Save Time and Keystrokes with Outlook Business Contact Manager

By David Ringstrom, CPA

You probably have numerous clients with both customer data in their accounting package and some semblance of the same data in Microsoft Office Outlook. These clients typically retype the same data multiple times on a daily basis. Fortunately, you can help these clients by providing them a better handle on their CRM — their customer relationship management. It’s easy with Microsoft Small Business Accounting and the free Business Contact Manager Update for Outlook.

 

Understand the Requirements

You need three applications installed — with the latest service packs — in order to effectively manage customer information within Outlook:

 

• Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
• Business Contact Manager Update

 

To confirm that you have the latest service packs for Small Business Accounting and Outlook, visit www.officeupdate.com and follow the prompts starting with Check for Updates.  The Business Contact Manager Update is a free download from the Microsoft web site.

 

Smart: After you update your Microsoft Office applications, take a few minutes to visit www.windowsupdate.com and ensure that your operating system is also fully up-to-date.

 

Explore the Capabilities

By using Business Contact Manager in conjunction with Small Business Accounting, you can accomplish several accounting-related tasks from within Outlook:

• View past and present quotes, sales orders, and invoices
• See customer financial history at a glance
• View outstanding balances
• Track billable time on your calendar
• Send completed transactions, such as billable time, to Small Business Accounting
• Update customer records in Outlook and Small Business Accounting simultaneously
• Create new customers in Small Business Accounting from within Outlook
• Provide coworkers with access to accounting information without giving them direct access to Small Business Accounting
• Link e-mails, tasks, and other Outlook items to customer accounts

 

To learn more, you can read two case studies to see how others are benefiting directly from the powerful combination of Business Contact Manager and Small Business Accounting. In certain cases, customer data from Small Business Accounting can be viewed on your mobile device. Keep in mind that Business Contact Manager is only the first step in CRM capabilities from Microsoft. Growing businesses can migrate their customer data to Microsoft Dynamics CRM when they need advanced capabilities.

 

Get Started

Once you complete the requirements above, you’re ready to link your accounting records to the Business Contact Manager. To do so, launch Outlook, and then confirm that the Business Tools menu appears between Actions and Help in Outlook. If it doesn’t, you can enable it:

 

1. Choose File.
2. Choose Data File Management.
3. Click Add.
4. Choose Business Contact Manager Database, and then click OK.
5. When the Startup Wizard appears, choose Create a New Database, and then change the database name if you wish.
6. Click Next to create the database.

 

Helpful: Once your database is created, you can view the Quick Start Guide for Business Contact Manager.

 

After you install the Business Contact Manager, you’ll link Outlook to your Small Business Accounting data:

 

1. Choose Business Tools.
2. Choose Accounting Tools.
3. Choose Set Up Connection to Accounting.
4. When the window shown in Figure 1 appears, choose Yes, and then click the Browse button.

 

Figure 1: You can link your Small Business Accounting data to the Business Contact Manager in Outlook.

 

5. Select your Small Business Accounting database and then click Open.
6. If your selection is successful, the name of your company will appear in the Company Name field. Click OK.
7. At this point you will be asked if you wish to import your customers, contacts, and product and service items. Click Yes to do so.

 

Decision: As you know, a customer record in Small Business Accounting can have multiple contacts associated with it. You can choose to import these contacts into Outlook, or you can have only the customer accounts appear. As shown in Figure 2, imported records are stored in two separate Outlook Contacts folders:

 

·         Customers: Accounts in Business Contact Manager

·         Contacts:  Business Contacts in Business Contact Manager

 

Figure 2: Business Contact Manager places your Small Business Accounting records into separate folders.

Note that any existing contacts in Outlook remain in their existing Contacts folder, or within any additional folders that you may have established.

 

8. If you do not want your Small Business Accounting contacts to appear in a separate folder, clear the Include Contacts checkbox.
9. Click Next to launch the import process from Small Business Accounting.
10. Once the import completes, click the Close button.

 

At this point you can view customer contact information in Outlook without needing to launch Small Business Accounting. This is a significant timesaver in itself, but the Business Contact Manager provides other new capabilities, including managing your billable time and converting business opportunities in Outlook into transactions in Small Business Accounting.

 

Managing Billable Time

Anyone who bills by the hour knows keeping accurate records is paramount to business success. Fortunately using Business Contact Manager with Small Business Accounting can eliminate a tedious daily chore: logging one’s time into an accounting package for billing. By using these two applications together, you can mark events on your Outlook calendar as billable, and then submit them to Small Business Accounting for billing. There are two ways to work this magic:

 

1. Create a new appointment in Outlook.
2. Click the Billable button on the Outlook toolbar. When you do so, Billable is added to the Categories field, as shown in Figure 3.

 

Figure 3: Business Contact Manager enables you to mark appointments as billable.

 

3. Save and close the appointment as you typically would.

 

Remember: When scheduling billable time be sure to select the contact from one of the two folders created by the Business Contact Manager import process. Otherwise your appointment won’t be linked to a customer in Small Business Accounting.

 

When you’re ready to submit your billable appointments to Small Business Accounting, try these simple steps:

 

1. Choose Business Tools.
2. Choose Accounting Tools.
3. Choose Submit Billable Time.
4. When the window shown in Figure 4 appears, select an employee name from the list.

 

Figure 4: You can submit all billable appointments to Small Business Accounting at once.

 

5. Change the period in the Look For field if needed.
6. Assign Billing Items to any billable appointments, meetings, tasks or phone logs.
7. Select the items that you wish to submit.
8. Click the Submit button.
9. Once the time records have been sent, Business Contact Manager notifies you with a “All rows were successfully submitted” prompt.

 

Alternatively, you can submit time directly to Small Business Accounting from within an Outlook appointment by clicking the Create Time Entry button on the toolbar of the Appointment screen in Outlook. When you do so, the Time Entry screen from Small Business Accounting appears, as shown in Figure 5. Certain elements are automatically captured from your appointment:

 

• The appointment length is placed in the Duration field
• The subject of the appointment is placed in the Description field.
• Any comments that you enter for the appointment are placed in the Comments field.

 

Figure 5: You can directly enter time entries from within Outlook.

 

You’ll need to fill in the customer name and billing item fields and click the Billable checkbox. You can then click Save and Close to add this to your timesheet in Small Business Accounting, or you can click Create Invoice to immediately convert your time entry into a sales invoice in Small Business Accounting.

 

Track Business Opportunities

Another superb feature of Business Contact Manager is the ability to track business opportunities -- closely manage sales leads or quotes that you’ve provided to customers. Business opportunities contained within Outlook can be converted to quotes, sales orders, or invoices in Small Business Accounting. Thus, as sales leads reach fruition, recording the transaction in Small Business Accounting can require as little as a couple of mouse clicks. To enter a business opportunity in Outlook:

 

1. Choose Business Tools.
2. Choose Opportunities.
3. Click New on the toolbar.
4. Complete the opportunity screen shown in Figure 6.

 

Figure 6: Close more sales by tracking opportunities in Outlook.

 

Timesaver: Converting a business opportunity to an accounting transaction is easy. Click the Convert To button on the toolbar of the Business Opportunities window, and select from Quote, Sales Order, or Invoice.

 

As you add opportunities in Outlook, you can manage them through the Opportunities screen or run a report:

 

1. Choose Business Tools.
2. Choose Reports.
3. Choose Opportunities.
4. Select from 5 reports:

 

• Opportunity Funnel
• Opportunity Forecast
• Opportunities by Product and Service
• Opportunity History
• Past Due Opportunities

 

Handy: Business opportunity reports can be saved as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets — among other formats — so that you can easily share information with others.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Microsoft.