The new dashboard will be with you all tomorrow. You will find this feature on your sales tab and will be able to start invoicing straight away – pull up different types of sales statistics and get links to support in the form of text and videos.

Many Congratulations to Saxo Bank who won the Danish E-commerce Award 2010 in the cross border category. We’re proud and delighted E-conomic reached the final three in such a tough competitive field and exalted company.

Thanks to all our back-office techie guys and girls for your unending input, improvement and innovations – hard to keep up with all the excellent extras you keep adding – don’t you lot ever take time off? Of course thanks also to our ever-growing army of contented clients.

“Puhut suomi? As you undoubtedly know, means do you speak Finnish? And indeed we do now. Well, to be strictly accurate, E-conomic does. Finland has been chosen and launched as the next country within which E-conomic offers own-language services.

The Finnish market is similar to those in the other Nordic countries with the exception that it’s included in the euro area. Operations there hit the ground running at the beginning of this month  http://www.e-conomic.fi And because Finland is itself a bilingual country we will be supporting both languages used there on the web.

If you’ve been keeping track you’ll know that Finland is the eighth country in which E-conomic is happily operating, the others being Denmark, Sweden, the UK, Norway, Spain, Germany and Poland. Our plans are to reach at least 12 countries by 2012 which should give us a total of over 100,000 customers.

Due to a major database restructuring, E-conomic will be unavailable for shorter periods at nighttime in the periode:

March 18-23 2010 between 23.00 and 04.00 am.

We  recommend that you avoid logging in to E-conomic during this time frame.

In addition, we are planning a longer downtime of up to 20 hours during the Easter holidays Maundy Thursday/Good Friday:

April 1-2 2010 from 9 pm to 5 pm

You will not be able to log on to E-conomic during this period. Should we be able to restore service before 6 pm we will of course notify you instantly here on the blog.

We deeply regret the inconvenience and look forward to introducing you to a faster E-conomic.

For more details see our blog at TechTalk

To reduce response times in E-conomic, we are working on a serie of updates to improve system speed.

This means that E-conomic is going to be down for 10-15 minutes tonight and the nights to come between the hours 02:00 am to  04:00 am.

Far be it from us to blow our own trumpet, but it’s hard not to be tickled pink that E-conomic has, this week, been nominated as one of the three finalists in the category Best Cross-Border Company. This award is for a Danish-based company showing great success using online channels for international expansion. 

 Results at a nice big award ceremony on Thursday 25th of March. We’re thrilled and honoured to be nominated – and of course we’ll keep you posted! Thanks so much for all your good wishes on our previous win of the Nordic Newcomers Award.

A question often asked of us is ‘How vital is a knowledge of bookkeeping and accounting when you’re using E-conomic?’ and often these are passed to me to answer because in fact I use the system myself for my own book-keeping and trust me, they don’t come with much less professional knowledge than my own good self - I only recently  discovered double entry wasn’t putting something in twice to make sure you got it right – a kind of belts and braces approach!

So I’m here to assure those individual businessmen and women even now nervously chewing their fingernails that if you’re using E-conomic as an individual business owner you need no professional book-keeping knowledge whatsoever to get all the benefits and you can choose just as much or as little of the system as you like.

My personal use is simply entering individual quotes, upgrading them to firm orders, invoicing once the work’s been done (oh happy day!) and then entering monies received (happier still!).

I then sit back and let my accountant do whatever he wants from his end, fairly smug in the knowledge that the days of a file full of rather grubby, coffee stained,  invoice copies are long gone. Of course I fully appreciate I’m at one end of an extremely long scale and that many of our other  E-conomic clients with branches all over the country, several hundred staff and turnover hovering around £ several million, are using the system to a somewhat different depth and functionality.

And there you have the beauty of E-conomic (and I never thought I’d hear myself say that about an accounting system). But there’s no getting away from the fact it works well for you however little or large you might be, however simple or complex your requirements.

A lot of people ask Anders and Jacob (whose baby E-conomic is) why they didn’t create something far less complex and just aim at either small businesses or large ones.  In typical down to earth Danish style they shrug,  ‘Why only please some of the business world when you can keep all of it happy?’ – And quite frankly there’s really nothing one can add to that, is there?

A good mix of local and global enhancements and add-on module improvements have recently taken place, and can be found in the March Improvements news page.

The recession has thrown many issues to the fore. One of these is that whilst individual businessmen and women suffer huge amounts of stress keeping their heads above water, their advisers rarely remain unscathed.

In fact, as several of the accountants I’ve spoken to point out, they’re often dealing concurrently with more than one business going through life or death struggles and whilst cynics might say the only real worry is losing a client – people I’ve spoken to put this way down the list.

If you’re good at your job it’s unavoidable that your investment in it is also an emotional one and very often businesses struggling to stay afloat are ones you’ve helped launch and nurture so it would be unrealistic to expect to sail through unscathed.  

Of course there are no easy answers although sometimes just being aware of a problem is a move towards dealing with it.  As business advisors accountants are well-wired to deal with success. Failure with its close companions, fear, anxiety and stress are not so easy to handle, nor are you forearmed with any kind of training in the kind of support to offer.

Probably the most constructive thing professional financial advisers can do is make sure they have their own strong support network with whom they can off-load and get constructive input. The one thing they shouldn’t do is pack individual problems, stresses and strains into the briefcase to take home nightly.

At E-conomic this is a subject we’ve discussed with many of our accountancy profession partners and we’re always interested to hear your views so don’t hesitate to comment. Businesses aren’t just businesses – they’re people and it’s people who feel the strain.  Goodness, just realised this is heavy stuff for a Monday.  But if an issue has to be addressed then we’re man enough to do it!

We’re delighted to announce that yesterday E-conomic beat rival nominees and worthy opponents, Vattenfall Wind Power and Clas Ohlson to take first place in the Best Nordic UK Newcomer of the year.

Anders Bjornsbo proudly made his way back down the red carpet at the London Stock Exchange having been presented with a very desirable  trophy and happy in the knowledge that whilst pioneering a whole new way of thinking may be a hard furrow to plough, it’s exceptionally rewarding when it pays off!

Anders says he thinks the very simple recipe for success is ‘Knowing your market and knowing your market will benefit exponentially from your product. The toughest part he jokes is ‘Getting your market to cotton on to the fact!

We’re so thrilled that we’ve won this award and delighted our efforts are paying off not just in the increase in our client numbers but the very wide range of businesses we work successfully with.  Two of the top accounting firms in the UK have been test-driving E-conomic for nearly a year now and are very pleased indeed with the way it’s been working for them and their clients.  We’ll follow up with more on this shortly.

Anders was also keen to emphasise just how delighted he is that the company policy of investing heavily in the UK as a spring-board into Europe and beyond has proved so successful.  E-conomic is now a leading supplier of online accounting services in the UK, with a continuing increase in turnover which we predict will continue for 2010.

But of course we couldn’t have done it without . . . all of you!

The support and input from you, our accountancy professional partners and all our great individual business users has been superb. It’s never easy as a foreign company to establish yourself in a brand new country and we feel so much of our success is down to the invaluable contributions, criticisms, praise and encouragement that’s a feature of our relationships with you.

Can we offer you all great big E-conomic THANK YOU!’ We thought you also might like to enjoy some of our success with us – Download the film about E-conomic as the best Nordic UK Newcomer.

http://www.e-conomic.co.uk/news/05-03-2010-best-newcomer-award