Small business service provider NetLedger Inc. announced Wednesday
(Nov 29) the unveiling of NetLedger 5.0, allowing small businesses
to leap from online accounting to a full range of e-commerce
capabilities, including operating an online store.
“This is the most significant enhancement to the service since
we started it in August 1999,” NetLedger founder and CEO Evan
Goldberg told ASP News. “It moves us much closer to our vision of a
single small business management center on the Internet.”
The highlight of NetLedger 5.0 is the online commerce extension.
Building on their existing product information in NetLedger, users
can load item images, run specials, publish company and store
information, publish email forms for customer interaction and
integrate shopping cart and checkout processes. Everything feeds
directly into NetLedger’s sales order feature for order processing
and customer billing. Because of the tight integration between
accounting and online commerce, inventory levels will be
automatically adjusted with each sale, and store transactions will
be immediately reflected in users’ NetLedger accounts.
“NetLedger has had a consistent vision from its founding in
1998: provide an integrated, powerful, easy-to-use system to run a
small business, giving it the tools it needs to succeed in the
Internet economy” Goldberg said. “The addition of online commerce
capabilities is a major step towards a complete solution, and it
will be followed quickly by other major enhancements.”
Additional features new to NetLedger 5.0 include improved
inventory management, the ability to create custom fields on
records and individual lines of a transaction, reconciliation
enhancements, the ability to lock transactions before a date
specified by an administrator or accountant, job tracking and
reporting enhancements. NetLedger 5.0 also offers one-click
conversion of QuickBooks data into NetLedger.
“We use the products we build to run our own business, so we get
hands-on experience,” Goldberg said. “We also get feedback from
users to see what additions they would like to see.”
The monthly fee for NetLedger 5.0 remains the same: $4.95 per
month per user with one free access seat given to the subscriber’s
accountant. The new online commerce feature costs $49.95 per month
for an unlimited number of users. The introductory fee for this
feature will be $29.95 per month for an unlimited number of users
through the end of the year. There is no additional cost associated
with the other upgrades.
NetLedger’s addition of e-commerce features in its 5.0 version
marks the latest of many milestone achievements the company has
reached since its launch in August 1999. In just over a year,
NetLedger has established a rapidly-growing customer base, released
five major upgrades of the NetLedger service, expanded
internationally with NetLedger Canada, and implemented significant
alliances with partners such as Yahoo!, ADP and Oracle.
Companies such as Paytrust, OfficeMax, OneCore.com and
Stamps.com are just a few of the many other companies to integrate
NetLedger with their services, providing their customers with
additional benefits. NetLedger has also secured several dozen
co-branding and distribution partnerships in the past year. Most
recently, NetLedger has partnered with broadband-application
service provider, C3Communications to bring high speed Internet
connection to ASP users.
NetLedger also launched a consolidated datacenter backed by
technologies from Oracle, VA Linux and Network Appliance. The data
center has established NetLedger as one of the world’s largest
Oracle deployments on Linux.
Starting with web-based accounting as a core, NetLedger turns
the small business accounting system into a powerful e-business
tool. This tool delivers capabilities including online commerce,
expense reporting, online customer ordering, online credit card
processing, payroll and employee, customer and supplier remote
access.
“In the next couple of versions, you’ll see things like front
office and HR functions — things that go beyond the core of
accounting that we started with, but use the same data,” Goldberg
said.