From the December 2015 issue.
The Sleeter Group’s Awesome Application Awards Program is designed to recognize quality software solutions available in the SMB accounting software marketplace.
For the 2016 awards, in addition to our traditional Awesome Applications, we’ve added a new category called the “Saavy Startup Award.” This category includes new products from younger, smaller companies that we believe will delight customers for many years to come.
The selection process included voting from the community and our expert panel. Community votes accounted for 40% of the final selections and the expert panel accounted for 60% of the overall score. The 2016 Awesome Application committee members include: Stacey Byrne, CPA; Charlie Russell; Debra Kilsheimer; Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP; and Kacee Johnson.
For more information about the awards, visit www.sleeter.com/awesomeapps
Bill.com Mobile App
Bill.com solves the end-to-end AP and AR automation issues that nearly every business needs. This cloud-based solution has previously thrice been recognized with an Awesome Application award. But this year, Bill.com revamped their mobile app with a native iOS solution that impressed both the voting audience and the committee.
Bill.com for iPhone provides a simple and secure way to review, approve or deny, and pay bills.
Expensify
Travel and Expense tracking is a pain for companies all over the world. Expensify solves this problem with a mobile app that provides digital receipt capture, automated expense report creation, routing for approvals, and electronic reimbursement to employees and contractors.
Expensify received the second most votes from the community and also got high marks from several committee members.
HandiFox
HandiFox is a QuickBooks add-on that automates inventory, sales, and supply chain management. This app hits a home run by allowing mobile devices to manage nearly all of the inventory, warehousing, and fulfillment functions that streamline product-based business processes.
HandiFox handles Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Invoices, and Stock Transfers. In the warehouse, users can receive items, perform physical inventory counts, and manage the pick/pack/ship functions, all from a mobile device. In the field, users can create sales orders, deliver items, capture signatures, and print invoices.
Receipt Bank
Receipt Bank blew our committee away this year. They’ve developed both a great product and a great global team who deeply understand the importance of digital documents and zero entry solutions in small business.
Receipt Bank is a bookkeeping productivity tool designed to give visibility to the bookkeeping function where ever that bookkeeping takes place. By capturing documents in digital form and storing those documents with accounting transactions, Receipt Bank automates a big piece of the process that is crucial to streamlining accounting solutions.
Receipt Bank provides multiple document submission methods including smart phone app, dedicated email addresses and scan and upload. Receipt Bank then extracts key data from ALL source documents associated with the payables function – supplier bills, corporate and individual receipts, credit notes – and converts that data into transactions. It then sends the transaction data and an image of the source document directly to the accounting software. Receipt Bank supports QuickBooks Online and Xero.
RedTeam
Construction accounting has some of the most challenging processes in small business. With contracts, job costing, subcontractors, estimating, scheduling, and work in progress reporting, this is one of the hardest businesses to get the whole system working efficiently. But RedTeam really delivers. Both the audience voting and the committee ranked RedTeam very high in the Awesome Application line up for 2016.
RedTeam connects directly to QuickBooks Online, and offers construction accounting features for Contractors, including management of Prime Contracts, Change Orders, AIA-style Progress Billing, Timekeeping, Field Expense Reporting, Company Credit Cards, Subcontracts, Purchase Orders, Open Commitments, Job Cost Reporting, Estimated Cost at Complete, Revenue, Cash Flow and Work in Progress.
For the small contractor who wants to streamline their entire business management and accounting system, RedTeam should definitely be considered.
TSheets Time Tracker
TSheets shined again this year with the voting audience and the committee. The depth of integrations and top notch support combined to make TSheets an Awesome winner for the 2nd year in a row.
TSheets Time Tracking is a cloud-based, mobile timesheet management solution that directly integrates with QuickBooks (Online and Desktop) as well as Square POS, Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll), Results CRM, and more. It includes rich features for employee time entry, zero-entry time entries using start and stop timers. Once timesheets are captured, TSheets routes them to management for review/approval and submission to payroll.
Workato
We’ve been talking about “chunkification of the business process” for several years. This trend away from all-in-one solutions to a collection of best-of-breed apps that allow each business to have the best solution for each business process is really taking hold across the entire market. But the downside of chunkification is that, without integration, we’re left with “islands of data,” trapped in each of the chunks. What to do?
Connecting apps together is a daunting task if you plan to have “useful” data at each point in your “chunkified” system and if you want real-time information to help management run the business.
Workato, a stand-out Awesome Application winner, provides powerful yet simple integration platforms for integrating QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks, TSheets, NetSuite, Intacct, Bill.com with 70+ other cloud applications to automate businesses.
On the Workato platform, you can build robust yet flexible integration flows, also known as recipes. Recipes are a set of steps that describe how your apps work with each other. For example, when there’s a new customer is created in QuickBooks, it triggers an action to create a new account in Salesforce.
When a recipe is active, data is moved automatically whenever the trigger event is detected. It runs in the background until you manually stop your recipe.
Saavy Startup Awards
17 Hats
Every business faces some of the same basic challenges when it comes to streamlining the core processes of everyday business. Beyond the accounting pieces, every company has to deal with email, calendaring, time tracking, invoicing, and project management. And for most small businesses, the concept of bring all of these functions together into a unified office management solution is beyond their dreams. So they just deal with each of these tasks as separate, non-integrated pieces of the company information systems.
17 hats is a new startup with an impressive vision of how businesses should be managed. This app automates contacts, emails, projects, calendars, timesheets, invoices, and workflows to provide a unified business management solution for virtually any business.
AccountingSuite
AccountingSuite is an all-in-one business application that combines Accounting, Cloud Banking, Order Management, Advanced Inventory, Project and Time Tracking into one cloud-driven platform.
This application provides a deep and broad set of modules not found in many cloud accounting products, which makes it best suited for the growing product-based business that expects to need more core features now or in the near future. Real-time inventory, assemblies, order and back order management, margin control, and flexible reporting makes AccountingSuite a Saavy Startup that is worth a look for your small and growing clients.
Fundbox
Fundbox is a cash flow optimization tool that leverages Big Data analytics, engineering and predictive modeling that is transforming a massive pain point for small businesses. Fundbox provides small business owners with Credit-as-a-Service, embedded directly into their accounting software. This allows them to instantly clear outstanding invoices and render cash flow gaps obsolete without disrupting workflow. The company has created a new type of solution for small businesses, one that offers a way to streamline cash flow without burdening a business with bloated loans that are irrelevant to their actual financial needs.
Hubdoc
Hubdoc helps you organize all of your financial docs in one place. Through its deep integration with QuickBooks Online and Xero, Hubdoc turns your documents (and their data) into transactions in your accounting with source documents attached.
Another standout winner this year that impressed every one of the committee members, this company and product is definitely worth a look for those looking to take documents to the cloud and experience more zero-entry bliss.
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Tags: Firm Management
