Day 9

Today was a long day... Mainly worked on checking out Quickbooks Simple Start Free Edition and Microsoft Accounting Express 2007. Quickbooks, as expected, is a mature product, templates look better than that of Microsoft Accounting. For example, I like that Quickbooks facilitates the emailing of PDF invoices. While Microsoft Accounting Express 2007 also facilitates emailing of invoices through Outlook, the format is in Word (not ideal) and forces me to email only out of whatever email account I have set up on Outlook. Functionality-wise, Microsoft Accounting Express 2007 has richer features. The basic stuff is pretty much the same between the two though. My main complaints -

• No facilitation of accounting beyond basic invoice, payment, expense, issue check, etc. I was expecting more facilitation of the capital contribution, owners' equity, and equity draw accounts. Saw some help topics in QuickBooks talking about this. I really need to learn those basic Accounting principles too.
• No integration with a credit card processing API or SOA platform that can be used in free-form web applications. There is credit card integration, but only with email, fax, phone, point-of-sale, and "Quickbooks-compatible Web Store providers".

A lot of CRMs that we're evaluating is starting to offer similar functionalities as that seen in these basic book keeping packages. It's interesting. While it's tempting to have one less application/platform to deal with, we also need to consider "integration" with accountants & tax software, thoroughness & compliance of the software to ensure compliance with IRS requirements.

Another challenge I ran into today: just because I'm working from home, family thinks it's OK to get me to help with personal stuff. That really disrupts my rhythm. I read about that in the startup book that I have. And now it's happening. I'll see how the situation is and decide how to handle.

The day really flew by very quickly. i still have so much more to do!!! I was hoping to start working on screenshots again today, but no such luck. I need to wrap up understanding Accounting tomorrow and really get those screenshots moving.