Using Office Accounting together with Outlook with Business Contact Manager

Applies to : Office Accounting Express, Professional
When you combine Office Accounting Professional 2008 with Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager (BCM), you get a complete business and financial picture of your customers in one place. From within Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager, employees can turn opportunities into quotes, orders, and invoices in Office Accounting Professional 2008—without having to re-enter information in another program. Employees can mark their Outlook calendar appointments, projects, tasks, and phone logs as billable and automatically send that information to Office Accounting Professional 2008 to create customer invoices.

Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager
Because the programs share a database, data entered in either program automatically flows to the other so information is always synchronised. This keeps you informed of account and customer changes and provides a central location for critical information, which can also be shared with employees selectively, based on their roles.
There is another great advantage about the integration with Business Contact Manager. Customer facing employees (like sales staff and business owners) can access financial information directly from Outlook.
Integration with Office Accounting

There are six main points of integration with Office Accounting:
  • Share contact information for accounts and customers
  • See customer and account financial history and drill down to the details directly from Outlook
  • Use the product and service list from Office Accounting when creating opportunities in Outlook
  • Convert opportunities to quotes, sales orders or invoices in Office Accounting
  • Convert Outlook appointments and tasks to time entries and invoice them in Office Accounting
  • Run Office Accounting reports directly from Outlook

Share contact information for accounts and customers
Office Accounting and Outlook with Business Contact Manager share the same data store when they have been integrated. This means that whenever you update contact information in Outlook with Business Contact Manager or Office Accounting, the other application will automatically be updated.

Account in Business Contact Manager
Accounts in Business Contact Manager correspond to customers in Office Accounting.

Customer list
So let us look at the account form in Business Contact Manager:

Business Contact Manager Account form
And the corresponding customer form:

Customer form
Notice that the contacts in Office Accounting are business contacts in Outlook and their information is shared as well.

Financial summary of account
The financial history can also be seen from outlook and you can double-click on a document in the history to see the corresponding form in Office Accounting.

Financial history of account

Invoice opened from financial history
If Office Accounting Professional is installed on a remote PC, the person using Outlook with Business Contact Manager actually doesn’t have to have Office Accounting installed locally – he or she can still see the financial history with all detail.

Use products and stock from Office Accounting when creating opportunities
When you have integrated Office Accounting and Outlook with Business Contact Manager you can use the products and services in Office Accounting on opportunities.

Outlook opportunity with an Office Accounting product

Convert opportunities to quotes, sales orders or invoices in Office Accounting
When a sales person using Outlook with Business Contact Manager is using an opportunity to track a sales process, the opportunity can be converted to a quote, sales order or invoice, when the customer asks for it.

Convert opportunity
Just select the convert to button on the ribbon at the top of the form and select either to convert it to a quote, a sales order or an invoice. Note that only Office Accounting Professional and Professional Plus use sales orders.

Opportunity converted to quote
The quote can be edited in the Office Accounting form just like any other quote and it will be saved in the Office Accounting database. The memo field will display information that the quote was converted from Outlook with Business Contact Manager.

Convert Outlook appointments and tasks to time entries and invoices
One of the most powerful features for users from service industries is that they can convert the Outlook appointments, tasks and project tasks to time slips in Office Accounting which can be invoiced to a customer. So when a billable meeting is held or a billable task has been performed, it can be converted to an invoice for correct billing.
There are two options in Outlook with Business Contact Manager. Either you can create time slips whenever a task or an appointment has been completed or you can create time slips on a weekly or monthly basis by selecting submit billable time feature in the Business Contact Manager menu in Outlook.

Submit billable time
In the following we will show how to create time slips from an appointment, but the process is the same for tasks and project tasks.
1. Create an appointment for an account or business contact in Outlook

Submit billable time
2. When the meeting has been completed open up the appointment, mark it billable by clicking the Billable button (if applicable) and click on the Create Time Entry button in the ribbon.

Outlook appointment for account
3. This will open up a time entry in Office Accounting

Create time entry from Outlook appointment
4. You have to select a billing service if you want to invoice this time to your customer. If you don’t want to create an invoice yet, you can just Save and Close the form, but if you want to create an invoice, press Create Invoice on the toolbar. This will open the invoice form.

Invoice from time entry
5. The invoice now contains the information from the original appointment.

Updated financial history
6. The financial history in Outlook is now updated with the invoice.

Run Office Accounting reports directly from Outlook
The final integration point is the ability to run financial reports directly from Outlook. To run financial reports, select Reports, Financial reports in the Business Contact Manager menu.

Financial reports menu
This will open up the financial reports dialog.

Financial reports dialog
Select the report you want to display and press Open Report.

Profit and Loss report
Based on the role-based permissions given in Office Accounting Professional, the Outlook user can be given access to a desired subset of the areas of Office Accounting and their reports (e.g. sales people can be given access to only sales and stock reports).