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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.

The new and improved? Most definitely.

In fact, there’s so much to talk about, that it would just be easier for you to run over to Merchant’s Mirror and take a looksie. If you have questions, feel free! That’s what we’re here for. We’re extremely happy with the progress that we’ve made and we believe whole-heartedly that you will too.

Many of you have been wondering what we’ve been doing quietly in the background for the past few months. And we’re happy to say that here’s a little teaser. We don’t quite have an ETA although I can probably say that we’ll have this in definitely by May if not earlier.

As you can see, the entire interface has a new fresh look. But that’s not all! There are some things that have been done so that the user experience itself has been intensified. We’ll do a more in-depth post after both the test teams and development staff have finalized the migration to version 2. What you see there is something on our testing platform and we are extremely excited to bring this to you as soon as we can.

In other developments, we’ve actually moved into a new office! Excited, but tired from the move, we’re happy to join the the Nussbaum Center of Entrepreneurship as one of the incubating startups. That has actually taken some time out of our schedule but it also reinforces our test and development teams into one area for an instant feedback arena.

We definitely have more great things coming down the pipeline and didn’t want you to think that we left everyone in the dark. Look for wonderful things appearing in your favorite accounting software soon!

There has been a sizable update as of late. Since we’re knee-deep in a huge thing that we know that our clients and everyone else has been waiting patiently for, we managed to squeeze a few last bits out of our development team to bring you a few more things that are useful towards your business:

• Planning and Budgeting
  Budgeting and planning is something that every business really should be doing. We actually thought about this feature back when we were doing our own budgeting and realized that this would be a perfect fit to what every small business would want to use. There is an annual breakdown and you can expand and retract the description fields by clicking the arrows. It will also automatically update the totals and allow you to take a look at how you’re doing compared to your actuals.


• QuickBooks Importer updated
  Our QuickBooks Importer got a few important updates. Now it supports many more versions of Quickbooks for PC. Not too much to say here except, we’re happy to convert you.


• New reports
  As requested by clients, there were a couple new drill-downs for the current reporting structure. There was also the addition of the budgeting report that takes a look at your budget versus your actual numbers. This gives you a vantage point on how close you can actually manage your business and where you could spend more, or save more in other areas. It’s always good to trend your data and make sure that you’re meeting budget.

We’re happy to say that everything is just humming right along. And if you’re not a client yet, this is your chance to join us today!

So here we go with a shorter list of minor updates. This is due to the fact that we’ve actually been working on some of the framework in the backend the last two weeks. What this means is that there are some major features that we were setting up to bring in, and this would help get it working. But without further ado, here’s what was added:

• CSV exports
  Yes, now you can actually export all those lists of things that you need and want into CSV file formats. Customer lists, invoices and payments by vendors, pretty much any list there we figured you’d want the data for so we set it up so you could grab it.


• High-resolution logo attachments
  One of our clients had told us that the resolution of the logos attached to the invoices were not in high-resolution. We took a look and found that indeed this was true. But this wasn’t something that you could just let go. Oh no. This was something that we felt must be thrown in there since we all love higher resolution graphics.


• Document attachments
  We’re super proud of this feature. Why? Let me give you an example. So here you are at the end of the year and you have all these receipts you had accumulated over the year that you’re finally getting around to inputting into the system. And then the big audit comes by. Yes, it does happen. But you had thrown that shoebox away…. Wait! You had scanned them in and attached them to each of your invoices! Turmoil has been averted. And that’s what we were thinking too, except we thought that it would be fantastic to actually allow customers to attach scanned documents so that customers didn’t have to worry about the hard copies.

As you can see, we haven’t just been sitting around twiddling our thumbs. And if there is anything that we’re doing great, need to improve upon, or just plain want to talk, we’re here for you. Just drop us a line on the feedback and I promise you’ll get a response. Unless your email happens to be incorrect or nonexistent… then we can’t really help you with that problem.