Accounting Software

The one major difficulty in running a business entirely on Macs is the availability of decent accounting software. Basically, you have two options: Quickbooks and MYOB. Quickbooks is easy to use and works fine for a sole proprietor, but it falls flat as things get a little more complicated. MYOB Accountedge, though it has a strange interface, can take a small business much farther.

It has a good chart of accounts functionality, good controls built in and is generally superior to Quickbooks in almost every way. However, it has limitations which our SmallBiz is starting to run up against. We need something a little more robust, that can handle consolidation and other things that are tougher to do in entry level packages. I would love to use Peachtree, but unless you are running Windows, that is not an option. I have tried almost everything I can find for the Mac, but nothing seems to be close.

We have looked at online stuff, like NetSuite, but we don't like that option very much. Perhaps we are a little old fashioned about having our financial information on teh interwebs, but the real issue is speed. We have a pretty speedy T-1 connection here, but these things are still very slow to run. Too slow.

So, the search goes on. Feel free to post any suggestions and I will definitely check them out.

OmniFocus and OmniFocus for the iPhone

Once I got the iPhone, I started looking for some cool apps. Since one of the weak spots in Exchange for Mac and the horrible iCal is task lists, that was want I really wanted. I wanted to be able to find something where I could enter a task on my iPhone when it popped into my head and have it sync with my computer at some point. My old method of emailing it to myself, worked okay with the Treo, but it was inefficient, particularly since it takes longer to send an email with the iPhone.

I finally settled on OmniFocus. One reason I selected this is that it is made by the Omni Group, which also makes the very excellent OmniGraffle, which we have on all of our machines, and OmniOutliner and OmniPlan, which we have on several. OmniFocus is not supposed to be a run of the mill task manager. It is based on David Allen's "Getting Things Done". GTD is an interesting and useful system. I have read the book and agree with much of what he says, so I thought this would work well.

Unfortunately, OmniFocus is not ready for prime time. To get the system to work you have to buy both OmniFocus and OmniFocus for the iPhone. In addition you need a MobileMe (nee .Mac) account or another webDav server, so the whole setup is quite pricey. The worst part, is that to sync the iPhone version and the desktop version, you have to pay full price for what is essentially an alpha version of the software. They send updates every day, but it is a long way from being done. Getting the daily update is like playing roulette. You spins the wheel and you takes your chances. Is the update going to fix things? Or is it going to send the whole thing crashing down. Lately, crashing has come up more often than not.

I can't sync anything since an update last week. Even more unfortunate, support, which is typically very good with Omni Group products, is nonexistent. If you try to get help, you get a notice that they are very busy writing the software and may get back to you within three weeks. If you go to the forums on their site, you get dogpiled by GTD true believers who will usually say something to the effect that "working software is not GTD canonical".

I hope they get things worked out, because this has potential to be an excellent app, but it is crazy to charge full price for alpha software. I can guarantee that we will not be rolling out OmniFocus throughout the company for a while and we will start thinking hard about using less Omni Group software in the future. After all, even Microsoft waits until it has a beta version before selling it to the masses.

Testing the iPhone 3G

So I bought an iPhone 3G. It is a test to see if it is good enough to replace the Treos and BlackBerrys we use. That the iPhone was way cool was obvious from the start, but we did not consider it until the latest generation for a couple of reasons.

The first was that it didn't work well with Exchange. Until they got that working, there was no way. The second reason is that AT&T is the only choice. In our experience AT&T and its predecessor, Cingular, simply has lousy coverage compared with Verizon. Also, the slow wireless network made the cooler features of the iPhone not very cool.

I will update as I go along on this test, but I will post some initial reactions. I had a Treo with the Palm OS, which was great for phone and email but weak on anything else. And the Treos with Windows have been just terribly buggy.

The phone part of the iPhone is very good. Better than the BlackBerrys. I haven't had a chance to test the coverage very well, but it works well as a phone where you have coverage.

Email is going to take some getting used to. It was much faster to send and receive emails on my Treo. Part of that is that I have not yet mastered the keyboard, but a good bit of it was design. On the Treo, I can be in the email part with two clicks. It is a minimum of three and often more, depending on what you were last doing, on the iPhone. With the Treo, I could do a lot with one hand, which made clearing out the inbox easy when I had a little downtime. Can't do that with the iPhone. It needs some keyboard shortcuts or something. And, it also needs the ability to delete multiple messages at a time.

Setting the iPhone up to work with our Exchange server was a breeze. Much simpler than configuring a new Treo with Good or a BlackBerry. And everything syncs well, although it doesn't sync all messages.

Battery life has been good. It was horrible when I first got it, but after a few cycles, it is fine without using a lot of the battery saving tips.

So far, I like it and will probably keep it, but I am not entirely convinced. Not enough to roll it out for everyone else yet. I'll keep you posted.