Posts Tagged entrepreneur
Bookkeeping and Tax Preparation Help with DocSnaps
Posted by gordonlo in Guest Bloggers on October 17, 2009
Whether you are a sole proprietor or a small business, bookkeeping data entry is a nettlesome problem. DocSnaps helps you solve the paper problem and provides you completed books that you can take to your accountant or export any bookkeeping software like Quickbooks, or Simply Accounting.

Paper Pile
So gather up all your receipts and documents (bank statements, credit card statements, etc) that are needed for your bookkeeping and instead of manually entering all the information into an accounting software, you can scan the documents and upload them to your DocSnaps account. Not only are all your records stored online, but bookkeeping transactions are created for you. Here are the steps:
1. Create a DocSnaps account – First create a DocSnaps account if you don’t already have one. Go to the Signup page and fill in the simple form to get your new account activated. You will get an email to the email address you entered in the sign-up form with a welcome message and your own account on docsnaps. This is an email in the format: xxxxx@send.docsnaps.com. This is the email to which you send all your documents.
2. Upload all your documents – Next depending upon the number of documents you have and the type you can either snap them, scan them, eFax them, or email them. Here is how:

Snap a receipt
a. Snap them – This is ideal for receipts that you encounter on the road – eg. at the gas pump, or restaurant. Use your cellphone camera (resolution should be more then 1.5 MP) to take pictures of individual receipts. Place the receipt on a flat surface and hold the camera at least 1 feet above the receipt until you can see the full image in the viewfinder. Snap the picture keeping the camera steady. Similarly snap pictures of all your receipts – one snap shot per receipt. You can email each of these to your DocSnaps account one by one, or first capture them all, and when you get to computer download them and email to your DocSnaps account as an attachment.
b. Scan them – This is ideal for processing a large backlog of documents. With a good office scanner like Fujitsu ScanSnap scan in all your documents into PDF files. It is very fast and can take in paper of different sizes and thickness – bank statements, telephone bills, store receipts etc. You can get through a full folder of documents in less than 10 minutes. Once done log in to your DocSnaps account and upload the scanned images. You can even zip up all the documents and upload them. We will unzip the file, and split up large pdf files into individual documents.
c. eFax them – Ideal for automatically storing all your faxes, and capturing vendor invoices. If you have an eFax account then set the email address to your DocSnaps account email. This way any vendor invoices and faxes sent to you will go directly into your document repository online, where it will be indexed and processed. You can get an eFax account from eFax, or Octopus IP.

Record list in DocSnaps
d. email them – Ideal for capturing online transactions. When you purchase goods or services online vendors send you the bill to your email account. Services companies also send you monthly bills online (eg. utilities, server hosting, etc.), which can be set to automatically forward to your DocSnaps account.
3. Manage records online – DocSnaps FLY account comes with a set of expense categories. In the SPEED account you can create your own chart of accounts. Once all the documents are in your DocSnaps account, they will be indexed, categorized based on your expense categories or chart of accounts, and transactions created for them. This allows you to search all your records, tag them (eg. Project 1, business trip to new york, etc.), and view them online from anywhere. It gives you a breakdown of all your expenses by category, and generates tag reports.

DocSnaps Overview Page
4. Get expense reports and bookkeeping done – You can then export all this data to Quickbooks, Simply accounting, or a csv file. Select all the transactions you want to export and choose the format and it will generate the file for you. Then open your accounting application and import the data. For example, the Quickbooks export produces and iif file. This can then be imported into Quickbooks which will generate transactions for you. Similarly a csv file can be opened and manipulated by Excel.
5. Bookkeeping online – Need bookkeeping help? There are several virtual bookkeepers who can help you with your bookkeeping online. Just send a twitter to @docsnaps or email marketing@docsnaps.com, and we will hook you up with a good bookkeeper or accountant.
Bill Clinton Business Innovation at PanIIT 2009
Posted by vinkash in Guest Bloggers on October 11, 2009
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:
- 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
- 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.
- 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.

Bill Clinton addressing PanIIT
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.
We Won PanIIT2009 Business Plan Competition
Posted by vinkash in small-business on October 9, 2009
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
Free Tools and Applications for Small Business
Posted by vinkash in small-business, startup on October 3, 2009
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

