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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.

I’ve noticed something that is of interest to probably most small business owners. And that’s where you don’t get much of the one-stop shop anymore. Starting back in the 1990s, there were many tools on the Internet that tried to be the all-in-one from web design portals to content systems. By and by, you found that tools started to go back to a single use-single function point of view.

Which don’t get me wrong, that’s a great thing. But having owned several small businesses, I can say that the outside of open-source where you couldn’t complain about the price, those that you paid for were mediocre at best. The reasoning was that while the function that it served was perhaps the best in its field, the subscription models added up. As you pushed your business growth, you add more and more products together and thereby making it less affordable to run your business due to a subscription for this, and a subscription for that, for all of them to interact together.

Fortunately, we heard that call too. Why should a business look at their accounting broken up into pieces? Financials should be kept under one roof and provided for in one arena. And that’s what we strive to do for our small business clientele. Don’t forget that I definitely have felt your pains. It’s not easy and you have to count every single penny to make your business fly. So let us be your one stop shop and help you soar.

Photo Credit: (sylvar)