Our data provider reports that these issues have been resolved.

If you continue to experience problems with a connection with one of the Chase-affiliated banks, please contact support@waveaccounting.com and let us know. Thanks for your patience.

Original message:

Some customers will have noticed problems with their bank connection in recent days. The problem exists with the large Chase Bank group of financial institutions (full list is here).

These banks in the Chase family have made some technology changes to their online banking sites, which has in turn affected our ability to gather financial data for our customers.

Our data partners are hard at work to restore the bank connections, but the fix is expected to take a few days. We have been promised an update at the end of this week, and are hoping that the bank connections will be restored early next week.

We’re sorry for the hassles, and will continue to post updates on Twitter, with the hashtag #WaveChase.

View the list of affected banks.

We identified early on a special group of customers: moms who work from home, running a business while wrangling the kids. It’s a busy, passionate community with some very specific business needs and considerations.

But there was one problem: What do we call you?

“Mompreneur” is fun and apt, but the name rubs some people wrong.
“Work-at-home-mom” (WAHM) is more neutral, but it’s a heck of a mouthful.

So we decided to use both, interchangeably. I hope that’s OK with you.

However you define the business side of yourself, we hope the resources we’ve gathered up for WAHMs/Mompreneurs help you with your business, while also helping make more time for the rest of your life.

The WAHM/Mompreneur content team and I look forward to hearing you!

–Rob, Lisa, Kathleen, Jeff, Kruti and Sara

The down side? We’re still small, and when you’re a small business, you do all the dirty work, too. We’ve just moved offices (literally across the street). Witness the least glamorous part of our jobs.

Tim (customer support) and Ivan (developer) carry desks across the street to our new office, while Brian (QA) makes the return trip for the next load.

Still, nothing worth doing was ever accomplished without getting your hands dirty, figuratively or otherwise. So whether it’s the move, or developing new features and smoothing out the rough spots in your accounting and bookkeeping, we’ll keep working hard for you, every day. Thanks for your ongoing support!

Our new address:
Wave Accounting
235 Carlaw Avenue, Ste. 601
Toronto, ON M4M 3L1

___________________________________

Three years ago I embarked on a journey of creating Grasshopper’s Buzz Department — some crazy mash-up of community management, PR, biz dev, event planning, and customer engagement. Boy did I learn a lot, as well as make a ton of mistakes. I thought it might be helpful if I shared a few things I learned along the way:

Brand Perception Matters

Regardless whether you can measure it, influence it, or even know it’s going — word of mouth is real, my friends. It’s happening all the time, and the mass adoption of social tools is only making it more important.

It comes down to something very simple. Eventually price and features just won’t matter anymore, regardless of what market you’re in. You and your competitors will migrate to about the same place, with the same offerings, at around the same price.

So why does someone buy from you over your competitor? Very simply, it’s because they like you. Sometimes it seems like we have forgotten that we are just people doing business with other people. And people work with (and give their money to) people they like.

You should constantly be brainstorming new ways to make your brand approachable, caring, and likable.

Add Value Beyond Your Product

In the spirit of brand perception and finding a way to get someone to take out their wallet out for you (instead of your competitor), adding value is a major differentiator. Now let me be clear, I am not talking about customer service. In fact, fantastic customer service is what your customer deserves just for choosing to pay you money each month. Anything less is frankly unacceptable, and if you can’t provide them a good product that works, at a good price — someone else will.

What I am suggesting is to find a few simple ways to help your customers, completely outside of your product. For instance, let’s say you sell a productivity web app. You probably have a bunch of entrepreneurs/startups using your service. If one of your customers had a marketing idea they needed to talk out with someone, get on the phone with them, be a sounding board, and try and make a valuable connection for them. That 15 minutes of your time will not only increase customer retention, it will make them 10 to 15 times more likely to refer your product to a friend (and word of mouth is the cheapest and most effective form of acquisition).

Did one of your customers recommend you? Why not take 5 minutes to send them a hand-written note? That 5 minutes will come back to you in signups. I’ve seen it time and time again. I mean, think about yourself, if you got a hand written note from a brand you worked with… wouldn’t you want to keep working with them?

Put an actual face behind your brand

Be human. Don’t have your twitter picture be a logo, have it be a picture of yourself. People are scared of and uncomfortable with things they don’t understand. Isn’t that why the Romans created Gods for things they couldn’t figure out (like lightning)? Treat your brand the same way. Be approachable, be super transparent, and most importantly communicate with your customers in a human manner.

Don’t give a robot-like response just because you are scared of being unprofessional. Being a boring, stale robot is actually much worse than tweeting about how much you love Sour Patch Kids.

Get Out of the Office

One of the best ways to make your brand more approachable is to actually meet your customers. But you can’t do that in front of your computer. You need to get out. Use tools like StartupDigest.com to find out what is going on in your community, and go introduce yourself to as many people as you possibly can in one night.

Invest your time and money to travel to conferences you know your target audience will be at. People get really excited to meet the founder behind a product or service they love. Even better, introduce yourself to the people putting on the event and try getting invited back in a more influential role.

The bottom line is simple: Branding is the new sales. People don’t want to be sold to, they want to “hear about you.” Investing your time and money into creating a great brand with a compelling story will help you build & grow your business.

If you ever have any questions or just wanted to chat email me any time jkay (at) grasshopper (dot) com.

-Jonathan Kay

Jonathan is the Ambassador of Buzz at Grasshopper, and founder of the Barcamp Tour, a journey of 5 awesome brands.  He created Grasshopper’s word of mouth department and is responsible for generating over 450 mentions in the last two and a half years.

What Grasshopper.com is saying:

“Our goal at Grasshopper is to empower entrepreneurs to succeed.  One way we do that is with a Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs.  It helps you sound bigger, more professional and most importantly always stay connected.  This tool allows you to get an 800 / Local number, create a professional voice greeting, set up departments and extensions, and forward calls anywhere you want, any time you want.”

Wave customer of the week:
Kate Whitmore, Lifestyle Photographer

It starts with a dream. “I am going to take pictures for a living.”

Kate Whitmore is busy building that dream, shooting weddings and portraits outside Columbus, Georgia, and spending quality time with Brett, her husband of exactly two years today. (Happy anniversary!)

Not long after the wedding, Whitmore launched her own photography business. And on the strength of photos she describes as “fresh, real and lively” (including those on this page), Whitmore plans to grow to a multi-photographer shop within five years, while building a business that gives her the flexibility to also shoot projects she’s really interested in.

Our goal at Wave is to help her get there.

Before & after

“I was spending way too much time — hours — entering this information manually.”

Most entrepreneurs avoid accounting if they can. Before Wave, Whitmore was no exception.

“Frankly, it was atrocious!” she says. “I would attempt to set aside time weekly to collect my receipts and record them manually in ledgers that I had created. Usually I missed that time that I set aside and several weeks would go by before I had recorded my expenses and income. At that point, it was too difficult to truly catch up.”

Now, by connecting her bank accounts and using Wave’s other time-saving tools, she’s finally ahead of the game. “It was such an easy set-up, and it amazes me that it organizes your expenses into categories all on its own (and correctly!).”

“Every week or two, I can log in to categorize/match my expenses. At the end of the month, I make sure it’s all together and then print off records such as the Income Statement. It gives me such a great view of what my company made in that particular month, and I’m so thankful that I don’t have to use my ledgers and add them all up anymore! It’s taking me about an hour PER MONTH now to organize my income and expenses. I just make sure I keep all of my receipts in a safe place, and Wave does the rest!”

Even in a light month, Whitmore guesses she’s saving at least 10 hours by using Wave. “I have more time to shoot, edit and correspond with clients.” She also estimates having saved $175 in software costs.

But best of all, she says, “I now actually have time to lounge on the couch watching TV with my husband! ”

Company info

Kate Whitmore Photography
katewhitmore.com
hello@katewhitmore.com
Skype: whitmore.kate
http://Twitter.com/katewhitmore
http://facebook.com/katewhitmorephotography

Be a Wave featured customer

What’s your story? If you’d like to have your company profiled in Wave, please contact us at info@waveaccounting.com.

Wha…?

This is the point where most people glaze over, or give a resounding, “Huh?” So let me back up and give a bit more detail.

• What’s Google Chrome?
• What’s the Chrome Web Store?
• And most importantly: Why bother with the Chrome Web Store?

What is Google Chrome?

Chrome is a web browser produced by Google. It’s an alternative to Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Safari and others. Is it better? A lot of developers like it because it’s fast, and much more standards-compliant than Explorer. It’s rapidly gaining popularity because it works well, and because of features like the Chrome Web Store.

What is the Chrome Web Store?

The Chrome Web Store is a directory of online (“cloud”) applications that you can “install” in your Chrome browser. There are thousands of apps to choose from, from games (like Angry Birds) to online accounting apps. Some apps (including Wave) are free, and others are not.

When you install an app, its icon appears under “Apps” when you open a new empty tab in Chrome. To launch the app, you just click on the big, juicy icon.

Some people complain that “installing” an app is just a glorified bookmarking process, and they’re partly right. But there are some cool features, too.

So why bother with the Chrome Web Store?

Google (and lots of other people) believe that computing is naturally headed toward “the cloud” — that is, more and more people will be running online applications instead of installed-on-your-hard-drive applications. In addition to being a slick browser, Chrome makes it easy to run apps, or at least makes it easy to keep all your apps in front of you where you want them.

Now, I mentioned above that some folks think installing an app in Chrome is not much different from bookmarking. And they’re kinda right. After all, the app doesn’t actually live in your browser, and you still need to go online to use it. But there are advantages to installing an app in Chrome:

1. Pinned tabs

For any app you install, you can open it in a “Pinned tab.” A pinned tab is a special kind of tab that slides all the way to the left in your browser window, where it takes up less space. More importantly (this is the cool part), if you have apps pinned and you quit your browser, any pinned tabs will reopen when you start a new session. So imagine that you always want to have Wave, Gmail and Tweetdeck running when you open Chrome. You can pin the tabs, and each time you launch Chrome, there they are.

Three pinned tabs take up less space than one normal tab.

To create a pinned tab:

• log into Chrome and open a new tab
• right click (or command+click) the icon to any app that you have installed
• choose “Open as pinned tab”
• click the app icon to open

You can also right click or command+click on any normal tab, and select Pin Tab. However, that will only pin the tab for this session; if you launch it again later on, it will open in a normal (unpinned) tab.

With an app open in a pinned tab, you can just leave the window open and do what you want when you want to, and the tab is small enough to not get in your way while you do other things. That’s useful when you have lots of cloud apps on the go at once. I suggest you only open Wave in a pinned tab if you’re on your own computer in a secure place — you don’t want to leave your windows open if it’s a public machine.

Worth pointing out: A pinned tab isn’t locked to the app you launched. In other words, if you open Wave in a pinned tab, and then (while in that window) you select a new website link, that new site will now live in the pinned spot. (That functionality doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m just the messenger…)

2. Full screen

Some apps work better if you open them in “Full Screen” mode — i.e., taking up your entire monitor. (Having the extra length to a Wave screen helps sometimes, but the extra width doesn’t matter too much, so Full Screen isn’t too big an advantage for us.) Chrome allows you to set a preference to open an app in Full Screen mode. The steps are similar to setting a pinned tab: right click or control+click the icon in a new tab, and select “Open full screen.”

These features aren’t necessarily earth shattering. Yes, it’s just a spruced-up bookmark. But hey, better that than a plain-old vanilla bookmark, right? And truthfully, the more I use my cloud apps in a pinned tab, the more frustrated I get when some cloud apps (like WordPress) don’t appear in the Chrome store.

Apps in the Chrome web store will undoubtedly evolve to offer more features, too, like processing that happens in the background while you do something else, or even the ability to work offline. I imagine pinned tabs are just the tiny first step of something much bigger. At Wave, we’ll continue to explore these options as they come up.

Interested in getting started? You can download Chrome here, and install Wave here.

Firefox App Tab

Chrome isn’t the only option for pinned tabs. Users of Firefox 4 can do the same thing: right click or command+click on a tab, and select “Pin as App Tab.” This feature works pretty well exactly as it does in Chrome. But for the moment there’s no app store for Firefox.

But after being introduced — and converted — to cloth diapers, Hadrava says, “I started to learn more things about the crunchy lifestyle and began practicing more natural parenting ideas with my three year old daughter and infant son. Let’s just say, it’s brought about a whole new me and an entire different and better way of thinking! I am definitely passionate and almost a green missionary of sorts.”

Her company, Bouncing Woolies, started off as an idea to supplement the family’s income. Hadrava had already been making 100% wool eco-friendly dryer balls that shorten drying time and soften clothes naturally without the use of store-bought fabric softeners.

They were so popular with her friends, she decided to make a go of it. “I got to thinking… ‘I’m crafty and graphics savvy. I can create a small business that’s green and saves money!‘ It all just fell into place and here we are.”

“Our goal is to help save the environment and people’s wallet one woolie at a time. ”

The five year plan: to expand into multiple locations, to facilitate production and distribution worldwide. “The motto I live by is, “no risk, no reward.” I used to hear a very successful team of entrepreneurs say that phrase and I thought they were crazy. It’s funny how things change.”

Before & After

“Before Wave, I would rather jump from a plane without a parachute than do my accounting.”

How did you previously deal with accounting for your small business? “I hate numbers. I just threw receipts in a box and procrastinated until tax time. Then I found Wave and my fears dissolved. I was able to set everything up and get my info ready for my tax accountant in one weekend.”

Time saved: 15 hours per month. “Now I am able to work on my product rather than spend hours and days working on the accounting.”

Money saved: “I had just bought the dreaded QuickBooks, but hadn’t busted open the packaging. That night I found Wave and I felt like I saw the light. My bank account was joyful that I saved $250 by returning the software.”

Favorite Wave tool: “The import and auto categorize feature. It’s incredibly handy!”

Accounting advice for other small businesses: “Don’t procrastinate. Wave helps keep things where they need to be and saves time, but you still have to keep on top of things. I must admit that with finances, I’m a huge procrastinator! Wave helps me with my procrastination issues because it makes things easier.”

Company Info

Bouncing Woolies, LLC
“Save time. Save money. Save energy.”
www.bouncingwoolies.com
shauna@bouncingwoolies.com
Twitter.com/bouncingwoolies
www.Facebook.com/bouncingwoolies

Today we release a tweak to our design. It’s a shave-and-a-haircut, really, not a hard-core round of plastic surgery. But details can make all the difference, and we know that a well-designed application makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, and do what you need to do, so that you can get in and out of your accounting To Do list fast.

We think it looks awesome, and hope you agree. (Sign in to check it out.)

Now, in the meat-and-potatoes department, we’ve of course been working on functionality at the same time. There are about 70 improvements, touching on everything from Freshbooks integration to invoicing, reports and foreign exchange. Little things, perhaps. But again, details can make all the difference…

Did you know…

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