Email Marketing on a Shoestring

Sendblaster is a handy little block email sender that sits on your desktop.The free edition comes complete with a selection of templates ranging from e-cards to e-newsletters but is limited to 100 contacts. A PRO version can be bought for a moderate sum.

If you’re running a club or society or you just want to send an newsletter, Sendblaster offers a free Newsletter Software edition.

Please consider that the European Directive 2002/58/EC requires mandatory “opt-in” modules to gather the customer emails for email marketing and newsletter subscription.

Accountancy Software

A bewildering array of accounting software is available. A recent visit to the Amazon site revealed a list of 215 different accounting and payroll packages (excluding personal accounting software).

Your choice of software should not be based solely on price. Read the box to ascertain if the software is appropriate to the current needs of your business. To make your investment in an accounting software a worthwhile one, you should consider the following:

* What management information will you need regularly?
* If you are an employer, do you require a payroll package?
* Do you need to track movement of stock?
* Do you trade abroad? Do you sell in one or more currencies?
* Do you want to computerise job costing?
* Need to raise invoices?
* How many people will need to use the software at the same time?

The most popular packages are: Sage, Quickbooks, MYOB, Iris and TASbooks. To save you the trouble, I would strongly recommend that you choose a package from one of the above. Quite simply, all other accountancy software is little more than a calculator fronted by (nice) graphics.

Here’s a quick overview of the three most popular accountancy packages:

Sage

By far the market leader for accountancy software for small and medium sized business. This is what Sage has got to say about its products:

Sage Instant Accounts is designed for start-ups, sole traders and small businesses, who have limited IT and accounting skills and who are, therefore, looking for an easy-to-use solution. It offers all of the usual accounting ledgers and they do your double-entry bookkeeping for you. Instant Accounts Plus comes with all of the above, plus basic stock management and two user capability. Instant Accounts Financial Suite combines the accounts package, plus payroll capability. Instant Business Suite offers the accounts and payroll packages, plus ACT! (Sage’s contact management package). Prices start at £110 + VAT for the basic Instant Accounts package, rising to £203.40 excluding VAT.

Sage Line 50 is the UK’s most popular small business package. It is a powerful system which will accommodate increasingly complex requirements as a business grows. It will cover almost all accounting needs, from VAT returns to credit control, and offers a wide range of management information and reports. It is backed by excellent customer support, advice and training. It integrates with other software and offers industry-specific add-ons and provides comprehensive data storage and full security. Prices start at £525 + VAT for the single company version.

Pros and cons
Most bookkeepers are familiar with Sage but if you’re willing to have a bash at it yourself then there’s a number of courses available to you. First class telephone support. Price tag is a little offputting. A little less user-friendly in places than its rivals.

MYOB Mind Your Own Business

The strength of this Australian import lies in its compatability with both Apple Mac and PC (Windows).

MYOB products:

MYOB BusinessBasics
Resembles an automated cash book. It will help you keep your bank accounts in order, track expenses, create sales invoices, maintain customer information and provide the reports you or your accountant need for VAT reporting. Ideal for one-man bands or organisations that do not require a great deal of management information. Price £67.23 + VAT + Delivery.

MYOB Accounting
Aimed at the small business, MYOB Accounting provides full-featured, integrated accounting in a package that includes nominal ledger, chequebooks, sales and purchase ledgers, payroll, item stock, jobs management and a contact card file. Integrates a direct link to Microsoft Excel and Word. Possible to upgrade to multi-user platform. £199 (excluding VAT) + delivery.

MYOB Accounting Plus
Includes all the features of the MYOB Accounting package PLUS it will write cheques, create invoices and track your money and stock. With additional features time billing, multiple currencies, multiple price levels, emailing of invoices, reports, plus links to Word and Excel. Multi-user. This package costs £299 + VAT + Delivery.

Advantages & Disadvantages

Competively priced given the range of features. Cross-platform capability may be a bonus to some. Telephone support is mostly good. Try before you buy with a 30-day free trial A little disappointing that transactions included on the VAT reurn cannot be flagged directly but rather the software accommodates this by allowing the user to lock down the period for which the VAT return has been processed. Thus achieving the same objective as ‘flagging’ transactions.

Quickbooks

Developed by US software developer Intuit Quickbooks comes in four varieties:

QuickBooks SimpleStart
Like MYOB BusinessBasics this is an automated cash book since it lacks features such as balance sheet, purchase and sales ledgers. It is aimed at first time users of business management software. Interactive tutorials help you create invoices, post receipts, print cheques, pay bills, manage your VAT and generate reports. £79.95 + VAT.

QuickBooks 2004 Regular
Deigned with start-ups in mind. It offers set-up wizard and tutorial, invoicing and VAT management, automate stock control, data back-up and integration with Word and Excel. £149.95 + VAT. If you need payroll facilities you can opt for QuickBooks 2004 Regular + Payroll for £199.95 + VAT.

QuickBooks 2004 Pro
As above only featuring advanced VAT and budgeting features, multi-currency and multi-user capability. It also offers ‘inventory control’ and customisable reporting. £299.95 + VAT (£349.95 + VAT with payroll).


QuickBooks 2004 Premier includes all of the above, plus more advanced budgeting and forecasting, business plan creation, time/job costing and remote access features. £449.95 + VAT (£499.95 + VAT with payroll).

For and Against
A popular package considering the range of features on offer. Competively priced, these packages come with Intuit’s 60-day money back guarantee. Developed in the United States, some of the terminology and methodology may take some getting used to if you already have experience of other packages. Screen based help is OK, but product is let down by its telephone support.

Oxygen Office Suite

One of my clients has been recording financial transactions on the Microsoft Works spreadsheet that comes bundled in with new PCs. However, from the perspective of an Accountancy professional, the Works’ spreadsheet is a waste of both the Hard Disk space it occupies and the RAM required to run it. You could fall into the trap of upgrading to the powerful but expensive Microsoft Office suite or you could consider the leading Open Source equivalent.

Formally known as Open Office Professional, Oxygen Office is a powerful office suite along the same lines as Microsoft Office. The best thing about it? IT’S FREE.
I’ve been using this software for about a year and I find I’m using it more than my outdated version of Microsoft Office. I could rant and rave about this software but the Open Office site does a much better job of it.
Unlike the Microsoft product, you can download as many copies as you wish and incur no additional license fees.
What’s more you can burn as many copies of the program (or source) to CD or DVD for distribution to your colleagues as you want – you can even sell it for a profit without paying royalties.
Unlike its Microsoft equivalent, Oxygen Office allows the user to open, edit and save documents created by a variety of Office suites (including Microsoft Office!), which means that you can still share documents with people still locked into Microsoft products.
Still not convinced? In the UK, the Open Office suite is currently used by the British Army and Bristol City Council and, from 2008, Birmingham City Council. Across Europe, Open Office is the office suite of choice of the French Parliament and civil service and most city councils in Germany.

FREE PDF Converter

I came across this free PDF converter just this weekend. Simply download the software, together with the converter (Ghostscript) and you can easily change your Microsoft documents to PDF format via the File>Print command!

Open Source Software

Over the last year or so I’ve been trying out Open Source Software. Basically, Open Source Software is distributed under a license which makes freely available the code (programming) so that others may contribute to, further develop and improve its functionality.

There are bonuses for us non-geeks, too. Open source material is quite often free or available very cheaply and quite often the multi-user license deals are extremely generous. Probably the best known example here is the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Another highly desirable feature of Open Source is the way in which security is built into the source as the program as its developed, rather than as an afterthought as is often the case with proprietary products.

So what’s the catch? Well, certainly Open Source material is often less-polished than it’s proprietary equivalents and its development is dependant upon the likes of us to report bugs to the developers involved.

However, Open Source Software has moved on considerably and just about everyone with an internet connection will have come across it in some guise or another. The Mozilla Firefox browser, Apache Server Software, MySQL database, and php are just a few examples of Open Source applications.