Chances are you started your company because you love what you do. You opened your doors because you have a solid product that you believe in.  You probably did not start a business because your paperwork abilities were unmatched.  Paperwork is an essential and necessary evil for any business owner and accurate invoicing cannot be ignored. We all need cash flow to keep our businesses afloat, so using a good invoicing system can help us keep cash in the bank and our customers happy!

Invoicing help online

Using a web-based invoicing service is a possible option for business owners who want a quicker, more reliable way, and often-automatic means to invoice their customers. There are a vast number of available online options to choose from that can take that monotonous task of paperwork off your plate. Below we’ll take a look at just 3 of the solutions out there:

A free but powerful invoicing service

BillingBoss has a big advantage: It’s free. This online tool allows you to set up automatic invoicing of repeat customers and send out once-off invoices to those customers who aren’t regular. Do not be deceived because this service is free. It ought to be plenty effective enough for the majority of small business owners.

A power tool

AcceptPay from American Express is definitely for the power user. For only $30 a month, users of AcceptPay can connect with QuickBooks, collect online payments from clients, and set up a wide array of customizable automatic invoices. It seems a pretty small price to pay for such a effective tool.

Invoicing for the tech-savvy

If you are tech-savvy and understand how to use open source software, BambooInvoice is a great option. This free service is highly customizable and lives on your in-house servers rather than in the cloud.  This makes it simple for you to make the program satisfy your company’s exact needs.

The best news for business owners is that these services are merely a small sample of the many online invoicing services available, most of them free or low-cost. Those business owners who wish to quickly gain control over their invoicing process should check them out.

It looks as if Microsoft is ready to do its part to discourage cyber crimes. Microsoft plans to offer real-time feeds that partners can use to study possible cyber threats and take the proper steps to boost their defenses against these attacks.

With Microsoft’s success in tackling botnets, they have been able to collect a lot of data around the specific threats these botnets pose. By allowing the botnets to contaminate highly controlled environments, Microsoft had been able to identify and remove the harmful bots and also learn how they work.

Previously these details had not been shared, but now this data can be shared with the government and private organizations, CERTs, & ISPs. Even though the amount of attacks will not likely decrease thanks to this real-time feed, the impact of a feed like this will be great. The amount of damage from a cyber attack will likely be greatly diminished because IT security professionals will be able to more quickly answer a threat.

Another great result a real-time threat feed could have is an improvement in overall information sharing between IT security companies. For too long IT companies have been hesitant to share threat information for the fear that it might fuel more attacks. Most experts say this an unsupported fear.  The cyber criminal “community” is already sharing and gaining knowledge from each other.  It’s only logical therefore that IT security professional share as much information as possible to combat the seemingly endless barrage of new cyber threats.

The IT industry has for too long viewed the sharing of the details of a cyber attack an invitation for a copycat attack. Hopefully Microsoft’s first small steps toward a more connected IT security force will take root and that sharing data and information is a more sensible choice than secrecy.

Many small business owners have employed the cloud in these tough economic times. Business owners can save money by utilizing programs within the cloud, from Photoshop alternatives to project-management tools. However, the cloud can be a bit questionable with regards to security. Documents stored in the cloud can be compromised or damaged.

Password issues

One of the biggest security issues when dealing with the cloud is password protection. This is also one of the greatest security issues outside of the cloud.

Business owners should be careful to choose passwords for their cloud projects which are challenging for others to guess. The best solution is for owners to include a mix of letters and numbers in their passwords. Owners should also be careful about sharing their passwords with a lot of people. The more people who have access to passwords, the more in danger important data and documents are.

Hacker alert

Hackers, malware, and spyware remain serious issues for cloud environments, just like they are issues that business owners face when logging onto their personal computers everyday. What makes this particularly scary is that individual business owners have little control over how secure cloud services are. The big names — companies like Microsoft and Google — must supply their own security for the information that business owners store in the cloud.

Common sense protection

There are a couple common-sense practices that will help protect small business owners who choose to store information in the cloud.

First, owners should consider what type of information they are storing in the cloud. The most sensitive data, data that could damage a company if it is lost or stolen, might not be appropriate for cloud storage. Instead, this data may be better preserved on a business owner’s individual computing system and reliably backed up.

Secondly, be careful about who is allowed access to the data stored in the cloud. It seems obvious that business owners protect their laptops and desktops with passwords. The same should be applied to the cloud.