Judy Hesser, owner of Topaz Natural Pet Products, LLC, in Denver, CO, recently took
a vacation to the Grand Tetons. Thanks to Office Accounting and Small Business Server,
she was able to take her office with her remotely, while still enjoying her trip.
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Alan Shrater, President of Solutions Unlimited Inc., in Denver, and a Microsoft
Small Business Specialist, saw to it that that was possible. Like many of his clients,
Hesser spends a lot of her time out of her office, yet still needs access to her
business information.
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Client Benefits
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Partner Benefits
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Manage business while travelling with remote access
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Increased revenue over basic Small Business Server installations
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Better reporting through dashboards built in Sharepoint
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Improved networking with accounting professionals leads to new business
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About four months ago, Shrater moved Hesser from another small business accounting
system after she expressed her frustrations with a lack of accessibility to her
data, even when using an online version. That version allowed her to enter invoices
from wherever she was, but wouldn’t satisfy her needs for the information she needed
to run her business.
Microsoft products solved her problem. “It’s working very well, especially with
SQL Server as a back end,” she says.
Microsoft Office Accounting is a good example of the whole being greater than the
sum of its parts, according to Shrater. It’s everything else that Office Accounting
brings to the table that’s important. “That’s when you start seeing Sharepoint,
seeing SQL Server,” he says. “You start looking at things from a different perspective.
You start saying, How can I use this foundation to provide business information and
decision support? How can I use this to affect my bottom line?”
If you take Office Accounting alone, he says, it’s a good foundation product, but
it lives on a SQL database. “That means I can get to the data from Excel, from Word,
from Access, even from Microsoft Query,” Shrater says. Shrater can also use Sharepoint
as a front end to his accounting data, to build dashboards. He can use SQL reporting
services if he wants to use strong tools.
Using Office Accounting, Shrater and his associates can all look into data from
whatever perspective they want, to determine what his clients’ driving questions
are, and to help answer them.
Shrater cites the MPAN program as another important element. “The story is, in a
nutshell, two words: Better Together,” he says. That is, partners working in tandem
with accounting professionals to solve problems.
And Office Accounting is working well in tandem with myriad other software solutions,
which gives Judy Hesser the freedom to be out of the office, yet be in the office.
“Using Office Accounting as a foundation, we’re no longer talking about a basic
small business accounting system,” Shrater says. “We’re talking about a small business
information system.”