Sage North America has opened an online portal for small businesses that provides them with free online invoicing and other services.
The portal, known as SageSpark.com, includes Billing Boss, to help small businesses handle customer invoices. The overall portal also allows small businesses to sign up for paid services from Sage, including an online help desk for their technology needs, online marketing services, employee recruitment and business performance measurement.
Sage is also providing social networking features in SageSpark to allow users to connect with other small business owners, find new customers and share advice. Other services include a jobs board and an area where users can find a local accountant.
A lot of people who have been serial entrepreneurs are like parents who have had several children, said Rob King, vice president of strategic marketing for North America at Sage. We make it easy for them to get engaged and make it easier for them to be successful in business.
The virtual help desk provides on-demand IT support for small businesses. It also provides services such as making sure a businesss antivirus software is up-to-date through remote control features. The IT help desk service costs $60 per month. Sage is also providing a service that will allow a small business to market itself better through localized search engines such as Yahoo Local, submitting their information to 20 different search engines, according to Chuck LeDuc, director of development at Sage.
The free online invoicing service, Billing Boss, currently integrates with Sages Simply Accounting Software, but Sage plans to integrate it in the future with its Peachtree line and with other accounting software, even from other vendors. Small businesses will be able to share information from the service with their accountants, and get a summary of the taxes they have collected or need to pay.
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