Congratulations on purchasing your new online accounting solution! You can finally say goodbye to countless, jumbled Excel spreadsheets, shoeboxes for receipts, and additional software taking up precious storage on your hard drives. However, not everything is rainbows and butterflies; despite seeming a lot more user-friendly, online accounting software are still what they are: software to manage your bookkeeping and financials. And you have to learn how to use it quickly in order to see their full potential.
That is the reason why you can get as much help from your chosen online accounting solution provider as possible in the form of webinars, trainings, tutorials, community forums, and, of course, regular contact methods like email, live chat and phone support. In this article, however, we are going to talk about supplemental sources of learning the use of a new online accounting solution. There are companies that go above and beyond in educating their users by providing these additional sources of expert information. Sage, Xero and FreshBooks are three such cloud accounting companies.
Tutorials – Lots of How To
When you first access your new online accounting solution you will see useful pop-ups which tell you how to use the software and what kind of features you will find there. But what if you want to see the software in action? Thankfully all companies have tutorials briefly explaining the features of the software. Xero 101 is a prime example of this: it contains short videos about Xero, giving you a quick inside look into the software. These types of videos can also be found under Sage One Help and FreshBooks’ support as well, for instance. However, there is also a bulletproof way of finding these tutorial videos: go to the YouTube or Vimeo channel of the selected company and you will definitely find the video you were searching for.
Help Centers – The Home of FAQs
Help centers are always full of useful information: not only do they contain FAQs, which answer the most common questions, but they also tell you more about those features of the software the tutorials didn’t have time to mention, and sometimes these are the pages where you can learn about the latest product updates. Xero’s Business Help Center, the Sage One Help page and FreshBooks’ support page are full of such information often illustrated by screenshots from the software itself.
Community Forums
Community forums are places where users can talk to each other and the personnel of the company. If you have a very specific problem not detailed in the help centers, you can ask your question here or you can search for similar discussions started by others. Xero has one of the most lively community forums among online accounting companies under its Business Help Center, while Sage gathered all these forums under Sage City along with blog posts, details about trainings and other support resources.
Trainings, Webinars
Whether they are organized locally or in an online format, trainings are the perfect occasions for learning from the personnel of the online accounting company. The trainings section of Xero called Xero U has many, completely free of charge opportunities for users to choose from: the majority of the trainings are on-demand webinars, meaning that you can learn anytime from anywhere about different topics starting from the basics to tips helping you grow your business. And if you are an accountant or bookkeeper, you can also find live webinars and courses dedicated for self-paced learning.
Sage’s webinars are a bit different, however. First of all, you have to create a separate Sage University profile to access the courses, then you have to select the product you want to learn about. After the selection, however, you have plenty of courses to choose from: on-demand webinars, scheduled trainings, learning packages and many more.
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