business needed to succeed.

One of the pitholes that many small businesses fall into is that because a larger business uses a product, then the small business must also use the same one to succeed.

Yet there are many pieces of software more suited towards small business needs. For instance, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is something that many larger businesses use as a one-stop shop system. While it seems like it could possibly be tuned for small business use, there are just so many things that a small business doesn’t need to operate whereas a larger one does. For instance, do you need to track all of your HR employees? Chances are, you are THE HR employee. Along with the IT guy, and so on so forth.

That’s why you would look into using systems that are more cost effective and better engineered for your small business use such as web based accounting. It’s good for you, it saves you money, and it has the features that you need to get your business from point A to point B. If you grow beyond these needs, then perhaps its time to shop around for something more on your business scale. But until then, get the right package for the right business.