Office Accounting 2007 integrates deeply with Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager.
Outlook 2007 with Business Contact
Manager
Business Contact Manager is a feature of the Professional, Small Business and Ultimate editions of Outlook 2007. Using the same database as Office Accounting 2007, it converts outlook into a customer relationship management package with features such as accounts, business contacts, communication history, opportunities, opportunity and sales funnel, marketing campaigns, and business projects.
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Note |
Outlook 2003 with
Business Contact Manager Update also integrates with Office Accounting 2007.
However the older version has less features and uses a different database
instance so it may end up taking up most of you memory and processing power
unless Office Accounting is installed on a different computer. The integration
with the earlier version is therefore mostly recommended for employees who
won’t be using Office Accounting on a daily basis.
In Office Accounting it is very easy to set up the integration with Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager. Simply select Integrate with Business Contact Manager in the Company menu.
Starting
the Integration with Business Contact Manager
This will open up the integration wizard:
Integrate
with Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager Wizard
Unless you have special integration needs (e.g. if the Business Contact Manager database is located on a network location) select Standard Integration and click Next.
Back up
databases
Review the location of the two databases backups before they are merged. Add an optional password if you want to. Click Integrate.
Integrating
Integrating the two databases may take a few minutes depending on the amount of data in Office Accounting and Business Contact Manager.
Integration
completed
When you combine Office Accounting Professional 2007 with Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager (BCM), you get a complete business and financial picture of your customers in one place. From within Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager, employees can turn opportunities into quotes, orders, and invoices in Office Accounting Professional 2007—without having to reenter information in another program. Employees can mark their Outlook calendar appointments, projects, tasks, and phone logs as billable and automatically send that information to Office Accounting Professional 2007 to create customer invoices.
Because the programs share a database, data entered in either program automatically flows to the other so information is always synchronized. This keeps you informed of account and customer changes and provides a central location for critical information, which can also be shared with employees selectively, based on their roles.
There is another great advantage about the integration with Business Contact Manager. Customer facing employees (like sales staff and business owners) can access financial information directly from Outlook and they don’t even have to have Office Accounting installed on their PC. Just as long as the financial data is hosted by Office Accounting Professional, it can be shared by multiple users of Outlook with Business Contact Manager.
Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager
Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager features a long list of improvements and new features:
· Customization - Tailor Business Contact Manager for Outlook to fit your business needs by customizing forms, lists, and reports.
· Marketing Campaigns - Manage and measure the effectiveness of the marketing content that you create. Promote your brand, quickly see which Marketing Campaigns help you generate more business, and improve customer satisfaction. If you have created Marketing Campaigns before, Business Contact Manager for Outlook helps you distribute the Marketing Campaigns more effectively. If you're new to marketing your business, Business Contact Manager for Outlook guides you through the process.
· Business Projects and Project Tasks - Manage your time and business better by using the Business Project feature. Business Projects give you a single place to store all related project information, tasks, and assignments so that you can quickly see who's doing what project task, and its due date. Easily share project information across your company. For example, you can assign project tasks to colleagues, which they can see in their To-Do Bar.
· Offline - Take your data with you on your portable computer so that you can see how your business is doing at any time. View reports, follow up with customers, create new Business Projects, or just update Account and Business Contact information. When you return to your office, it is easy to synchronize the information.
· Business Contact Manager for Outlook E-Mail Marketing Service - By combining the power of the E-mail Marketing Service with Business Contact Manager for Outlook, you can send specifically targeted e-mailings to your customers, and keep track of the responses to your e-mailings. The E-mail Marketing Service is free to try and provides a cost-effective and powerful way to reach your customers in a personal way. To use the E-mail Marketing Service, create a Marketing Campaign, and then select the Campaign Type as E-mail and the Delivery Method as E-mail Marketing Service.
· Home Page - Get a complete view of critical information through the centralized home page. This customizable home page helps you summarize your important business metrics and prioritize business tasks.
· Leads or prospects - Differentiate leads or prospects from existing Business Contacts, and create customized reports.
· Search Folders - Use Search Folders to gather Accounts, Business Contacts, Opportunities, Business Projects, or communication history items into a folder based on your criteria, such as all Business Contacts with an excellent rating.
· Reports - Use one of the more than 50 reports to see the state of Accounts, Business Contacts, leads, Opportunities, activities, Business Projects, and Marketing Campaigns. Use the new report filtering capabilities to easily sort and filter data, and then export it to Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for further analysis.
· Integration with Office Accounting 2007 - When you combine Business Contact Manager for Outlook with Office Accounting, your Business Contact information and financial history are seamlessly integrated. Sales opportunities can be easily converted into quotes, sales orders, and invoices in your accounting application.
· Sharing of customer data and communication history across your business - Sharing Accounts, Business Contacts, leads or prospects, and Opportunities gives you and your colleagues a rich view of all communications that your company has had with each customer. This feature gives everyone the shared customer history data that they need to respond faster and serve customers better.
· Opportunities - Quickly organize, manage, and track all of your Opportunities, including details such as sales stage, potential value, and estimated close date, so you can assess potential sales and make better-informed business decisions.
· Communication History - Enjoy immediate access to the history of your customer interactions. Items stored in the Communication History folder include business notes, phone logs, Opportunities, Business Projects, tasks, e-mail messages, appointments, and files. It's easy to share this communication history with your colleagues.
· Import and Export - Easily import and export data from or to various applications and formats, including ACT!, QuickBooks, Access, Excel and many others. The enhanced mapping capabilities make it simple to transfer information from other applications that may have different fields than Business Contact Manager for Outlook.
There are six main points of integration with Office Accounting:
1. Share contact information for accounts and customers
2. See customer and account financial history and drill down to the details directly from Outlook
3. Use item and inventory lists from Office Accounting when creating opportunities in Outlook
4. Convert opportunities to quotes, sales orders or invoices in Office Accounting
5. Convert Outlook appointments and tasks to time entries and invoice them in Office Accounting
6. Run Office Accounting reports directly from Outlook
Office Accounting and Outlook with Business Contact Manager share the same data store when they have been integrated. This means that whenever you update contact information in Outlook with Business Contact Manager or Office Accounting, the other application will automatically be updated.
Account in Business Contact Manager
Accounts in Business Contact Manager correspond to customers in Office Accounting.
Customer list
So let us look at the account form in Business Contact Manager:
Business Contact Manager Account form
Notice that the account doesn’t have an email address. If we add sales@firststatecomputerservices.com in the email address field and save the form, the customer in Office Accounting will automatically be updated.
Updated customer form
Also notice that the contacts in Office Accounting are business contacts in Outlook and their information is shared as well.
From the Outlook account form you can also see the financial summary and financial history from the corresponding Office Accounting customer.
Financial summary of account
The financial history can also be seen from outlook and you can double-click on a document in the history to see the corresponding form in Office Accounting.
Financial history of account
Invoice opened from financial history
If Office Accounting Professional is installed on a remote PC, the person using Outlook with Business Contact Manager actually doesn’t have to have Office Accounting installed locally – he or she can still see the financial history items with all detail.
When you have integrated Office Accounting and Outlook with Business Contact Manager you can use the items in Office Accounting on opportunities.
Outlook opportunity with Office Accounting item
When a sales person using Outlook with Business Contact Manager is using an opportunity to track a sales process, the opportunity can be converted to a quote, sales order or invoice, when the customer asks for it.
Convert opportunity
Just select the convert to button on the ribbon at the top of the form and select either to convert it to a quote, a sales order or an invoice. Note that only Office Accounting Professional use sales orders.
The quote can be edited in the Office Accounting form just like any other quote and it will be saved in the Office Accounting database. The memo field will display information that the quote was converted from Outlook with Business Contact Manager.
One of the most powerful features for users from the professional services and trade services industries are that they can convert the Outlook appointments, tasks and project tasks to time slips in Office Accounting that can be invoiced to a customer. So when a billable meeting is held or a billable task has been performed, it can be converted to an invoice for correct billing.
There are two options in Outlook with Business Contact Manager. Either you can create time slips whenever a task or an appointment has been completed or you can create time slips on a weekly or monthly basis by selecting submit billable time feature in the Business Contact Manager menu.
Submit billable time
In the following we will show how to create time slips from an appointment, but the process is the same for tasks and project tasks.
1. Create an appointment for an account or business contact in Outlook
Outlook appointment for account
2. When the meeting has been completed open up the appointment, mark it billable by clicking the billable button (if applicable) and click on the Create Time Entry button in the ribbon.
Create time entry from Outlook appointment
3. This will open up a time entry in Office Accounting.
Time entry
4. You have to select a billing item (usually a service item) if you want to bill this time to your customer. If a different person is responsible for the billing, you can just Save and Close the form, but if you want to create an invoice, press Create Invoice on the toolbar. This will open the invoice form.
Invoice from time entry
5. The invoice now contains the information from the original appointment.
Updated financial history
6. The financial history in Outlook is now updated with the invoice.
The final integration point is the ability to run financial reports directly from Outlook. To run financial reports, select Reports, Financial reports in the Business Contact Manager menu.
Financial reports menu
This will open up the financial reports dialog.
Financial reports dialog
Select the report you want to display and press Open Report.
Profit and Loss report
Based on the role-based permissions given in Office Accounting Professional, the Outlook user can be given access to a desired subset of the areas of Office Accounting and their reports (e.g. sales people can be given access to only sales and inventory reports).
Office Accounting allows you to print customer and vendor facing documents such as quotes, sales orders*, invoices, sales receipts, customer credit memos and purchase orders* to Word for a more professional look and feel.
*Office
Accounting Professional only
The process is similar for all the document types, so in the following we will show you how to print an invoice to Word:
1. Open up the desired document in Office Accounting.
Invoice form
2. Select Print on the File menu (do not use the icon on the toolbar).
Select Print
3. This will open the modified Windows Print dialog:
Print dialog
4. Select Word template under print options and click the Templates button. This will open the Select Word Templates dialog.
Select Word template
5. Select a template on the list and click Select.
Print dialog with template selected
6. The print dialog will now display the selected template. Click OK. This will open Microsoft Word in the background and print the invoice to the selected printer. After the document has been printed, Word will close.
Word invoice
It is recommended that you customize one or more templates to include your company logo and modify the layout to your liking.
Office Accounting provides a long list of Word templates for quotes, sales orders invoices and other documents. This training article will help you customize the template to make your quotes, invoices and other external documents look professional.
To customize a template, select Manage Word Templates in the Customer menu.
Manage Word templates dialog
Select the template you want to modify and click Modify.
Word 2007 with invoice template
This will open Microsoft Word with the selected template (template looks slightly different in Word 2003). The template will be shown with purple XML tags for Office Accounting data fields (see below), so it may look confusing. We recommend that you look at the invoice in a print preview before you customize it.
Print preview of invoice template
Close the preview.
The first thing we will do to customize the invoice is to insert a company logo. Click on the Your logo here image and click on insert picture in word.
Insert logo
Browse to the company logo image and insert the image. If you use letterhead paper, you should just delete the logo image and make room for the letterhead.
Invoice with logo
You can also modify other parts of the invoice template such as the slogan and the fonts.
Formatted invoice
Data fields are shown with purple XML tags, e.g. the financial date of the invoice is shown as follows:
XML tag
To remove a data field from the invoice, simply select the whole tag (with content) and press delete.
To add a data field, follow these steps:
1. Place the cursor to the place in the document where you want the data to appear.
2. Find the data field in the right hand document actions sidebar
3. Click on the data field and the XML tag will be inserted into the template
Formatted invoice with due data inserted
Preview your invoice from time to time.
Preview of completed template
When you are happy with your edits, save the template with a new name:
Save template
You can now shut down Word. The next time you want to print an invoice, open the invoice form and select Print on the File menu. This will open up the print dialog.
Print dialog
In the print dialog, select Word template in print options, click on the Templates button and select the template you just created. Select the printer Name, click OK and your will now print invoices using the new template.
You can use Office Accounting in combination with Microsoft Word to write letters to customers, vendors, or employees. Office Accounting performs Word mail-merge using Word templates and data from the Office Accounting database.
Office Accounting comes with its own selection of business letters, already formatted as Word templates.
1. To start writing a letter, click Write letters on the Customer menu.
2. This will open the Write letter Wizard. Click Next.
3. Select Customer as recipient and select the template you want to use. You can also create, modify or delete word templates. Click Next.
4. Select the recipients by picking filter options, data range and name list and click Next. In the example above all active customers who are 31 days or more overdue have been selected.
5. Add a comment and signature and press Create Letters.
6. Word will now open with the merged letters (Word 2007 shown above). You can review the letters and print them from Word.
Office Accounting 2007 allows users
to take full advantage of Excel’s extensive functionality by making it easy to
export all lists directly to Excel. Click the Excel button 
on the toolbar to export the list to Excel.
Customer list
Remember you can customize which columns are shown (please refer to the Customization module) before exporting the list to Excel by selecting Add/Remove content in the View menu. Office Accounting supports export to Excel XP, Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.
Customer list exported to Excel 2007
Some of the advantages of exporting the list to excel are that you can use Excel features such as auto filter, conditional formatting, multi-column sorting and calculations.
Setting a filter
A filter can help you sort and filter columns of data.
Filtering on state
You can filter on any number of columns at the same time.
Customer list filtered on state and sorted by zip code
Another great feature is conditional formatting.
Setting conditional formatting in Excel 2007
Conditional formatting uses color to distinguish between different numbers - in the example below small and negative numbers have been colored red and large positive numbers have been colored green.
Conditional formatting applied
Office Accounting 2007 allows
users to take full advantage of Excel’s extensive functionality by making it
easy to export reports directly to Excel. Click the Excel button on the report toolbar to export the report to
Excel.
Office Accounting exports reports with formulas and formatting to Excel.
As an example we can look at the Sales by customer detail report:
Sales by customer detail report
Report exported to Excel 2003, including formulas and formatting
Office Accounting 2007 can export reports to the three latest versions of Excel (Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007).