Here’s a nice problem to have: too many people are giving you money. Not to be confused with too many people owing you money, which is a terrible problem to have. We at Deskera can’t tell you how to get in touch with some nice gentlemen of the leg-breaking persuasion, but we can certainly help you out with tracking all of your payments and invoices.

Deskera Accounting is built on a great idea: take the simplest, most straightforward way to do something, the way that requires the least amount of setting up and learning new concepts – and then improve it just enough to make it really, really convenient. Every small business owner has gone through that early stage where they kept a list of outstanding payments in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s the way accounting has been done throughout human history. I think the old Civilization games had double-entry bookkeeping in their science tree. Since almost everyone has a copy of Office (or OpenOffice, or MS Works if you’re a home user who bought your computer from a really silly retailer), a spreadsheet is just the path of least resistance for making a list. Don’t believe us ?

…we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn’t even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. – Joel Spolsky in The Process of Designing a Product

Using Deskera Accounting is no more difficult than keeping a list in a spreadsheet. There is nothing that you need to know about accounting, or information management, or databases, to get the best out of this tool. But you do get a lot of surprisingly convenient little functions. Not just the sort of thing you’d expect from any competent accounting application, but the sort of thing that makes you go “hey, that’s really cool!”.

Here’s my favorite example. If you go to the Deskera Accounting dashboard and click on Company Preferences > Account Preferences, you’ll see a section called Automatic Number Generation. This is a really simple way to tell Deskera Accounting how to generate invoice numbers. You can enter any combination of letters, numbers and special characters, and that combo will be automatically used in every payment slip you make. Just place zeroes in there somewhere, and the software will replace them with sequential, automatically incrementing numbers.

Of course, this is a basic function of an accounting system, but what I really like is that you can set this up in just a couple of clicks – you don’t have to go looking through a bunch of menus and settings, and figuring out how the software thinks about this particular variable.

It’s no more difficult than typing a number into a spreadsheet.

Deskera is the only truly Microsoft Project Compatible project management software available. You can import your existing Microsoft Project plans, collaborate on them and export the updated plan back to Microsoft Project.

Now Deskera allows you to embed your project plan anywhere on the web.

1. Get the embed code from the Export option in Deskera
2. Paste it into your website, blog or any HTML editor
3. You can change the dimensions of the plan to suit the destination

Some of the benefits:

1. Any updates to the plan in Deskera will automatically be reflected
2. Search-as-you-type on your embedded plan
3. View the true Work Breakdown Structure – expand task lists for a complete view
4. View task details on the Gantt Chart as well
5. Give your clients and project stakeholders complete visibility – Accurate project status. Every time.
6. Get feedback on your project plan from colleagues and experts.

Also now you can not only work on your Microsoft Project Plans on the web, but also publish them anywhere on the web. Deskera is definitely the best Microsoft Project Viewer around!

Embed Project Plans – Increase Visibility. Incorporate Feedback. Improve Efficiencies.

What are you waiting for? Sign Up.

You can now access your Deskera calendars from any calendar that supports iCal, including Microsoft Outlook, Google, Yahoo, Blackberry, iPhone etc.

Using the URL provided, you can access events from all your Deskera calendars in any calendar you choose. You can also choose to export only individual calendars. Learn more about how to export calendars in Deskera.

Whenever your project events are updated in Deskera, you will automatically be notified on your other calendars, whether MS Outlook, Google, etc or your mobile calendars.

This means that now you don’t even have to log in to Deskera to be in sync with your project events. Stay informed of your schedule on the move.

You can also import your existing events in other calendars to Deskera.  So along with importing your existing Microsoft Project plan to Deskera, you can also move your existing schedule and events in Microsoft Outlook, Google, Yahoo, Blackberry, iPhone, etc to Deskera.

One more step towards being the single application for all your project management needs.

Now you can send email notifications for to-dos. Once you create a to-do and assign it to a team member, you can choose to notify the to-do owners by e-mail.

You can select multiple to-dos by holding down ‘Ctrl’ and send multiple notifications at once. We’ve also improved the Mark-as-Done UI by replacing the old checkbox with a neat ‘Tick’ icon.

And thanks to all our customers who said they loved the drag-and-drop functionality. Give it a go at demo.deskera.com and tell us what you think.