Thomas Meehan is a big cheerleader for Office Accounting. A former CFO, he’s now
a Small Business Specialist and a Microsoft MCSE whose consulting firm has served
the tony Marin County area north of San Francisco since 1998.
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He’s been creative with his engagements. By integrating Small Business Server with
SharePoint services, one of Meehan’s clients, a company that provides solar power
for wineries, can set up access to the project server. “It gives everyone real-time,
non-verbal communication,” Meehan says. Users can get a real-time view of a given
project and respond in their own time, assured that the most recent updates are
always there.
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Client Benefits
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Partner Benefits
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Improved CRM with Accounting integration
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New client development through community visibility
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Faster billing with electronic invoicing through outlook
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Helps pull through Small Business Server Sales
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Better job cost reporting and allocation of overhead
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Additional revenue from client training opportunities
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With another client, a management company for home builders, he set up jobs as accounts.
The company can then relate all subcontractors and suppliers and vendors to the
job and have all of the information there in one place. They can also link a job
to Microsoft Project to track it.
Most of the clients that Meehan converts are coming over from QuickBooks Pro, but
he actually moved a contractor over from QuickBooks Enterprise. They discovered
the CRM-like capabilities of Office Accounting, all the information they’d have
at their fingertips, and the labor savings was enough to convince them. Meehan has
even figured out how to modify Office Accounting to allocate overhead to jobs.
A lot of Meehan’s clients export to Excel and take advantage of Excel Pivot Tables.
“I really love that feature, to be able to go into Excel with a button,” he says.
“Then I can use Excel and Access and do sorting and drill down into a job.”
Salespeople have benefitted, too. They can use their Internet card to get to Small
Business Server, then to Office Accounting, and it’s like they’re sitting in their
own office. They can also set up the server to work with Mobile 5 and Mobile 6 devices,
and there’s their e-mail on the phone.
Meehan has done presentations on Office Accounting to numerous groups in the San
Francisco Bay area. He’s found that when they learn about the integration as well
as the built-in function to sell on the Web, they like it. He’s moved lots of users
from ACT! and Goldmine and QuickBooks to Office Accounting 2007 and Outlook with
Business Contact Manager for that reason.
Partnering makes sense with this powerful combination of tools, Meehan says. “If
it’s a problem I can’t do, I can refer them,” he says. “But if you get them working
just a little with the Office suite, then the light goes on. It just takes some
gentle persuasion.”