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Posts tagged Iphone
Comparing Top Online Accounting Software Packages
Oct 25th
Accounting and bookkeeping are two important aspects of running any type of business, whether its a small retail store or a large corporation. Any business owner knows that these tasks can become a painful experience and if not managed correctly the tax man may end up knocking on your door.
We recently were advised by our accountant that we should invest in an accounting software tool so we can better track our expenses and project future financial growth of the company. There are many off the shelf accounting software products on the market. If you walk down to Office Works or search online, you will find software packages that could either be affordable or just too expensive. Some are easy to use whilst others are just too complex but to be honest with you, there isn’t a perfect product out there that does exactly what you want. Every user and business has different processes so a one size fits all approach to accounting software cannot be used here, but what I can say is that if you have basic accounting requirements then you may be in luck. What I’ve done is compared and detailed some of these software packages so we could make a suitable decision of which product we should be using and hopefully at the same time we can also help our readers find a solution that meets their needs. We decided that using a SaaS (Software as a Service) online package would be the most cost effective solution since you are not required to pay extra for software upgrades – everything is done online. Here’s our list, it’s not the most comprehensive but it’s a start (keep in mind we compared product versions that had similar benefits and costed roughly the same):
| Software Package | 
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Zoho Invoicing (premium) |
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| Price | AU$25 per month (includes GST) +11c for each bank transaction over 100 | US$29 | AU$25 per month (min 3 months) 12 months gets 1 month free | US$29.95 per month | US$25 per month | US$20 per month |
| Number of accounts | Unlimited | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Number of users | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | N/A – 1 for each additional account | 3 + US$5 per additional users | Unlimited |
| Contacts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Number of Invoices and expenses | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | 500 | Unlimited |
| Link Bank accounts | Yes – unlimited | 20 reconciled bank statements per month | Yes – beta test | Don’t think so | No | No |
| Support | Yes – unlimited | Yes – unlimited | Email only | Customer Support Mon-Fri / 9am-6pm ET | Yes | Yes – unlimited |
| Backup | Yes – data is safe and backed up | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free Trial | Yes – 30 days | Yes – lets you raise a maximum of five new invoices and reconcile 50 bank statement lines. The trial is also limited to a maximum period of 180 days. | Yes – 20 Transactions per month | No – 30 day money back guarantee | Yes – 5 invoices per month, 2 users | Yes – 30 days |
| Mobile access | Not sure | iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile | Not sure | Yes, iphone | Not sure | No |
| Payroll | No | No | 25 employees | No | No | No |
| Other Features | accept credit card payment, invoice workflow status, resend invoices, API support, multi-currency | multi-currency, point of sale hardware + software, items and inventory, connectors, CRM/Activities, time based timesheet, inventory, ebay connector | access online payments, Timesheets, Document Sharing, Support Ticketing | Remove Zoho logo from outgoing emails | UK Based company (not ideal for Australia), timesheet, |
| Number of accounts | Unlimited |
Now based on the above comparison we decided to trial the SaaSu (pro) package.
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Free ways to advertise your iphone app
Oct 11th
If you’re a business and just got someone to develop your iphone application then how do you go about advertising your new app considering there is almost a quarter of a million applications available on itunes?
We’ve done some research and below is a list of ways to advertise your iphone app for free:
- Get your family, friends, colleagues to try out the application. Get feedback from them and get them to recommend the app to their friends
- Announce it to the world through social networking – use facebook or twitter to promote your app, even get your friends to share your link on their status. Create a fan page on facebook and a twitter account.
- Join various forums and announce the availability of your app. The biggest iphone forum is http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/
- Make sure you develop a cut down version of your app and give it out for free. Most iphone users will not buy your app straight away unless they trial it. That way you have a chance to up-sell your app if they like it.
- Update your email and forum signatures with a link to your free app.
- Get companies to review your app, e.g gizmodo, cnet, appdictions, whatsoniphone.com, iphoneapppreviews, etc. If they like it then they will definately review it for free.
- If you have guts then create a forum dedicated for your app so you can get others to provide positive and negative feedback.
- Think of an innovative idea to generate PR with companies e.g free advertising on your application
- Get on the News…
Good luck and if there’s any other ideas on ways to advertise your iphone app for free let us know.
Attached Files:
iphone4iphone4
iphone4 or BlackBerry
Aug 24th
With the launch of the iphone4 in Australia our team has been in a heated debate as to which phone our company should be using and promoting. The majority of us have used the blackberry storm but have been having several issues with it since we initially purchased them almost two years ago. There has been version upgrades which have dramatically fixed some of these major issues but at the same time one of my collegues has complained about missed calls. The problem may be related to memory I.e the more applications you have in the background the more memory it consumed. I’ve noticed that as soon as the memory reaches 4Mb the phone just slows down. You can reboot the phone or use quickpull to fix the issue but during this memory leak you might end missing important phone calls. I don’t know whether this will be the same case as the iphones but one of the main reasons why we went with the blackberry was because of the unlimited data download. There is a disclamer about the fair use policy but I ended up watching a full series of an anime and wasn’t charged at all.
So the iphone4 is very appealing because of the new apps like facetime and the speed. The blackberry is quite slow because of it 600 or so hertz processor.
Now I also use the blackberry as a storage device, just plug the usb cable to any pc and it will be mounted as a drive. Apparently you can’t do that with the iphone.. You need itunes.
In terms of apps, the iphone has too many and the blackberry is very limited. But we don’t play games so unlikely our decision will be based on this factor.
So which one should we go for?
ANZ Mobile Banking on the Blackberry
May 7th
Today, I had to process an urgent invoice so I thought to myself why not use my Blackberry to make the payment via the ANZ website.
I thought it was going to be a very simple process, login, enter the bank details and then make the payment. This wasn’t the case.
So this is what happened: I logged in to the ANZ Internet Banking website using the built in Blackberry browser. It was then stuck on the Welcome to the ANZ Internet Banking screen and couldn’t click (press) on the “Proceed to Internet Banking”. Maybe there’s a trick to do this? More >
