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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.

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.

This move not only justifies where small businesses are going, but it also shows that pretty much everyone is moving towards an cloud driven world where your applications do not exist on your own local machines anymore. Obviously, this still requires you to have an Internet connection of some sort and the move to a cloud based solution is a difficult one still for many to swallow in the development world. But with Microsoft making the leap, it actually shows that almost all of the major software developers are now backing cloud based computing.

One of the significant key moves here is that the company that hosts the cloud now has full control over the versioning. No longer will you have support questions that are determined by older version A, B, or C but instead the questions will start migrating towards actual usability and functionality. This not only creates ease for the support staff, but it also helps the development cycle flow better.

Small businesses benefit from all of this because the cost of doing business on a cloud based system is inherently less than a desktop system. After you have calculated all of the costs associated with data retainment, the answer is simple when it comes to choosing what to use for your small business accounting, office applications, and the rest. This move by Microsoft signifies not only a competitor-driven move towards Google Apps, but the fact that Google Apps is actually making a difference. Welcome to the age of cloud computing.

Web based accounting actually performs their duties at a low-cost and provides an easier way of managing bookkeeping. There are accounting solutions out there that allow multiple company support and ways to keep all of the bookkeeping in order when it comes to tracking multiple businesses. It also makes it a lot easier to accomodate the VAs since much of their data is virtual. But in the end, here’s the key point on why your VA should be using a cloud format for your accounting needs instead of an offline one:

Do you trust your VA enough to secure your business’ financial data?

A VA that uses offline accounting products does not necessarily understand how to secure and protect your financial data. Do they backup your books? Is it stored on the same drive or a separate drive. How often is this process done? Is it encrypted or out in the open? A cloud based service however, needs to take security into account and provide your business with as much redundancy as possible. Most services not only transfer your data via SSL, but also provide redundancy on the backend. Your data should be on hot-swap RAIDs and probably also have a cold backup solution.

Don’t get me wrong. Nothing wrong with VAs, nor if they use offline products. But the real question as a business owner is if you want them to work on your data without some guarantees of backing up your financials. And a web based accounting can provide all of that for you, and your VA without fail.

There are five things you should be looking for in your new accounting system software program if you want to relax and have a long and happy life together.

Your web-based accounting software should be:

•    Simple to use
•    Accessible from anywhere
•    Compatible
•    Secure
•    Affordable

Simple to use. Let’s face it.  You’re a business owner, not an accountant.  So what good is having a program that doesn’t speak your language? You want to find simple accounting software that includes all of the basic features you need to run your business: such as customer invoicing, bill payments, reports, payroll, and banking.  It should also be customizable to fit your particular business needs and not the other way around.  It should allow applications such as customizable invoices or automated email messages.  This way, you can communicate using your logo and your marketing strategy.

Accessible from anywhere. You want a program that is both online and offline compatible.  Web based online—so that it can be accessed from anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection—and, it needs to be available offline too, so you can still work when you cannot get a connection; you can always save your work and update it when you get back online.  You should also be able to share data in real time—and at the same time—with other users anywhere in the world.

Compatible. It should be compatible with all major operating systems (Microsoft Windows®, Apple Mac OSX®, and Linux) and all major web browsers (Internet Explorer®, Firefox®, and Safari®).   It should also include all upgrades, bug fixes, and feature enhancements as part of your subscription. Software development is constantly changing and improving, so you shouldn’t need to worry about upgrading or having to buy the next version every time an upgrade is available.

Secure. If your data is stored on a file server in your office, you are setting yourself up for several unsafe situations that could be avoided.  A good web-based accounting program protects you from fire or from theft, be it physical theft (intruders that could steal your computer or backup files) or cyber theft (hackers that access your files electronically.)

Affordable. Most online accounting programs are surprisingly affordable, charging just pennies a day for lots of user-friendly features.  That’s a very small price to pay for peace of mind.

Keep these five simple rules in mind when shopping for a simple accounting software, and you will be able to concentrate on more important business matters like making a profit.