The keynote on the second day was delivered by Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. He spoke about how innovation by a few sharp minds can be scaled up to bring prosperity in developing countries. He used props, statistics, and his personal experience in countries, most recently in Haiti. Here are a few notes about his speech and general observations about IIT:

Bill Clinton addressing PanIIT

1. In the middle of his speech he got a call on his cell. He took the call since he said that only Hillary had that number, and told her that he was in the middle of his speech to IIT. He then asked her “Yes or no?” and hung up after that
2. I met a recent graduate from IIT (Chemical Eng – 2009 batch) doing his masters at MIT. He was just one of 15 from his batch of 500 to come to the US. During my time it was not uncommon to have 10 times that many come abroad.
3. The team that was a runners up to us called ECPS were a group of recent graduates. At a time when most people their age would be looking for their first job, one of them is already running a company with 10 people, they have several clients, and they were able to raise sponsorship money for 3 of their team members to come to Chicago.

More information can be found at Pradeep’s blog and Christopher’s blog. 

It is good to see some real work being done in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship in developing countries. And others that are further along and opening their borders to innovation.

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

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.