In my review of bookkeeping and tax prep service Outright back in April, I highlighted not only its ease of use, but also its ability to play nicely and communicate with other apps. As a bookkeeping app is just a part of the chain of tracking income and expenses, these connections to your existing data are critical and keep data entry times to an absolute minimum.

I’m thrilled to hear that the Outright folks are extending this reach, with two major additions to the list of apps that Outright is compatible with being released today. Both should really help the typical small business keep finances and expenses in check.

I would imagine it’s safe to say that the majority of small businesses use a credit card for purchasing supplies and for most of their day-to-day expenses. The convenience, delayed payments and rewards programs make them a favored option. This new partnership with Expensify, which we covered while it was in beta a few weeks back, allows you to now directly import your credit card transactions right into Outright on a nightly basis. It even puts your expenses into the appropriate Schedule C categories.

Also announced today is the ability to directly access your PayPal information from within Outright. Given the number of small businesses that use PayPal for payment processing (both expenses and invoicing), this should make tracking those transactions considerably easier.

The authentication methods differ for these integrations. The Expensify authorization requires you to input your user name and passwords for your bank sites. This information isn’t retained by Outright, while Expensify is a full PCI Compliant application with permissions to only read your data, not to perform any transactions.

The PayPal integration, on the other hand, uses a method similar to the OAuth protocol used by Twitter. When initiating the connection, you are taken to the PayPal site to log in which then passes back an authentication token back to Outright delegating the proper permissions.

I make the distinction because while I believe all necessary precautions are considered and in place for either method, I appreciate how Outright is pushing for easier and more secure data connection processes and using those whenever possible.

These new integrations add to the existing hooks already in place with Freshbooks, Shoeboxed and eBay, providing a wide spectrum of data connections to get the bulk of your data directly into Outright without duplicating your data entry efforts.

Also revamped is the reporting and graphing engine used in Outright. If I have had any criticism of Outright in the past it was that, other than the outstanding Schedule C report it generates, the reporting options have been lacking. It has always been somewhat difficult to view the data in any format other than the defaults. The new graph formats are much more comprehensive, and data filtering options allow for a more customized experience.

New users to the service will be greeted with a nice wizard-like process to get up and running quickly. If you arrive armed with the account information you need, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get your accounts connected and have an almost immediate glimpse into your business financial health. Existing users can access these new connections from their account management screen.

In the big picture view, this is really just an another incremental step for Outright as integration with other apps is at the forefront of their strategy. Outright and the other members of The Small Business Web are doing wonderful things together to make our day-to-day experiences using web software easier and more productive.

Registration and use of Outright is free, although there are plans to offer paid plans in the future.

Do these new hooks into Expensify and PayPal make Outright a more attractive option for you?

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Online identity manager DandyID, which I covered back in July, has added some nice improvements to its privacy options, specifically the option to control which of your identities is visible through your online profile or shared widgets.

Simon shared some great integration news about Outright and Expensify. It’s wonderful to see the Small Business Web initiative really moving forward.

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Social Contact Manager BatchBook now lets you create custom web forms that tie right in to your CRM database.

The folks over at MailChimp just announced a very cool Twitter-themed email template for their email marketing service. Link your MailChimp account to your Twitter account, and you can automatically pull in profile information including colors and backgrounds, follower numbers and recent tweets to use in your campaigns.

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Outright

Outright is part of the Small Business Web, a movement that we’ve written about before, which aims to bring closer collaboration between web apps in order to make their offerings stronger. Expensify and Outright are certainly a very natural fit — hopefully more companies will be persuaded that joining together like this results in a better product.

What other apps would work well together like this?

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As we’re at the midyear point, now is a good time to evaluate how prepared you are for tax preparation, rather than wait for year end. To sweeten the deal a bit, the folks at Outright have partnered with Network Solutions to offer a free domain name and business profile page for one year to new signups. The promotion runs through until the end of July.

If you don’t already have a web presence, this might be a great way to get yourself online, and to get the bookkeeping and tax preparation benefits of Outright. Just register as normal with Outright and they’ll send you the details on how to get your domain name. It is estimated that 50 percent to 60 percent of small businesses do not yet have an online presence; offers like this can give people the ability to take the plunge and move their business to the web.

What I really like about this offer is that it is very much in the spirit of the Small Business Web movement that I think is tremendously important for the long-term success of web services. While not an integration move, it shows how service providers can work together to bring a real benefit to their small business users. I’ve watched these interactions and relationships develop online and am thrilled to see real benefits coming out of these partnerships.

Is your business online? Could you use a free domain name?

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While there’s no shortage of accounting programs available, with varying levels of complexity and pricing, it can be difficult for a small shop to find the right solution. Focusing on ease of use and integration with other web apps, Outright is a great choice for web workers.

In reality, the accounting needs of the average solo web worker are usually pretty modest. Record the money in (income) versus your money out (expenses) and be prepared to pay your taxes when they’re due.

At its core, Outright is a basic web service designed to allow you to easily track your expenses and income. Using a familiar check register interface, you enter in transaction details and get quick and simple access to the general health of your business.

As a member of the Small Business Web initiative I wrote about recently, Outright integrates well with FreshBooks, the invoicing app, and Shoeboxed, the receipt organizer (both also SBW members).

In fact, it is when used in conjunction with these other apps that Outright really stands out. While it has all the right things to make data entry easy, like auto-complete and keyboard shortcuts, nothing could be easier than having your existing invoice and expense data imported automatically. When connected to your Freshbooks or Shoeboxed accounts, all transactions are updated nightly and even maintain a link connection so you can get to the original source quickly.

There are some challenges with this integration, though. For example, Outright exclusively uses the categories from  Schedule C but since Shoeboxed doesn’t have that limitation, there are instances when it is necessary to manually re-assign a category to synced records.

I think the folks at Outright don’t stress enough the tax preparation angle when describing the usefulness of their service. With email reminders when quarterly payments are due, estimated payment amounts and a really handy Schedule C printout, using Outright just for the tax preparation functionality alone might make great sense.

If you’re already using Freshbooks or Shoeboxed, then getting an Outright account is almost a no-brainer. But even if you’re not using these apps, then Outright is still a very good choice for basic expense and income tracking.

oDesk integration was also recently added, and I imagine support for other apps is coming soon, so it might be a good idea to check in occasionally and see if they are supporting your app of choice.

Outright is free during the beta period and works wherever you have a browser and Internet connection.

How do you manage your books?

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“The Small Business Web is a movement to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses,” Pamela O’Hara, CEO of BatchBlue, told me via email.

By using the APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, present in each other’s products, the participating companies hope to offer a very high level of integration between their services. This will allow each company to focus on its own core competency, while allowing for easier data portability and a better overall experience for the user.

We’ve already seen companies make use of APIs to allow for some level of integration: most time tracking applications allow for import from a Basecamp project, for example. This new initiative is seemingly taking this to a whole new level and is essentially looking to offer a suite of mix-and-match services that will work together to provide a higher level of interaction to offer the functionality you need.

The initial batch of participating companies include WebWorkerDaily favorites such as FreshBooks, Shoeboxed, Outright, MailChimp and, of course, BatchBlue, and there is a good level of integration between these products already in place.

My initial reaction to the announcement was a good one. As someone who promotes efficiency in business process, needing to do duplicate data entry in multiple systems has always been a sticky issue. The more that the tools I use interact to keep data in sync, the less time my team has to spend to do so manually.

A potential stalling point is the cost involved in this mix-and-match approach. At what point does it make sense to consider a more integrated solution rather than lumping individual products together? I can (and do) justify the cost of a couple of these services but when I start combining $10 here with $14 there across five or six different products it has the potential to become prohibitively expensive for a small business.

It will mean that we may need to reevaluate our providers to see if this interaction offers a benefit that would make switching services worthwhile. I’ve long been a proponent of the BatchBook CRM, but I recently moved my invoicing from FreshBooks to Cashboard. Do the advantages offered in this new mashup make it worth it to return to FreshBooks?

Of course, these are decisions that one must make in any case, and the increased integration does make the use of these unique services more appealing, but for a small team to spend upwards of $1,000 a year on SaaS products is a considerable investment. Perhaps a plan to discount the cost of services when you combine them could be implemented.

The initial group of participants announced is certainly a compelling assortment of applications and services. My hope is that the options will continue to grow and that it won’t be exclusionary. For this to be successful, we need to be able to choose between competing applications within a space.

I would also like to know more about what the criteria is for inclusion as a provider. Is there a baseline of functionality needed? Is there a formal process or a commitment of some sort? I am sure more info will be forthcoming. So while it is still early for this movement, I’m hopefully optimistic about the possibilities of the Small Business Web initiative. Offering nice benefits in efficiency and productivity to those of us who use web-based products is a good thing.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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