Wave Accounting Inc. today announced the closing of its Series A financing round, led by Charles River Ventures (CRV), with the participation of OMERS Ventures. The CDN$5 million in financing allows Wave to continue developing its free online accounting software for small businesses and marketing it internationally.

Wave is already the fastest-growing online accounting application for small businesses. Wave eliminates manual data entry by importing transactions automatically from a user's bank account or electronic statement, and then applies smart technology to make accounting fast and easy. Features like these have led Wave to sign up almost 75,000 small businesses in 198 countries around the world since its launch less than 11 months ago.

It wasn’t too long ago that the term “mobile workforce” was seen as almost exclusively a blue collar issue. Jobs in construction and home service repairs often needed some sort of mobile connectivity to work efficiently. However, these days almost any type of workforce has a need for mobile solutions.

According to research firm IDC, over 75% of the entire workforce in the United States is mobile in 2011. Jobs all across the pay scale have a need for staying mobile, and it’s vital for a company to be connected if they want to succeed.

With all this connectivity comes confusion and problems, though. Recently, an oilfield instrumentation system provider performed an internal audit on their customer service and help desk. They found that roughly 30% of the time those employees were so busy going back and forth with mobile employees they couldn’t actually do their job of talking to customers!

Although it can often be fluid, maintaining a relationship with your customers can also sometimes get very complicated. For example, if you only have a few employees trying to deal with a growing number of customers, how are you supposed to keep track of all the dialogue and that’s exchanged? Or what those same customers are saying about you online? Or even something as simple as how much money they still owe on their account?

Streamlining your business to avoid costly mistakes is certainly the way to go, as any slowdowns can make the difference between success and failure in the high stakes world of small business ownership. Because CRM is one of the most vital, yet most complex, parts of your business, we would like to help you make the most of it. Thus we looked up the existing solutions and selected the best apps to create the most efficient CRM strategy for your business, at the lowest cost possible and with the highest results.

 

As part of an effort to further drive efficiency and automation across their organization, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated has selected Taulia Inc's Invoicement® Suite to automate their invoice processing, improve supplier relationships, and reduce supply chain costs through dynamic discounting.

Organizations continue to look for additional ways to lower operating costs. As part of this mission, CFOs and Finance Executives look to consolidate and standardize financial processes while controlling and managing corporate spending.

Zoho launched the 26th addition to its growing suite of Web-based applications: Zoho Books. It's now available both from Zoho and from the Google Apps Marketplace. It costs $24 per month, with two users included. Additional users will cost $5 per month.

The application also integrates with Paypal, Google Checkout & Authorize.net to receive payments. Bank transactions need currently need to be adding manually, but Zoho spokesperson Raju Vegesna says bank integration will be implemented soon.

Expensify, the startup helps take the endless headaches out of expense reports has launched a new version of it's expense platform.

What makes Expensify so easy is that it can pull in your transaction records and automatically categorize them. All you need to do is register your credit cards with the platform, and the site will automatically import E-receipts. You can also take a photo of paper receipts and import it. Once your transactions are in the system, you can tag expenses and then submit the expense report to your business’s bookkeeper for reimbursement.

The new version includes a realtime analytics dashboard to show expenses by category, day, and unreported expenses. Expensify also includes customizable CSV and Excel export. The platform also now supports bulk report operations to better manage employees in large companies.The company has also added performance improvements and a new UI.

 

Joining fellow on-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor NetSuite, Intacct is taking aim at services-based businesses with a new product and partnership.

Intacct's Project Accounting application, now generally available, will help services companies keep better track of employee project hours and expenses compared to ad-hoc approaches done with spreadsheets or paper documents, according to the vendor. It also generates invoices based on that data, and provides users with role-based dashboards that let them keep tabs on a project's progress.

The accounting software model is in the midst of a major transition toward the use of hosted, on-demand services. Some experts are advocating a switch to a purely online Software as a Service (SaaS) model, where data and programs are hosted in secure data centers. Many industry leaders, including Sage, Intuit, CCH, Thomson Reuters and Microsoft, have advocated a switch to a model of some locally installed applications and some hosted services (also known as “software plus services”).

This hybrid approach, which has been adopted by many publishers, offers solutions that leverage the cloud for reach and flexibility, but connect into established on-premise systems for depth of features. For example, the Sage Non-Profit Solutions group recently announced ePhilanthropy, a web-based service targeted at nonprofit fundraising. While there are many successful products that use this model, including many banking and payroll applications, the demise of on-premise software will not occur overnight. Locally installed, Windows-based accounting software will, for the foreseeable future, dominate the small business market, and will be supplemented by online services that meet specific customer needs.

Allow me to restate my last point. Just as we still read print magazines, watch television, listen to radio stations and talk on landline telephones, Windows-based accounting software will continue to exist far into the future, although how it is used will change significantly. More simply (with apologies to Mark Twain), the rumors of the imminent death of Windows-based accounting software are greatly exaggerated.

Clear Books, the UK based privately held online accounting application, announces a new financing deal from key strategic investors for an undisclosed sum. Clear Books provides an online alternative to more traditional desktop accounting software products provided by The Sage Group PLC and Intuit INC, and a more UK focused service than online international competitors Xero Limited. The deal will enable Clear Books to increase its development resources and accelerate growth plans in the UK.

Clear Books is a rapidly growing company with customer numbers increasing more than 20% per month. It is quickly establishing itself as a leader in the growing SaaS online accounting software market in the UK. Managing Director, Tim Fouracre, said, "Our cash flows continue to reflect impressive growth month on month, but this additional financing will help us accelerate our expansion plans. One of our key objectives is to add depth to our development team to ensure we continue to develop the very best application. Our aim is to make both maintaining company accounts and doing the bookkeeping as easy as possible for small businesses. We are already making great progress on this front with our online VAT filing direct to HMRC and our new payroll module".

Clear Books is an online accounting application for small businesses. Clear Books was incorporated in July 2010 as a joint venture between Chartered Accountant and former KPMG employee Tim Fouracre, and online media company, Fubra Limited. The service was officially launced in July 2009 with a slogan "Online accounting to free your time" and costs from GBP 5 per month. Upgrades and support are free and no installation or prior knowledge of accounting is required. 

FreshBooks has announced the release of multi-currency  for their on demand billing solution. Users can now bill customers and collect payment using multiple currencies inside FreshBooks.

Here's a sneak peak at the features:

• Foreign currency invoicing
  • Now, when you create a new invoice (or estimate, or recurring invoice), you’ll be prompted to choose a currency for that invoice. Doesn’t get much simpler than this. The appropriate currency symbol and number formatting will appear dynamically, and carry over to your template.
• Helpful exchange rates
  • Most of your FreshBooks account will continue to work in your base currency. For example, if you’re a USD company, your re-usable items and project rates will continue to be stored in USD. When you put these on a foreign currency invoice, however, a helpful exchange rate widget will let you dynamically mark up (or down) your invoice according to the latest exchange rate data.
• Multi-currency reporting
  • Starting now, reports will group values and totals according to the currency in which they take place. There’s a few exceptions, most notably the Profit and Loss report, which will report figures solely in your base currency by averaging exchange rate data over the queried period.
• Bonus! Account statement redesign
  • Even if you don’t plan to make use of our new multi-currency features, there’s still good news: we’ve jazzed up our account statement to look more like our sharp new invoice template. And for the first time, printed account statements will fit in double-windowed envelopes, perfect for snail mailing to your clients.

Learn more about the release here: http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2010/01/13/multi-currency-arrives-at-freshbooks/