Streamline Accounting Tasks With Outlook With Business Contact Manager

By David H. Ringstrom, CPA

As the economy slows, your clients seek ways to work smarter and faster. Accounting tasks are sometimes time-consuming, and often require rekeying data. However, your clients can start working smarter today, and the best part is they likely already have the necessary tools in hand.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager connects seamlessly with Microsoft Office Accounting so that your clients can manage customer relationships and avoid missed opportunities. They’ll key transaction and customer contact data only once — changes in Outlook become an extension of Office Accounting. In addition, Outlook 2007 provides new marketing capabilities that enable your clients to reach out to their customers in a targeted fashion.

Formerly free:Business Contact Manager is a free download for certain Outlook 2003 users, but is a paid upgrade for Outlook 2007. However, Business Contact Manager is included free with these Office suites:

• Office Professional 2007
• Office Small Business 2007
• Office Ultimate 2007

The suggested retail price of Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager is $149.95, while stand-alone versions of Outlook without Business Contact Manager retail for $109.95.

Free resources:You’ll have no problem getting additional assistance with Business Contact Manager:

• Extensive training materials are just a click away
• Free demonstration videos can get you up and running fast
• Try it online in your web browser
• A free 60-day trial is available

Explore the Capabilities

Business Contact Manager in conjunction with Office Accounting enables your clients to accomplish several accounting-related tasks from within Outlook:

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

In addition, Outlook 2007 enables your clients to track opportunities, business projects, project tasks, and marketing campaigns. Further, your clients can take a laptop to work with contact data while away from the office — any changes will automatically be synchronized upon their return. Plus, the new Outlook E-mail Marketing Service enables them to send targeted e-mail to their customers, and then track the responses.

Business Contact Manager includes more than 50 reports that let you track, sort, and filter various activities. You can then send the reports to Microsoft Office Excel for even more analysis capabilities. As you can see in Figure 1, Business Contact Manager in Outlook 2007 puts a wealth of information at your fingertips.

Figure 1: Business Contact Manager in Outlook 2007 simplifies customer relationship management (CRM).

In certain cases, customer data from Office Accounting can be viewed on a 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’re ready for advanced capabilities.

Enable Business Contact Manager

Once Business Contact Manager is installed on your computer, you’re ready to link your accounting records. To do so, launch Outlook, and then confirm that the Business Contact Manager menu appears between Actions and Help in Outlook. (In Outlook 2003 the menu is named Business Tools). If the menu doesn’t appear, 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.
7. Close the Data Files window.

Helpful: Once your database is created, you can access additional training resources. In Outlook 2007, choose Business Contact Manager, and then Learn About Business Contact Manager. Outlook 2003 offers a Quick Start Guide for Business Contact Manager.

Connect to Office Accounting

Once Business Contact Manager is enabled, the next step is to link Outlook to your Office Accounting data:

Outlook 2007:

1. In Office Accounting, choose Company, and then Integrate with Business Contact Manager.

You can choose Business Contact Manager, Accounting Tools, and then Set Up Connection to Accounting in Outlook 2007, but you’ll hit a dead end. A prompt will appear to confirm the integration must be implemented through Office Accounting.

2. Click Next when the integration wizard appears.
3. Choose a Business Contact Manager for Outlook database from the drop-down list, and then click Next.
4. Confirm the back-up locations for both your Office Accounting and Business Contact Manager databases, and then click Next.
5. Read the instructions about E-mail Auto-linking, and then click Next after you make a selection.
6. Indicate whether duplicate customers should be merged or kept separate, and then click Next.
7. Review the user permissions, and then click Next. Specific permission must be granted to individual users to create documents or view financial data in Outlook. All users automatically have permission to view Office Accounting contacts in Outlook.
8. Confirm the shortcut location for your Office Accounting database, and then click Next.
9. Click the Integrate button to merge your Office Accounting and Business Contact Manager databases.

Outlook 2003:

1. Choose Business Tools.
2. Choose Accounting Tools.
3. Choose Set Up Connection to Accounting.

Tip: Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2003 refers to Office Accounting by its former name, Small Business Accounting 2006.

4. Choose Yes when asked if you’d like to connect to your accounting program, and then click the Browse button
5. Select your Office 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.
8. If you do not want your Office Accounting contacts to appear in a separate folder, clear the Include Contacts checkbox.
9. Click Next to launch the import process from Office 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 Office Accounting.

Manage Billable Time

Anyone who bills by the hour knows accurate records are paramount to business success. Fortunately, integrating Business Contact Manager with Office Accounting streamlines the tedious chore of logging your time into Office Accounting in two ways.

1. Create a new appointment in Outlook.
2. Click the Billable button on the Outlook toolbar. In Outlook 2007, the Billable icon remains lit, as shown in Figure 2. In Outlook 2003, the word Billable is added to the Categories field.

Figure 2: Mark Outlook appointments as billable.

3. Use the Link to Record button or select a contact from one of the Business Contact Manager contact folders to tie the transaction to a customer in Office Accounting.
4. Save and close the appointment as you typically would.

You can then submit billable appointments to Office Accounting:

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

Figure 3: You can submit all billable appointments to Office 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 an “All records were submitted successfully” prompt, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Business Contact Manager submits billable time as Time Entries in Office Accounting.

Alternatively, you can submit time directly to Office Accounting from within an Outlook appointment. To do so:

1. Click the Show Time Entry button on the toolbar of the Appointment screen in Outlook (the button is labeled Create Time Entry in Outlook 2003).
2. The Time Entry screen from Office Accounting appears, and as you can see in Figure 5, many of the fields in the form are prefilled.

Figure 5: Outlook appointments can prefill time entries in Office Accounting.

3. Make any additional changes to the time entry, and then click Save and Close to add this to a timesheet in Office Accounting. Alternatively, click Create Invoice to immediately convert the time entry into a sales invoice.

Track Business Opportunities

Another superb feature of Business Contact Manager is the ability to track business opportunities. This enables your clients to closely manage sales leads or quotes provided to customers. Business opportunities contained within Outlook can be converted to quotes, sales orders, or invoices in Office Accounting. When a sales lead reaches fruition, your clients can create a estimate, quote, or invoice with just a couple of mouse clicks. To enter a business opportunity in Outlook:

1.Choose Business Contact Manager (or Business Tools).

2. Choose Opportunities.

3. Click New on the toolbar.

4. Complete the opportunity screen shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Opportunity tracking can ensure no leads fall through the cracks.

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 4 new reports in Outlook 2007:

·         Opportunities by Account

·         Opportunities by Business Contact

·         Opportunities by Assigned To

·         Opportunities by Source of Lead

Or these 4 reports which are available in both Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003:

·         Opportunity Funnel

·         Opportunity Forecast

·         Opportunities by Product and Service

·         Past Due Opportunities

Outlook 2003 also includes an Opportunity History report.

Handy:In Outlook 2007, Business opportunity reports can be exported to Excel or saved as Business Contact Manager Reports. Outlook 2003 supports saving reports as Word or Excel documents, among other formats.

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