Since our beta release was published on Wednesday, November 19 we have had many positive comments and lots of great feedback on the software. We have taken all the messages under advisement and you should see some of your ideas implemented in the next few weeks.

To that end, the following updates have been applied to the beta version of Merchant’s Mirror:

• Manual additions for deposits do not require existing documents
• You can turn on/off the display and use of customer, vendor, and account numbers

The following additional updates have been applied:

• Emailed invoices are now named “invoice-###.pdf” where “###” is the invoice number.
• Corrected a layering error on additional line items for invoices, receipts, and credits.
• Removed the display of the page footer on all printed reports

The team will have more updates later in the week.

The closed beta was scheduled for November 15th of 2008. Our testing group has been waiting anxiously as we work to get Merchant’s Mirror out to them. Unfortunately, an underwriter for some of our paperwork took a longer than expected. Nothing drastic, but it did delay our launch from Saturday.

Currently, we’re looking forward to releasing it this week, and awaiting the final pieces of paperwork to be approved. We are expecting to launch the Beta version tomorrow, November 18.

Thanks to everyone that has contacted us about it. We are as excited as you are to get M|M off the starting line!

In this day and age, using the web to accomplish your daily tasks has become the de-facto of many applications and almost the standard for small business building. In fact, my personal experience is that online applications can literally provide a quick and hardened solution at putting together a business in a short amount of time.

Obviously, your usual concerns are there. For instance, offline applications have the single point of it being able to function without an Internet connection. But in this age, who doesn’t have Internet access? Most businesses have at the very least an email address, and it is practically standard that anyone dealing in sales and marketing carries an email-enabled cell phone. The Internet has become so in-tune with our daily lives that you don’t even bat an eyelash when you connect at a coffee shop with WiFi these days while two a decade ago, it would have been laughable for a business to operate out of a coffee shop.

In that case, there really isn’t much of a reason why conducting business primarily only wouldn’t trump an offline application if just for the flexibility of it. Web-based applications are pretty much accessible anywhere, through most browsers, and your data is backed up by the service that you use. What’s not to like? You don’t have to worry about the application crashing, having the latest version, or whether or not the development team even knows you exist. With an online application, you just have to fire up a browser, open an Internet connection and you’re off to the races.

In the recent years, having looked at both personal finance and small business accounting software, I can tell you that the latter has been painstaking for myself. Usually the required features to run an entire business were missing something or other, but even if all the features were there then the interface was overly complicated to use. Begrudgingly, I had to pick and choose one single product to track the finances for my business or hire a bookkeeper.

So when John and I first started discussing what was to become Merchant’s Mirror, I was very excited. I would finally be able to look into what all my accounting woes have been and squash them once and for all. Both of us have owned and managed small businesses in the past and we know the pain that everyone deals with when it comes to accounting tasks.

Day by day, we are looking at ways to include all of the important features an accounting system should include, and at the same time, make it easier for the small business owner to operate. We understand that balancing your check book should accomplished in as short a time as possible because your time could be better spent in business building. While it is not perfect today and we are always working toward our goal of bringing a more dynamic model to the table. We want to let the user’s skill level put it to the test.

And that’s what we’re here to accomplish.

As always, we are constantly looking to learn more about our visitors, members, and the online community as a whole. We have re-posted a survey we took as we began development on Merchant’s Mirror several years ago. We’d love to have your input to add to our knowledge base.

CLICK HERE to take the Survey

Your feedback will help us choose the features we include as we continue to develop Merchant’s Mirror.