Zoho Books Gets Even Easier to Use With Automatic Bank Feeds

| By Prashant
9

We’re always looking for ways to simplify life for our customers. We are thrilled to announce a major update to our accounting software, Zoho Books: You are now able to connect your bank and credit card accounts securely and automatically download transactions right into Zoho Books.

Reduce manual data entry
Let me illustrate with this with a simple example. You’ve bought a flight ticket using your credit card. To keep track of this in your accounting system, you’d need to manually classify this as a Travel Expense and enter multiple information including the amount, date, reference number, the airline from whom the ticket was purchased etc. This is tedious and can lead to mistakes. Even after going through this you are still not done – you still need to reconcile this with your bank statement.…


Is Double-Entry Accounting here for eternity?

| By Prashant
5


Take any popular

accounting software
 today, be it a SAAS player like us or our desktop counterparts or even the entreprisey ERP solutions, and I bet they all are based on double-entry accounting. For the uninitiated, double-entry accounting is a system of bookkeeping that enforces recording two aspects of a financial transaction – one that indicates the source of amount involved and another to indicate how it is put to use. It is said that this method was first codified by Luca Pacioli, an Italian monk in the fifteenth century (and I’ll leave it to The Almighty

Wikipedia
 to explain the rest).

It is fascinating to see that a system devised to catch financial inaccuracies six centuries back still finds its place in the world of accounting software and remains largely untouched.…


SAMTEQ Limited gets paid faster using Zoho Invoice and improves its cash flow

| By Prashant
1


Recently, I had a tete-a-tete with Ken Coley of SAMTEQ Limited, a Scottish Web development company. He had some interesting things to share on his company and how

Zoho Invoice
 fits into his fast growing business. Some excerpts from our conversation:


1. How did SAMTEQ get started?


SAMTEQ Limited was established in 2009 by Sam Coley, at the age of 16 and has enjoyed rapid growth to a successful web development company. SAMTEQ creates web solutions for small to medium businesses, based in Scotland but serving the UK and beyond. SAMTEQ specialises on making extremely easy to manage websites, with a unique CMS system developed in-house. SAMTEQ customers tend to be owner managers and have little time to do anything apart from concentrate on their business.


Cash is King: Cash Flow Statement in Zoho Books

| By Prashant
1

Real physical cash is what keeps your business running. It helps you pay your employees, make prompt vendor payments, juggle your marketing budget, meet unforeseen emergency expenses etc.

Isn’t it surprising, nay, shocking then to find that many businesses don’t know how much cash they have in their kitty at a given moment of time? And, when accessing this information is difficult, taking adequate action when cash levels fall below a certain threshold isn’t easy either. That could upset the best laid plans of any business.

We wanted businesses regardless of their size, not to get caught unawares but to overcome such a situation. So the team behind Zoho Books, the makers of your favorite

online accounting software
, has come up with a nice

cash flow report
. This report pretty much summarizes everything that has to do with your cash & cash equivalent accounts like checking and savings accounts.…


Online Payment Gateway Usage Statistics

| By Prashant
7

Work.Online
reads 
Zoho’s tagline. As a corollary to this, the Zoho Invoice team is fanatical that small businesses invoice.online and get paid.online. When your invoicing software was released, it was integrated with PayPal and we quickly added Authorize.net and Google Checkout to our repertoire. With that, we completed the troika of payment gateways to provide our customers a complete online invoicing experience. It is over two years since our customers have been accepting electronic payments and it is time to introspect and to gain interesting insights into to which payment gateway most of our customers turn to.


Multi-Currency Enhancements in Zoho Invoice

| By Prashant
9

When we launched Zoho Invoice last year it was one of the few affordable online invoicing services to support multiple currencies. However, there were some limitations and we have been pleasantly surprised by the number of users seeking improvements. This upgrade addresses these limitations to a large extent. So let’s quickly get down to the details:

Currency decimal places – It’s configurable!

Prior to the upgrade, irrespective of the currency in which you operate the amounts were rounded to two decimal places. This doesn’t go well with customers in a few countries. Let me give you an example of Japanese Yen (JPY) that does not  have decimal places. Previously, when you raise an invoice totaling 100 Yen, the amount would appear as 100.00 in the invoice.…