Imagine being away from the office and getting an email from a customer requesting more supplies, and you being able to pull out your phone to see if he’s paid his last bill? Now imagine being able to see year-to-date sales, terms, and other critical accounting data in the same glance?
Well, it’s possible if you have Handheld Contact on your mobile device and accounting integration between Quickbooks and Act! back at the office, and it’s a snap to setup.
The first thing you need to confirm is if your accounting integration supports “offline access to the data”, and thankfully most do. QSales data, for instance, is designed to update the Quickbooks data each night into Act! through a batch upload. Approximately one hundred fields are created in the Act! database to support this, and the fields get updated nightly. Other programs like XactLink, which we use internally, support a lower number of “offline fields”, but the end result is the same in that Act! fields in your database get updated with the latest changes to the accounting data.
Once that is configured, the second step is to use the Handheld Contact Windows Console to map some of those fields in Act! to the 50 custom fields available in HHC for synching. You don’t need to use all 50 available, of course, but if you select ten of the most critical pieces of accounting data to sync with your mobile device, you’ll know that the information in HHC will never be more than 1 day old.
And that’s it! Once you have these two steps completed, your accounting data will always be at your fingertips.