Wish you a happy and prosperous new year!

The tax season is upon us and customers are bringing in their documents, folders, and boxes filled with paper. Manual data entry from those documents is the most tedious and time consuming process and yet offers the lowest remuneration.

Now consider a solution that would make those paper documents disappear and replace them with a list of transactions on your computer that are linked to the source document. How convenient!

Documents IN –> Transactions OUT

DocSnaps (www.docsnaps.com) is a secure, web-based product that allows you to:

A). capture bills, expenses, invoices, checks, and other documents and store them as electronic records for safe management.
B). automatically extract financial information and creates transactions based on the chart of accounts and historical data.
C). view & drill-down financial reports AND export the transactions to popular accounting software such as Quickbooks, Simply Accounting, or Caseware.

With DocSnaps you save time and thus are able to provide your clients with value added services like tax planning or generating more leads. Meanwhile DocSnaps will automate the manual and repetitive tasks of bookkeeping transaction generation.

The future of accounting and bookkeeping is online. Get ahead of the competition and use the power of DocSnaps automation to grow your business.

DocSnaps has been tested by several accountants and bookkeepers. It is accurate, timely, and cost-effective.

Make this tax season hassle free and efficient. Trial DocSnaps today for FREE.

Small businesses – Go to the Pricing page and click on the “Beta Signup” button.

Accountants or bookkeepers – Get it free at Pricing page and click on the “Beta Signup” button. For customer referrals and partnership, email us at marketing@docsnaps.com.

What is the most tedious and time consuming task for a small business or start up? While there are those who absolutely love it, the overwhelming response from surveyed business owners is “bookkeeping”. Therefore hiring a good bookkeeper early on is not just a life saver for many but also makes good financial sense.

Work smart! Automate the rest.

A good bookkeeper or accountant understands your business, keeps your books updated, and provides actionable reports. While a lot of this requires skills, there is a part that is repetitive and monotonous. This consists of working with boxes or folders full of documents, bookkeeping data entry and moving data between various applications.

DocSnaps aims to automate a lot of this data entry and provide online access to accounting and tax services, resulting in enormous time and money savings.

Using DocSnaps users can capture and upload any financial document – bills, receipts, checks, etc. – using their mobile phone camera, eFax, or email. A transaction is created for each of these documents by the software. Users can also import data from other applications including their invoice application, bank or credit card account.

Real-time financial reports are generated which allow users to drill down to source documents. Transactions can also be exported to other accounting applications like Quickbooks. The accountant or bookkeeper can conveniently access DocSnaps remotely.

It took 2 months of various rounds before we finally won the PanIIT 2009 business plan competition. With accomplished judges and many of our peers in the audience we had 15 minutes to pitch. We went with 12 slides and focused on about 2 to 3 ideas/sentences per slide.

The judges liked the idea and we look forward to talking to the many VCs in attendance as well as others who can help us with their experience and connections. Judges included Kanwal Rekhi, Scott Meadow, and Kapil Chaudhary.

Overall the process itself was very rewarding with feedback at each level.

PanIIT 2009 - Chicago

With web startups giving away free applications with hopes of getting uses hooked, there are a lot of great tools out there that small businesses can use. Add to that open source apps and a plethora of already existing desktop tools and you have a free bonanza for companies. Granted some of these applications are less than perfect, and others fall short of their peers in terms of usefulness and features. But many of them are true gems, and for a cost conscious freelancer or entrepreneur they make life easier and help conserve cash.

We will be featuring one really useful app every week that is free (or has a free offering), saves money, makes money, or solves a real problem for a small business. Other apps in the space with slightly different uses will also be listed.

But first to get started here is a list of lists – websites that feature free apps. Please comment about others that you know and the list will be promptly updated.

Freewaregenius – A list of mostly windows applications, and others from pdf converters to time trackers.
Mashup – Has a list of useful apps for everything including twitter, business help, blogging, and money & finance to name a few.

Manage Money – Accounting and Bookkeeping
Invoice –
Expense Reports –
Bookkeeping –
Data Entry –
Payroll –

Create a Product or Service
Create a Website -
Design an Application -
Hire Talent –
Shopping Cart –
Online Billing –

Manage Customers – Marketing and Sales
Get Beta Users –
Survey Users –
Manage contacts -
Manage website analytics –
Blog –
Newsletters –
Do PR
Twitter – Twellow – Twitter yellow pages, Bit.ly – URL shortening and twitter analytics
Customer Forum –

Manage Partners

Legal

Online bookkeeping is nothing new. There are products and services available that tackle different aspects of the solution. For businesses it promises to save time and money, and deliver several soft advantages including efficiency, faster actionable information, and agility.

Scanning of documents, remote work, and risks associated with sending important documents online pose adoption problems. But those who overcome these problems can reap rich rewards. The phenomenal growth in the number of tech-savvy companies drives demand for this service. Similar to email, a steady adoption of online bookkeeping is inevitable. As an accounting or bookkeeping firm, how do you plan to tap into this large lucrative market?

How does it work?

Online bookkeeping services can be delivered online if three main functions can be done entirely online:
1. Sharing of source documents

This includes receipts, bills, checks, account statements, reports, etc. to be transmitted to the service provider.  There are several ways to capture electronic images of source documents:

• Inexpensive scanners like the Fujitsu ScanSnap can be used by clients to quickly scan documents.
• Smaller documents like receipts can be captured by a cellphone camera (resolutions of > 1.5 MP is recommended).  ScanR is a cool app that helps you scan, copy and fax from your cellphone.
• Services like Shoeboxed and Pixily will digitize all your documents for you if you simply mail it in.

2. Performing bookkeeping

This includes creating transactions, printing checks, bank reconciliation, generating reports, etc.  Several applications are available for small business to do this.

• Specialized applications for invoicing are available – Freshbooks and Blinksale are the better ones.
• Xero, Quickbooks online, and Sidomac are some applications that provide online bookkeeping functionality that includes bank reconciliation and check printing.

3. Communication and process

Especially while working online it is easy to lose control of the work being done.  Communication is very important to be able to hold the team together and focus on the next set of tasks that needs to be done.  For effective online collaboration contextual information exchange and processes are very important.  At present there is no good tool, save for SIDOMAC that offers a good framework for online bookkeeping services delivery.

Online bookkeeping also has the following disadvantages:
1. It involves an extra step – that of scanning and uploading documents.
2. The documents need to be indexed and somehow correlated to transactions to be useful in any way.

Should I use it?

Whether you are a good candidate for online bookkeeping services depends upon how clearly the work is split between you and your bookkeeper.  If what your bookkeeper does can be easily done using the tools listed above then go for it.  If it entails transmitting documents, exchange of information and time critical information then make sure to find an all encompassing solution to your problem that includes strong processes and a competent and experienced online bookkeeping services company.

(Summarized version of a white paper published on a partner website - Suitesonline.com, Inc)

DocSnaps has made it into the finals of the Pan IIT Business Plan competition to be held in Chicago in October. In writing a business plan for investment it is always good to access the most recent and pertinent resources for your industry. Here are 5 great resources to help you get started.

1. Guy’s business plan advice – Why write a business plan? It is important to answer this question first before putting pen to paper.

2. Sequoia Capital’s business plan outline – This provides an outline of what makes a business sustainable and the company fundable. It also includes an outline of what to include in the business plan.

3. Market research – A general idea of the size of the market is essential to get started. This is a great starting point with statistics and numbers to give you a general idea of the market.  Other resources for qualitative research – BizShark, Crunchbase.

4. Competitive Strategy – A viable business is all about competing. If the idea is good then it safe to assume that somebody is already working on it. And to be successful a strategy has to be devised that makes you more successful than the other. Micheal Porter a university professor at Harward Business School helps you to analyze competition and create a successful strategy. Without a great strategy even the best business idea will fail.

5. Financials Basics – It is important to understand the basics of startup finance and take into account all startup expenses. A business might be profitable but for investors to be interested they would want a healthy return on investment for their risk. Your financial plan should provide general trends and ratios which helps answer these questions.

Biz plan competitions are always wrong – According to Seth Godin pundits are always wrong at predicting the future. So do not worry if your biz plan does not win any competitions.

One of the biggest benefit of DocSnaps is that the painstaking work of creating bookkeeping entry from source documents – bills, invoices, receipts, checks, etc – is automatically done for you. There are other features like invoicing, creating expenses, printing checks and doing bank reconciliation, but these are similar to the other bookkeeping products and easy to understand.

Since documents data entry is unique to DocSnaps this article explains how to setup your company and get started with document categorization and transaction entry. Working with invoices, expenses, bank reconciliation, etc will be covered in future blog articles.

Company Setup – Before you start using DocSnaps for your routine bookkeeping work you have to first set up the company. Click on the Company -> Setup tab:

Each of the sections in the setup tab refers to a module in DocSnaps:

1. Company Information – Address and other info
2. Accounts Settings – Import or set up chart of accounts used by your company
3. Tax – Taxes for invoicing and expenses
4. Invoice Settings – Defaults for receivables and revenue account; import customers and items.
5. Expense Settings – Default bank and payables account set up; import vendors.

Note: You need basic accounting knowledge to set up your company. You can work with your online bookkeeper (or find one in the marketplace) to help you with this work including importing your data (chart of accounts, customers, vendors, etc.) from Quickbooks or other software.

Get Started – Once your company is set up you can start using DocSnaps for routine bookkeeping.

1. Upload documents using any of the following methods:

a. Snap photos with your smartphone camera – Capture receipts, bills and other documents the moment you encounter them, and email them to your_user_name@receipts.docsnaps.com

b. Scan and upload – Easily scan your paper documents with an office scanner (Fujitsu ScanSnap, Kodak) and upload to Documents » Manage. Multiple files can be conveniently zipped up and uploaded.

c. Email – If you pay expenses online forward the email confirmation to your_user_name@receipts.docsnaps.com and it automatically gets stored in your documents repository. Similarly email invoices you send to customers either as as html or as attached PDF, and forward electronic documents (multiple documents can be emailed).

d. eFax – your eFax can be forwarded to your DocSnaps email address for easy capture of faxed documents.

Once you have all the documents in your document repository they will all be marked with the green icon as shown below. This is the status icon and indicates that the documents are not yet categorized and no transactions have been entered for them.

2. Categorize and create transactions with ease:

Click on the document ID to open the document in a new window as shown below:

Document details can be entered and based on the document type the appropriate transaction can be created – Expense, Deposit, Payment, etc. If you want to track receivables and payables then it is important to enter the customer or vendor and the due date for the expense or invoice.

The software learns as you categorize documents and create transactions. With sufficient data in the system it will start to automate document categorization and transaction creation. Any documents that are newly uploaded or which are un-audited (green icon) will be processed by DocSnaps. If DocSnaps is able to categorize the document and create a transaction it will appear with a gray icon in the document listing.

Over time DocSnaps should be able to handle most of the documents.

You can toggle the status icon between un-audited (green) and audited (orange tick mark). Click on the status icon until you get the orange tick mark and you have audited all your documents.

3. Manage your documents from document list:

a. You can delete documents
b. Split them into single pages (if it is a multiple page pdf file) or
c. Combine several pdf documents into a single large pdf file.

From the document show screen (the pop-up) you can delete the document and also move forward and backwards.

Note that the document cannot be deleted if there is a transaction attached to it or if it is associated with an invoice, expense or bank account.

4. Search the documents – This is a very useful feature and it is very easy to search through all your documents to find exactly what you are looking for.

You can specify the document type, the date range and enter a term or dollar amount you are looking for. DocSnaps searches through the comments entered, looks at the dollar amount and document name to find the document.

Simply start typing a word or amount in the search box and as you are typing DocSnaps queries your document repository to instantaneously retrieve documents that match the criteria.

As you use the document manager in DocSnaps you will discover several new users and shortcuts to make your business more efficient and your work pleasurable.

Are you scrambling to do 2008 taxes and get the books completed for your small business?  We can help your business accomplish both these tasks quickly and efficiently using DocSnaps.  DocSnaps is a web-based product that is currently being launched in Ottawa. It helps small businesses manage financial records and do bookkeeping online quickly and efficiently, thereby saving you time and money.  Documents are captured as electronic files and integrated with transactions so your bookkeeper and accountant can easily audit them – without having to sift through paper folders and boxes.

We can help:

As part of our launch we are giving away our product free of cost and  optional additional services at a subsidized rate for limited time. Experience first hand how our accurate and secure services can help optimize your business performance during this busy time of year.

In exchange we ask that you take our 5-minute survey to give us feedback on DocSnaps and our services.

Trial offer includes:

• Use of DocSnaps online bookkeeping application free of cost until March 31^st, 2009
• Free scanning of up to 100 documents using our fast scanner on site at one of several locations
  
• Online bookkeeping services at a subsidized rate of $15 per hour for up to 2 hours (optional)
  
• Online tax advice at 25% discount through one of our several partner accounting firms (optional)
  

How to access this trial offer:

1. Email us at marketing@docsnaps.com with your contact information.
2. You will be contacted for a short phone interview to inquire about your business and answer questions.
3. Either make an appointment and :
   1. come in to one of several locations (to be announced on this page) where we are hosting face-to-face sessions, or
   2. arrange to drop-off your documents for scanning at designated locations all over Ottawa including select UPS stores (to be announced on this page), or
   3. scan the documents yourself and upload into your DocSnaps account.
4. You will be given your secure DocSnaps account. Documents can be uploaded and you can invite your existing bookkeeper and accountant to access them.
5. If you choose the optional bookkeeping services our bookkeeper will contact you either by phone or through DocSnaps to begin working on your books.
6. Your books will be completed in 5 business days.
7. We can help you export your data to other software like Quickbooks, or Caseware.
8. You can keep using DocSnaps until March 31^st, 2009 for free.

Our survey is mostly online. We might call you for clarifications.

For further details please call us at 613-265-7472, or visit us online at: http://www.docsnaps.com/tax-season-help

Watch this space for details as they emerge…

Wall street Journal blog – http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2009/01/29/how-small-businesses-can-avoid-a-tax-audit/

Specifically:

- Keep organized records and receipts. Obvious, right? But it can’t be stressed enough. Messy records look like somebody’s trying to hide something or may have forgotten to document that one big payment. Use an accounting program that allows for double-entry bookkeeping, and keep very neat records and receipts.

It is vital to store your financial records (either as paper or images).  Every small receipt matters.  And the IRS does accept PDF images as proof.

An old friend of mine who started life as a techie is now a successful salesperson.  Listening to some of the challenges I faced he give me some pointers about sales that addresses my engineering background.

TIPS

1. People are resistant to change – The value you deliver should be compelling enough for them to adopt it.
2. Talk to the person for whom your product/service makes a big difference
3. Target the solution to the right audience – You might have several great features which you personally like, but you should highlight those that would solve the unique problems faced by that prospective client.
4. Quantify, measure, re-evaluate, and re-invent your sales strategy – In many ways sales is like an engineering process.
5. Listen and don’t challenge – Techies tend to argue and get into information/IQ wars which is detrimental to the sales process.

One or more of these tips were able to solve all my problems.

Problem 1: I did a presentation to a company which was very eager to use DocSnaps.  But after the presentation, not only were there no questions, but it took me an additional month to close the sale.

Solution 1: Always start a presentation by asking the audience about some of the problems they face, and get an idea of what is important to them.  If possible tailor your presentation to different segments.  In my case I was gloating over a particular feature of our product that was perceived as a threat to the job security of some people in the audience.

Problem 2: An accountant who was very interested in our solution only had a few of his customers use our product even after 2 months of usage.  I was expecting a lot more would sign on…

Solution 2: The problem was not that the accountant was not interested enough, it was just that the message was getting diluted when he spoke to his clients.  I was not selling to the right person.  The people who were making the buying decision in this case were his clients.  Eventually I did a presentation for his clients specifically geared towards their needs with a lot more success.

Problem 3: A company called hubspot was blogged by Techcrunch which has a following of close to 1 million readers, in May, 2008.  As expected there was a surge in website visitors to hubspot.  But how many of these did they convert to paying customers? 2.

Check out their blog.

Solution 3: Was it because 1 – It was not compelling enough? 2 – Techcrunch readers were not the right audience? 3 – Techcrunch did not highlight the right features on their website (this happens when a 3rd party such as an independent blog or newspaper reports on you) ? The company did some analysis and concluded that TC readers were not their target market.  The solution here is that now they know what to expect (or not) if they decide to target websites similar to TC.

For a Web 2.0 company, the way to incorporate these sales tips is by effectively communicating with customers through public facing channels like the website, blogs, forums, and engaging them in candid dialog.