The planned upgrade to OnlineOffice is scheduled for implementation on 30th September 2008 at 17:00 BST.

To apply the upgrade it will be necessary to interrupt the WinWeb service for approximately 4 hours. During this time we shall migrate OnlineOffice and perform the upgrade to Version 5.

Should any users have any queries do not hesitate to e-mail support.uk@winweb.net and we shall respond as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience and enjoy OnlineOffice Version5.

Best regards

WinWeb Customer Care

WinWeb has just updated their OnlineOffice accounting module, to include cost centre functionality. This development was by popular demand, as a number of customers requested this functionality. OnlineOffice is aimed at the small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants client.

This allows you to “tag” expenses to products, departments, services or projects - giving you the opportunity to analyze the true cost of a department or any project. This will enable you to see exactly where your money is going and you can evaluate if your projects or products make you any money.

This functionality is free of charge along with the 24/7 live support for all of WinWeb’s software products - another reason to sign up to LiveNet of OnlineOffice for the free 30 days trail, if you do not like or need the full OnlineOffice functionality, you can use the accounting module, including the cost centre functionality, free of charge forever.

This will give you financial information to make even better decisions. ST.

WinWeb is to sponsor the Accountancy Age Award 2007 in the category: Best use of Internet in Practice for the second year. The event is held as last year at the Battersea Park Arena, Battersea, London, in the evening on November 14th, 2007.

This award is the most appropriate award for us to sponsor, since - incredibly - we are still the only online accounting software provider, with an ICAEW approval. It is two years since we first received our accreditation. It is surprising to me that not more accreditations have been made so far, the world is moving online. In accountancy the world is probably turning a bit slower, that makes these awards even more important.

Last year our friends at Goodman-Jones won the price, it will be interesting to see who will win it this year, especially as Goodman Jones is shortlisted again:

• BRAL
• Goodman Jones
• Morris Owen

I wish all the shortlisted candidates good luck and thank those who are not on the list for their great attempts to win the award and hope they will try again next year.

Yours truly will be presenting the award and I look forward to meeting one or two of you at the event. Should be a great night. ST.

With our recent launch of OnlineOffice 4, we have kept our promise to supply our online accounting software to every small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants free of charge forever.

But not only that - lets face it, if you want free accounting software, you could try the open source arena or other suppliers, even Intuit offers a watered down version of their accounting software free of charge - but a whole raft of other benefits can be gained by using our award winning product:

• Free 24/7 live online support - so when you work after 5 pm, we are still here to help and you do not have to pay for it;
• All future software updates are free of charge as well, so you will never have to pay for new or updated accounting software;
• Data backup and security included - while we all know nothing is ever absolutely safe, we back all your data up continuously and our investment in security would be unobtainable for small businesses, because of cost and complexity;
• All the benefits of online software (SaaS) - means you can access your accounting, write invoices and plan your business from anywhere at anytime.
• Online technology is eco-friendly - no shipping, no packaging, no manuals (help text in software) and our ClimateByte Technology.

All you have to do, is sign up for our free 30 day trail of OnlineOffice, or our free LiveNet and you will have free accounting for your small business, forever.

Let’s face it, nobody makes any money doing their bookkeeping. At least with WinWeb you don’t have to spend any money, not to make any money. ST.

This is easily answered, you have to answer one question: Do I know how to do bookkeeping, Yes or NO?

If YES - you can go and get an off-line (Intuit, Sage) or online accounting system and get started. WinWeb’s OnlineOffice includes a free forever - no strings attached - full accounting system, including free 24/7 live support.

If NO - you need to find a system that allows you to record all your transactions, without having to do the “Double-Entries”, you can leave that to an bookkeeper or an accountant, in other words outsource the tricky bit. The good thing here is that you will save most of the money you would have to pay someone else to do your accounts, because you do the labour intensive stuff yourself. WinWeb also covers this version of bookkeeping.

A good side effect here is that you will have to look at your expenses and cost again, and may be able to make a judgement if that was good or bad money spent - you know what I mean - the hindsight thing.

One thing is for sure getting involved in your bookkeeping/accounting, however little, will have a very positive effect on your business, no matter which kind of small business or start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants, you run - I’m all for DIY.

Remember, if you have any specific questions on our bookkeeping/accounting software you can always use our 24/7 support. ST.

Disclaimer: As with any of my readers questions, I do not have all the answers and here on my blog I can only give you some ideas, since I know very little about your small business. If any of you can add anything here do so for the benefit of my reader, who asked the question and everybody else, leave a comment below - I’d be most grateful.

As most of you know we at WinWeb have been offering a free forever - no strings attached - online accounting system for over two years now. It is good to see that Intuit has decided to pick up our free accounting software challenge, this can only benefit small and start-up business.

You can now download QuickBooks Simple Start 2008 for free. It is not online, not sure why they did not offer the online version free, and it seems to be for Microsoft Windows only - so if you are a Mac user, like me no free Intuit accounting software for us. So working with your accountant in real time and get up to date advice is not on the cards, with this free version.

I think it is good of Intuit to offer a basic accounting system free of charge, while I’m not sure if it will remain free and what the future developments will be like, i.e. will there be a free QuickBooks Simple Start 2009? Maybe someone from Intuit will let us know?

Intuit clearly understands the challenges for small business, and the accounting software industry looking ahead. Others seem to have more problems with this. ST.

I have discussed before that it is important for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants, to do a minimum of business planning, but does it stop there?

Not really, you need to keep up to date with your bookkeeping, to complete the business planning process. You may ask why, if you have done the planning, why not get your bookkeeping done once a year for your tax return?

The answer to this question is the business planning process never ends. Remember I have been talking about going back to your plan at least once a month. In order to fine-tune your small business planning you need to actual information how your business performed in the last month. The only way to do that is to do your bookkeeping or accounting.

By doing that you will be able to compare your predicted numbers in your cash-flow with the actual number your business has generated. This in turn will help you to update or modify your cash-flow plan for the future. More important than that, you will learn new things about your business:

• You may have higher (good) or lower (bad) sales, than you expected?
• Your cost in your business may be higher (bad) or lower (better) than you expected?
• Your cash-flow may be better or worse do to the above two points?
• You may need to outsource some business processes to lower your fixed cost structure, to make your business more recession proof or just more profitable?
• You may need to ramp up your sales and marketing activities for your small business products or services?
• You may also have to adjust your SWOT analysis and your business goals?

You will be surprised how creative you can be, once you know about and understand a problem in your business plan. It may not even be a problem at that time, you may just need to adjust the way you do things, and you may have avoided a small or big problem in the future.

In my opinion strict cost control and bootstrapping are not like nice to have features, they are essential for your small business survival. Often the difference between failure and success is just a little planning and checking the “plan” - doing a reality check. There is no excuse not to do it, all the tools are available for free, for anyone.

If you feel the initial process of business planning is too much for you, than get your accountant or bookkeeper to help you to set your cash-flow fore-casting, SWOT analysis with you, doing it online will give you strategic advantages, like you can work with your accountant or bookkeeper in real time in different places, this lowers your cost, no time wasted and is good for the environment.

I would like to make one more point here, the aim of all this planning is not to get it spot on - no, the aim is to understand what is happening in your business, that is why you should be doing it.

Among other things, it will give you a measure of certainty, security and confidence, if you understand what is happening in your business. So, how confident are you about the future of your business? Why not take the weekend and have a planning session, it is like playing monopoly, only this game will secure your future. ST.

I always remember my discussions with the “Marketing Experts” a few years back, when I proposed to give the accounting software we just had developed and accredited, away for free. These guys nearly had a heart-attack.

Today is the first day we offer our free US version of this software, and all signs are that it still is the right decision. It helped us in the Uk to get over 200.000 users and the same trend is already visible for the US after not even one day. Lots of questions and a certain amount of disbelief, but we have a good number of sign-ups.

It is true to say that we had US clients for a few years know, but the set-up work required was considerable. So I guess some people have been waiting for this release.

So enjoy your Free Accounting Software. No Strings Attached. ST.

I’m getting questions about AccountsOffice, following my earlier announcement of today.

The problem we see is that too many see us as an accounting software vendor, we are not. While we offer accounting software, still the only accredited online accounting software in the UK by the ICAEW, we are not only about accounting software.

We want to provide our Small Business Infrastructure, centered around our OnlineOffice product. It is our believe that small business needs more than just accounting software, or any other software for that matter, it needs a complete infrastructure, with software, 24/7 service, small business advice and collaboration, combined with world leading small business service solutions.

So we took the decision to offer only OnlineOffice, with AccountsOffice and CashBook becoming modules within OnlineOffice. This will show the power of integration to small business, yielding enormous benefits, which made us into the leader in this field.

It will help us all to focus better on WinWeb’s core business and goals. It is by no means an erosion of our pledge to keep our accounting software free of charge for single users. After the free 30 day trail period for OnlineOffice, any user can decline to pay for the full product, which will leave him/her with the fully functional accounting software (single user) and LiveNet, free of charge forever, no strings attached.

I hope that answers any questions, otherwise feel free to contact me or our 24/7 support. ST.

I get regular questions about what we really mean by WinWeb’s Small Business Infrastructure?

On-demand Small Business Infrastructure™ centers around the idea that business start-ups and growing small businesses need help with numerous administrative tasks that are not core to the business success - such as bookkeeping, it services, internet services, call handling and other such services.

These services - if performed by the business owner - cause a great deal of time wasting - while the fixed cost of a business is still accumulating. This is in our minds a fatally floored business model and can easily be remedied with our infrastructure approach.

We should not expect business start-ups and small business in general to be accountants, bookkeepers, lawyers, marketing & PR gurus and so on. We should provide small business with an infrastructure in which it can concentrate on core business tasks, while at the same time enabling the business owner to stay informed of all relevant business facts like cash flow, sales, HR issues, tax position and more. This will enable him / her to make informed decisions, maybe with the help of an external advisor.

Based on these facts, we have devised a six point on-demand Small Business Infrastructure™ concept, which consist of:

1. WinWeb On-Demand Software Solutions - Anywhere At Anytime.

AccountsOffice and OnlineOffice are our two software offerings, which are based on the SaaS - Software as a Services model, to allow for the following key business benefits:

• tight inclusion of business advisors from the start,
• cultivating outsourcing techniques at the outset, i.e. virtual assistants,
• no IT knowledge needed and hassle free operation,
• real-time multi-user access from anywhere, increasing mobility.

2. WinWeb 24/7 Live Support - We Are Here For You Always.

Providing customer care and support only during business hours is not acceptable to our clients. Experience has shown us that most admin work gets done by small business before nine in the morning or after five in the evening. This practice is essential if the business is to survive it’s early years.

This is why we have provided our much acclaimed customer support for 24 hours a day, seven days a week from the outset. Saving our clients wasted time and money - while setting new standards in customer support. No manuals need to be read - all problems can be solved in real-time online.

3. WinWeb Live - Networking Community for Small Business Only.

To foster collaboration and outsourcing we have expanded our WinWeb Live™ offering to allow for small business community networking - thus enabling the business owner to make decisions about his / her current needs, with the following benefits:

• timeshare virtual assistants for professional results,
• offer contracts of work to contractors on a case-by-case basis,
• promote the business to a large audience or even locally,
• find new work and contracts online

4. Business Advice

Our On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure™ enables business advisors, accountants, bookkeepers and other advisors to have a “Up Close and Personal” relationship with the small business owner, providing key elements for the success of a small business:

• timely and up-to-date advice from anywhere at anytime,
• more efficient advisor function due to SaaS technology, less travel,
• easily expandable advisor network.

5. Solution Partners

Third parties provide external services to complement our services, such as parcel service, office supply services, printing services. These and other services are provided on a bulk buy arrangements by leading businesses in their respective sectors - to provide the most reliable and up-to date service possible - with the effect of enhancing the professional appearance of our clients.

6. ClimateByte™ Technology - For A Cleaner Future.

Our clients are among the biggest demographics concerned with climate change and carbon footprint neutrality. It is a fact that employing remote working and collaboration techniques drastically reduces the damaging business side affects on our environment. We enable our clients to be more eco-friendly and aware, by providing them with our green technology - an ongoing development commitment of WinWeb.

WinWeb welcomes any suggestion that will further enhance our On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure™ concept - especially the development of even more eco-friendly business processes - to serve our small business and business start-up client-base.