Outlook® 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Accounting We Will Go

In This Chapter

• Granting permissions

• Linking BCM to Office Accounting

• Using BCM to feed money data into Accounting

• Seeing Accounting's data in BCM

One of the best benefits of using BCM is that it links directly to Microsoft Office Accounting. If you purchased BCM in the Small Business Edition, Accounting is included in the suite. MicrosoftOffice Accounting is competitive with QuickBooks — QuickBooks has some functions that Accounting doesn't, and vice versa. Accounting imports your existing QuickBooks file and re-creates all your accounts and transactions. And, the Express version is free! You can get the details at www.ideawins.com.

Here are some of the things you can do after BCM is integrated with Accounting:

• View the financial history of accounts in BCM that are the same as Customers in Accounting. This is both a summary of data (balance and sales information) and the transaction level (date, type, and amount of each transaction).

• Edit the individual transaction in BCM's screen, and it's updated in Accounting.

• Refresh your products and services from Accounting to use in opportunities — opportunities become Quotes, Sales Orders, or Invoices in Accounting.

• Track billable time using BCM's project tasks, phone logs, tasks, and appointments. Send them over to Accounting so you can bill your clients without reentering the data. You can use the same entries to pay your employees or workers for the time they've billed, too.

• Get a 360-degree view of your whole ...