Guest Post from Claire from WhoIsHostingThis.com:

Accountancy packages have long had a reputation for being stuffy, unwieldy and expensive. But cloud accountancy tools help you take control of your finances. Cloud accounting works via your web browser and gives you a familiar online interface for money management. Some packages can even make small business accounting fun. Here are a few of the ones we tried.

FreeAgent

£15-£25 per month ($20 to non-UK users), 30 day free trial

FreeAgent handles all of your billing, invoicing, time tracking and estimates. Their customisable email reminders allow you to chase people up, and you can re-bill expenses to your clients very easily from your expenses records. The Tax Timeline is a great way to avoid any nasty surprises, as it gives you a date and amount due to help you plan for your tax liability.

FreeAgent is offered as part of a package with a Barclays business account, and it’s cheaper than buying it outright. If you’re planning to open a new account with the bank, it may be a good idea to hold off on paying for FreeAgent on its own.

KashFlow

£15.99 per month, 60 day free trial

The interface in KashFlow is more basic than FreeAgent, and almost appears like an online banking statement. The screen is also not as quite so well utilised, with the majority of information filling the entire screen and pastel colours making navigation harder to locate. A sidebar for additional tasks would be more useful than placing all the buttons at the top, and it’s a shame that some data – such as your bank balance – is loaded on its own on a page, without any supporting information around it.

Overall, Kashflow seems to be aimed more at sole traders, and we found the interface to be far less intuitive than some of the more advanced cloud accounting packages. It may suit you if you need something basic to stop your accounts getting out of hand.

Liquid Accounts

£20 per month, 30 day free trial

The interface in Liquid Accounts really lacks refinement: the trial initially loaded as a jumbled mess, with the navigation tabs being rendered in the wrong direction which made the page unusable. The banking page was entirely blank. Little things like a lack of currency symbols (coupled with headings that say lazy things like ‘£000’s) make the presentation seem unpleasant and rushed, and the arrangement of invoices into ‘Top 5’ charts is a truly bizarre choice for a serious accounting package.

Liquid accounts looks like a useful system, but serious attention is needed to the look and feel before we’d even try to load any real data.

Xero

£12-£24 per month, free 180-day trial

Xero is the only package we tried which felt like a contender to FreeAgent. The interface features a selection of dashboard widgets which give a nice, clean overview, and the impressive selection of add-on widgets allow you to seamlessly integrate CRMs, payroll systems and inventory management. For example, you can add a PayPal widget in seconds, or hire a developer to code a bespoke widget especially for your in-house accounting system.

One thing that pushes it ahead is its mobile provision: official Xero apps are available for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android phones. If you’re always out of the office, Xero could be the one for you.

This post is by Claire from WhoIsHostingThis.com, which compares blog hosting providers and publishes user feedback on the top hosts.

Acyba offers with acymailing a professional Newsletter Management Component for Joomla. There is a free version and 2 paid versions. We used the enterprise edition currently at 89 EUR in various projects. The advantage of the acymailing enterprise edition is the Bounce Handling.

We faced a similar situation with various clients. They had collected thousands of email addresses over the years, through various lists from different internal/external sources, manual forms on trade shows, customers, call centre data and so on. Using one of the big Newsletter Service providers like Constant Contact or Mailchimp has turned out to be complicated as by the nature of these lists there is a lot of rubbish in there which leads to high bounce rates. Trying to send the first email to the contact base with these online services rings all alarm bells at their side (which I fully understand) and you need to give proof when and where your subscribers have opted in. Furthermore once you reach a base over 5000 contacts it becomes quite expensive on a monthly basis.

Acymailing Joomla Component
We then searched for alternatives and the best option we found was installing Joomla on a virtual private server (with our own IP, so we don’t cause problems for others if we got blacklisted) with the acymailing component. It is very easy to install and offers a lot of options. In the configuration the most important thing is the set-up of the bounce handling system: Bounces are sent to an email account that you can define. The system runs a regular cron job (which acymailing provides) and picks ups the bounced emails.

You can define actions per bounce type (mailbox full, mailbox not available, permanently failed, etc). That allows you to block bounced subscribers automatically. Once a user has been blocked he will not receive emails anymore, even if you upload him again with another list. Through this your lists becomes cleaner and cleaner the more you send. It is very important to avoid keep sending out emails to bounced addresses, one of the reasons you can get blacklisted for. 

The templates have „anti-spam“- tags . It is very easy to include an instant removal or unsubscribe link. The system also provides a web version of each newsletter, so you build-up an online archive of your sent emails.
Another cool thing is the queue processing. The system lets you define how many emails will be send per x minutes. You can schedule emails. The system then puts them into a queue and sends them out in batches. All triggered by a cron job provided by acymailing. So you don’t have to deal with cron job set-up on your server.
The statistics include E-mail opened, Clicked a link, Unsubscribe, Forwarded and Bounced; and of course you can retrace who did which type of action.

Very intuitive, well documented and easy to use. The customer service is also very responsive and there is lots of information in the acymailing forums. I just renewed 2 licences for another year. With the renewal for only 16 EUR a year you have access to software upgrades and the cron job service.

Flip Books have become very popular. They allow readers to virtually flip through documents, from right to left, instead of scrolling down.

We had some customer requests recently to transfer their pdf documents into this digital publishing format, .

I found issuu.com. We used scribd before, but issuu is just so much better. They offer a free version that allows you to upload documents, convert them into an ePaper and embed it into your website. The documents are published on issuu.com and can be shared with social media.

When the flipping pages are embedded into your website, just a link to issuu is shown  on the bottom.  On the issuu portal itself an issuu logo is placed next to your publication. If you want to get rid of that you can buy the Pro Version for USD 19 per month which comes with more features and statistics.

In a nutshell: A very easy, quick and simple way to convert your business publications, such as Company Brochures, Product Catalogues, Articles, etc. into  impressive online publications.  All you need is a pdf.

Here is an example of how one of my customers is using it. If your interested in Chilean mining, go to: http://www.direcmin.com/lectura-por-pagina

We recently developed an online clothing store. I did  some research to find an appropriate free open source eCommerce solution. This post helped me analyse which one to choose: 15 Best Free OpenSourceeCommerce Plattforms

In a fashion online shop you need to deal with product attributes, e.g. a Jeans is available in different sizes. What you also need is stock level management on attribute level, say Jeans XY size 32 has 20 on stock, size 33 got 15 on stock, etc.

I was quite surprised that this basic feature is not generally available, especially I was quite disappointed byVirtuemart which we used before. It only allows this basic feature with a very cumbersome process.

Also we needed multi-language ability and payment and shipping methods that can be easily adjusted.

I made a shortlist and after talking to my Hosting Company (Rochenhost) I chose Prestashop. They recommended it as it is less resource intensive as for instance magento.

It was a good choice. Prestashop comes with 5 languages pre-installed. A lot of modules are readily available or can be activated by just one click. There is a huge amount of documentation which solved all the problems we ran into.

I gave access to the customer and they already uploaded categories, products and images before we even trained them. It is very intuitive.

However, you have to get used to the configuration of the various modules and get an understanding which one does what. That took me some time. The configuration of the Shipping module was a bit complex, but that’s because we are here in a small country at the end of the world. For the bigger nations and the bigger carriers there are free modules available, easy to install.

We used a free template which needed some changes to the CSS, menu and languages. The language files were incomplete, so we needed to translate manually.

If you are a small or medium-sized company and thinking about setting up an online store with prestashop you should consider buying a Premium Theme. They are ready-made, easy to install and cost around 150 USD or less and save you lots of time. Templatemonster offers a range of Prestashop Premium Templates.

I will use Prestashop more often in the future. It offers the most important Online Shop Features for free, very intuitive configuration in the backend and a huge worldwide community for support.

There is a lot confusion on Facebook Pages for Businesses. A lot of businesses use private profiles to present their products and services on Facebook.
This is actually a violation against facebook’s policy. User profiles are reserved for human beings; they must not be used for Organisations, Corporations or Brands. But still a lot of businesses use a private profile to market their brand.

Talking to a few business owners about this issue I found 2 main reasons:
They are just not aware that there is a difference. They just don’t know what a Facebook page is.They do it on purpose to connect better with their fan base, especially write direct messages to their “friends”.Be aware that Facebook can terminate your account any time if you are using a private profile for your business and that would mean that you use all your ‘friends’.It is better to use a Facebook ‘Page’. People can’t be your ‘friends’ but they can ‘like’ you. There are nice applications to beef up your facebook presence and you can embed Like-it Buttons or a Like it-Box in your website.

FBML language allows you to build applications easily like ‘Click this button and receive a Promotion code!”

On the other hand I don’t really understand the ‘friends’. They reveal their personal interests, photos, activities, friends to an anonymous business or brand. Probably they just don’t know either

I keep having meetings with Small business Owners asking me for Web design and Internet Marketing advice.  One of the issues they usually have is that the website cannot be found in Google. Here in Chile there are a lot of niche businesses with little competition, that you can’t find in Google.cl; even when you type in their business name. Continue Reading

In my last article I gave you some tips on how to create more effective email campaigns. A lot of companies love Newsletters and use them as a means to communicate with their client base. Actually, I personally prefer Blogging over Newsletter Campaigns and here are 5 reasons why: Continue Reading

When we set up the hosting for our clients we always recommend to use Google Apps for Emails under your own domain. Even today you still get messages like ‘User mailbox size limit exceeded’ when you are trying to send someone an email. This should belong to the past, but there are still a lot of businesses around that limit the Mailboxes of their users to 20 MB or less, as if webspace was still a scarce resource. With Google Apps you won’t have that problem.
From my point of view the main benefits of using Google’s Apps are the following: Continue Reading