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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.

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.

There are plenty out there from Twitter to Facebook, and all of them have different types of scenarios that you should be paying attention to since the audiences are actually somewhat different. For example, if you are leveraging Facebook, there’s a good chance that you’re trying to sell a product or service to friends and acquaintances that you’ve met along the ways. However, microblogging sites such as Twitter provide a different type of scenario where the audience is not only the people that are looking to follow you, but also the real-time stream of information going across like a river. If it passes at just the right time, when someone is looking, you’ll have gained more eyes on your marketing.

Now, there’s multiple reasons to do social media networks, and it truly depends on whether or not your segmented market audience happens to use these services. For us, many of our clients happen to be freelancers of all types and are very in-tune with social networks in general which makes it a great area to not only market to those individuals, but communicate and provide customer relations through those channels. I do not believe that all small businesses should use this as a shotgun blast type marketing since it’s way too broad and is very much dependent to whom you are catering. But if you do provide products and services to an Internet market? Leverage your social networks like there’s no tomorrow.

There usually is a caveat though with open source. While they are community driven and supported, you have to be able to man the help station yourself and be proactive in finding the solutions to your particular issues. It also could be that your issue is explained in a very technical fashion and you have to be able to at least learn enough to disseminate that information. This makes certain choices more viable than others depending on the small business owner’s comfort level with technical documentation or sometimes lack thereof.

If you feel comfortable in the technical realm to use certain open source tools, there are many to choose from if you only take a few minutes with your favorite browser and look for the subject + open source. It has definitely helped keep our costs lower which is one of the reasons we can pass along the savings to our clientele.

Mainly, it’s to make sure that you’re not infringing on someone else’s work and to do your due diligence if you’re seeking to apply at the US Patent and Trademark Office. While filing through a patent attorney is probably not a bad idea, you can do all of the work yourself. Last I saw, I believe a trademark ran about two to three hundred dollars. Patents were a bit different depending on what stage you were in and what you were patenting.

Either way, you still need to make sure that you’re doing the right research. There are several searches online that you can use, and some are better than others, but I would definitely recommend from a preliminary standpoint to first check Google Patents. This is the quick and well-known text search method similar to their usual search engine. Pretty remarkable look. From there, I would go to the USPTO and be definite that you’re not missing anything. While Google makes the effort with updating their databases, there’s nothing that screams finality than going directly to the source.

There are other methods of searching, some are a lot cleaner that allow complex regular expression, but overall, I would recommend at the very least doing the two above. That way, you’re at least covering yourself and making sure that your business won’t be forced to change its name in the future because someone forgot to do the legwork.

We might be a web based accounting provider, but we do understand customer service and support. With over twenty years of combined experience in support services, we know that it’s tough as a company man to smile through every irate or frustrated call. But that’s what we do. And here, we try to be as transparent as we can and speak to our customer base as much as possible to see that everything is going smoothly. The goal is always to cultivate that trust and loyalty between your customers and your business. Doesn’t matter what type of business, customers put food on your table so you have to appreciate that if nothing else.

Thus, I stand by the Company-Customer Pact. This pact basically speaks of the communication between company and customer where everything is not only in a civil manner, but both sides recognize that we are all trying to make things work correctly and that as a customer, you have rights that many larger corporations do not recognize anymore. It’s good for both company and customer to read that pact since it’s by no means a one-sided deal. Both ends agree that there needs to be something done and we both seek to achieve it.

Think about it. With all of the large corporations tightening their belts and getting rid of crucial professionals, there are many more of those that are striking it out on their own their their respective industries as independent firms and consultants than trying to look in the dried up job market. In fact, if you’ve been job hunting for a little bit you would be quick to recognize that there are not as many of the positions there as you’re lead to believe and while those large corporations are actually laying people off, they still have work to do that cannot be done with staff on hand. Thus, consulting and small businesses are still needed by these larger businesses.

If you take that into consideration, then you’ll also realize that while it’s no easy task to go out on your own, it’s also something that is very fulfilling and allows you to learn things about your business that you might not have necessarily knew about before. This gives you insight on how corporate structure works and eventually be able to look at things in a different light. Obviously, going out on your own means that you would need a little business acumen since you’ll be running everything from your own accounting software to marketing and advertising. When you’re self-employed, you will also need to buy what’s right for your company without over-extending your budget. Finding more cost effective solutions such as web based accounting is a definite need in the consultation world. In the end? There will be more people that adapt to owning their own businesses than ever before thanks to how global economics are panning out.