Posts Tagged ‘business’

Evanston Technology Innovation Center ["TIC"] Needs Support with Evanston City Council

September 20, 2012

This morning I am writing with a focus on our clients, partners, colleagues, and members of the Evanston business community. As most of you know, I returned to Evanston after close to seventeen years in New York where I was a Tax Partner with Arthur Andersen LLP. While we have retained a substantial proportion of our New York and West Coast clients, it was a difficult process to establish and develop new client relationships having been removed from the Chicago area for that length of time. Our practice has evolved to combine being an AICPA PCPS practice firm together with a technology practice that includes being a Salesforce.com System Integration Partner and Google Apps Premier Reseller.

The Evanston TIC has been by a wide margin, the single most important source of new clients for our practice, and has given us a significant opportunity to help start up businesses take root, grow and develop in Evanston. Theses businesses provide technical, professional and skilled jobs which represent the type of employment that provides potential to expand the workforce and community locally. Once these businesses grow to a point where they are ready to move outside the TIC, they have to make a choice with respect to where they “set up shop”. In several cases, the relationships these businesses have with our firm, and other professional service providers and partners become a factor in their decision to stay in Evanston….which helps all of us.

I would like to personally ask each of you that has involvement with the Evanston business community, and the TIC to consider taking a moment to email the Evanston City Counsel members and management to express support for the City‘s efforts to make an investment in the TIC so it can continue its work….as a CPA, I can’t think of a better use of taxpayer funds to stimulate the growth of local jobs and their retention in Evanston.

The following is a list of the email addresses for Evanston City leadership and Council members that could be contacted to express your support for TIC.

Please join me in supporting this effort.

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aBIZinaBOX Presents “Alignment of Technology with Business Process” at Dreamforce 12

September 3, 2012

 

Jordan S. Zoot is speaking at Dreamforce 12 …the presentation is described as:

CPA‘s are the principal business advisors to almost every business. The unique combination of skills a CPA has makes them the ideal contact for implementation and deployment of salesforce.com workflows and approval process. This is where a HUGE opportunity exists. Join us to learn how by teaming with a CPA, a developer can gain access to the insight into what the business process issue is that needs to be solved, and through partnering would be able to “get it right the first time” such that their solution fits the business need, contains the security, and audit trail that the business and its external auditors need.

Use the link above to get a 20% discount off of the conference cost.

 

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aBIZinaBOX Recommends Accounting Seed for Integration with Salesforce or Force.com Platform

September 2, 2012

 

We are pleased to announce that after carefully evaluating a number of accounting packages that have connectors which purport to integrate with the force.com such as Intacct and Financial Force we have concluded that a connector is NOT the same as an application being NATIVE to the force.com platform.

Accounting Seed Financial Suite is a comprehensive accounting and ERP application that is both 100% native to the force.com platform and fully integrated into Salesforce CRM. The application was designed by a team of certified public accountants, Force.com developers and business process consultants to embrace the flexibility of the Force.com platform.

Accounting Seed Financial Suite is a horizontal offering providing all industries with a state of the art back office accounting suite with project accounting, ERP and robust financial reporting included in the package.

The chances are if you love Salesforce and the Force.com platform you are going to be thrilled with Accounting Seed as you watch your business come together as a single cohesive operating unit on the World’s premier business management platform.

Accounting Cloud’s Financial Reporting allows you to create formatted financial statements for your management team, investors, auditors and any other users of financial information. The application is flexible and allows for presentation of financial information in a way that makes sense to you.

Features:

  • Full Accrual Accounting
  • Completely Flexible Chart of Accounts
  • Flexible Accounting Periods (Fiscal,Calendar, 4/4/5)
  • Easy to Create, Copy and Reverse Journal Entries
  • Flexible Subaccount structure with 4 segments available.
  • Projects and Project tasks built into the ledger
  • Deferred Revenue and Expense
  • Bank Reconciliation
  • Core Financial reports without ever leaving Salesforce
  • User Defined Financial Report layouts
  • Financial Statement Formatting and grouping your way
  • Financial Statement Output to PDF or HTML
  • User defined Financial Statement calculations for Profit Margins and Ratios
  • User defined Financial Statement period comparisons

    While project accounting used to only affect a segment of the business world, in today’s services based economy we consider it a horizontal application that will greatly benefit any business regardless of industry.

     

    Whether your company lives and dies by projects or just wants to know how much you spent on that last marketing initiative, Accounting Seed will give you greater visibility into your organization with our easy to implement and fully integrated project accounting offering.

     

    Project Accounting: Time is money. You should start finding out where people are spending their time and what it is costing you. Accounting Seed’s Time Card and Expense application is built right into the general ledger structure of the product. We support standard and/or actual costing to projects for labor and materials.

    If you bill, and recognize revenue on your projects then you have found your new home. Accounting Seed has state of the art time and material billing and revenue recognition tools for project accounting.

    Features:

    • Full Accrual Accounting for Projects
    • Flexible Time Card Periods
    • Time Card & Time Card Approval
    • Labor costing at actual or standard rates
    • Expense reporting with creation of Accounts Payable liability to Employees
    • Multiple employee and material billing rates assignable by project work breakdown structure
    • Automatic creation of time & material billings
    • Scheduled revenue recognition

Manufacturing: Accounting Seed is the most flexible manufacturing package on the Force.com platform and offers the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of any Cloud based solution on the market. The application provides unparalleled coverage and access to operational intelligence. Managers can make decisions based on real-time data, which enables continuous improvement and lean management.

Features:

  • Automatically create consolidated manufacturing orders and purchase orders from multiple sales orders
  • Multi-level bill of materials
  • Manufacturing with labor
  • Manufacturing lot tracking
  • Automatically create consolidated purchase order by vendor/material for multiple manufacturing orders
  • Serialized manufactured inventory
  • Write off scrapped stock
  • Source materials from stock or procure individually for job
  • Schedule multiple orders by operation/routing
  • Work Center capacity planning

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aBIZinaBOX Achieves Expert and Guru Certification on bill.com

September 2, 2012

aBIZinaBOX has completed Expert and Guru Certification Training on bill.com…

What if you could eliminate writing and mailing checks, bill payment errors, late payments and check fraud? And what if you could do it all online, anytime, anywhere? As your accounting firm and trusted business advisor, we’d like to introduce you to Bill.com – an innovative new online A/P and A/R bill management tool that can help you pay smarter and get paid faster than ever before.

This low-cost tool will help you stay on top of your business and your cash flow…by streamlining and automating your accounts payable and receivable processes with complete security and control. The bottom line: You’ll be able to focus more of your time on running and growing your business.

With Bill.com, you get a complete web-based “financial office” to organize your day-to-day finances and optimize cash flow. Everything you, your employees need to manage your business — the documents, workflow, payment processing, invoicing, and collections – are available at your fingertips. Anytime. Anywhere.

Bill.com is helping businesses save over half of the time and cost of paying vendors and gets them paid 2-3 times faster.

Plus, Bill.com is:

  • Safe and Secure: uses bank-level encryption and is always backed up.
  • Organized: gives you access to all your financial documents, bills, invoices and transactions from any web browser or mobile device.
  • Simple: easily pay any vendor, large or small and invoice customers online.
  • Efficient: eliminate data entry, streamline vendor management and receive customer payments directly into your bank account.
  • Mobile: works with any computer or mobile device.
  • Collaborative: connects you to your colleagues, customers, vendors and accountants.
  • Strategic: improve cash flow and automate Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable processes.
  • Complete: Syncs with Intuit QuickBooks, Intacct, Sage Peachtree, NetSuite and other accounting packages

We urge you to contact us about Bill.com today.

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Posted in aBIZinaBOX Financial, aBIZinaBOX GAPS Platform | 1 Comment »

Kona DSC – The Solution to Search in Salesforce

June 4, 2012

Today is one starting out as one of those days where I keep getting hit between the eyes with solutions to business process problems that have been lingering forever. I would be willing to bet that if you are a salesforce user….that if we start listing what you like least about the product, the answer is going to be search…..the native search isn’t what it needs to be. Rather than rewrite verbatim, the following is a screen shot the Kona DSC website:

Once you read my suggestion is that you run…not walk and learn more about this product

If that doesn’t set the hook, then perhaps a demo will through this link. When you talk to the team tell them aBIZinaBOX sent you

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aBIZinaBOX Wonders – Google Apps Market Place – Cloud Alliance vs. gSocial – Can A Reseller Limit Their Options

May 8, 2012

We have been a #GoogleApps Reseller ["GAPS"] for over two years….and busy two years it has been. Our practice has grown substantially, and we have seen many exciting new applications, the introduction of @GoogleDrive, the emergence of an Reseller-ISV Conference – #gSocial last Fall in San Jose, the emergence of the #MSPExcellence CSP Program, and the #CloudAlliance. The purpose of the gSocial was to bring together ISVs and GAPS Resellers with the goal of helping Resellers improve their ability to sell applications through the Google Apps Market Place. The obvious benefits being that the more applications that are sold, it improves the financial results for the ISV by selling more software, it helps the reseller by causing the sale of GAPS to become a business solution when integrated with Market Place applications, and Google benefits all the way around. The premise of gSocial being that it was open to multiple ISVs and all resellers…all around benefitting to the GAPS Reseller Channel.

The Cloud Alliance represents a group of seven specific ISV that each sell a specific application which relates to a specific functional need within the Google Apps Market Place. The membership includes ISV’s that have identified themselves as “best of breed” . While some of them may, in fact, be best of breed, there are some applications within the group that aren’t the first choice of aBIZinaBOX, and we have looked at all of them. In fact, I am going to be very straight forward and add a table that highlights our choices [everyone may not agree, but by presenting them, it does create an opportunity to make what I view as a critical point.

Functional Cloud   aBIZinaBoX
Use Alliance Choices
Group Policy bettercloud domainwatch Promevo gPanel
Automation Run My Process Run My Process
SSO Okta Okta
CRM Insightly Nimble CRM
Project Mgt SmartSheet SmartSheet
Expense Expensify Expensify
Back Up Spanning Backupify

We have spent a substantial amount of time reviewing our choices with respect to Market Place Applications as we have spent considerable effort in to building the aBIZinaBOX brand within the GAPS Reseller Community, and have “packaged” our applications into pre-built “solutions” for our clients and prospective clients since the market has taught us that BUSINESS PEOPLE CARE ABOUT SOLUTIONS NOT APPLICAITONS!! As such, aBIZinaBOX has chosen to sell solutions rather than applications. Hence the premise of gSocial is very appealing in that it aligns the interests of Resellers and ISVs since everyone is free to pick and choose what they sell to whom they wish to sell to. On the other hand, while I understand the motivation of the ISV’s that created the Cloud Alliance, I am NOT so sure that I see their existence, in the form that I understand it as helpful to me as a GAPS Reseller.While an application which has been created by a Cloud Alliance Member may be just as good or better than a non-Cloud Alliance member in their view, if it conflicts with the choice of GAPS Market Place application which I have selected, it doesn’t help me or my client when I have to explain to them why aBIZinaBOX has selected a non-Cloud Alliance application. We are posting this blog, in advance of the Google CSP Program session which introduces the Cloud Alliance to the CSP Program members deliberately to focus on this specific issue to seek clarification and discussion   between the Cloud Alliance members, the non-Cloud Alliance members, the CSP Program participants, and Google.

My ultimate question being do all of the stakeholders in the GAPS ecosystem benefit from the existence of a what is essentially a closed membership group within the channel, or would it be more beneficial to support and expand a more all inclusive group with a model such as that which was exposed by the gSocial.

Correction – Please note that we have made as a correction to reflect that the product labeled as Cloud Sherpas should have been referred to as Bettercloud.com’s Domain Watch

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Posted in aBIZinaBOX - Products, Technologies and Services, aBIZinaBOX GAPS Platform | 1 Comment »

aBIZinaBOX Appreciates all of the Job Creators We Know

May 2, 2012

I happened across two very interesting articles in the New York Times this morning….and while we may not agree with all of the points discussed, they hammer home the importance of private equity, entreprenuerial risk taking, and tax policy which creates a favorable environment for long term investment in new businesses. The first article makes a very compelling case for why the 1% [and yea that phrase "Job Creators"] are so critically important to the economy overall. The views may go too far for some, but The Case for Spectacular Wealth By A Spectacularly Wealthy Guy highlights why they are so important to our overall economic health. It also is very striking reminder of how important the Job Creators in taking those risks are the fuel that permits us, as professional service providers and advisors with the ability to earn a living.

The second article, Ambitious Law Firm is Reduced to Grim Dispatches paints a very distressing situation where a professional service provider, in this case a law firm is suffering the consequences of having service provider compensation get out of alignment with the relationship between service providers and Job Creators. It certainly resonates with us…..which provides us with an excellent opportunity for us to reach out to our clients and let them know that we “get it” and realize that without their continued risk taking, we would be nowhere. THANK YOU.

A final thought that the 99% need to realize that there is no entitlement in the manner that the #OWS crowd seems to believe that they deserve…we need to maintain the incentives to be able to become part of the 1%

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