MyBizHomepage Launches Free Online Financial Dashboard

October 10, 2006; 07:21 AM

According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), 64 percent of the 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses that close every year considered themselves "successful" up until the point they went out of business. Many entrepreneurs simply don't know what hits them until it's too late.

MyBizHomepage.com launches today to provide entrepreneurs and small businesses with a free Web-based financial dashboard that will enable them to monitor more regularly and easily the financial data that is critical to their company's overall viability. MyBizHomepage syncs with popular accounting software such as Intuit's Quickbooks to pull real-time business-critical information from the software and present it via a secure Web interface in an easy-to-understand graphical format. Key reports include data about payables, receivables, costs, sales and cash.

MyBizHomepage is the creation of serial entrepreneur Peter Justen who decided to address his own frustration about not being able to view his financial data at the moments when he needed to make important business decisions. "Every time I needed a financial report I had to contact my controller or accountant, both of whom were charging by the hour and weren't always there when I called," says Justen, founder and CEO of MyBizHomepage. "I knew there had to be a better way for me and my fellow entrepreneurs to get a quick, bird's eye-view of our companies' financials. It made all the sense in the world to develop a Web-based solution that would sync up with our accounting software to present summary data in plain English and in real time, whenever it's needed."

Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) represent 99 percent of all employers, pay 44 percent of the total US payroll, and annually generate $1 trillion in business, according to the SBA. Yet, there is no cost-effective tool currently available to them that lets them instantly get a visual and complete view of their company's financial situation. Existing commercial solutions are geared towards larger companies with more complex needs and take days and thousands of dollars to implement. By contrast, MyBizHomepage is focused on the needs of SMB owners and entrepreneurs, takes only three steps to set up and is completely free, thanks to partnerships with organizations such as SCORE, the Counselors to America's Small Business, as well as revenue from advertising.

"Quite frankly, most small-business owners are too busy running their business to watch their company's financial health as closely and regularly as they should, and that's when they get into trouble," said Laurie McCabe, Vice President of SMB Insights and Business Solutions at AMI Partners, an IT analyst group that specializes in the small and medium business market. "Having their most current financial data automatically show up right on their homepage without any effort on their part is sure to help them keep a closer eye on their financials and therefore run a more successful business. MyBizHomepage is a simple, easy-to-use business tool that would be useful to any type of small business. The fact that it's free is an added bonus."

MyBizHomepage also meets the strictest security and privacy requirements, which resulted in its authorization by Verisign and certification by Entrust. First-time users of MyBizHomepage need to take only three steps to complete the registration process: They are required to enter their basic personal and business information, such as name, email address and business identification number, and then use Intuit's web connector to retrieve their QuickBooks file(s). Throughout the process, these files remain securely on the users' desktop and MyBizHomepage uses a secure sign-on, SOAP back-end and MySQL database to further safeguard the delivery of the personalized homepage to small businesses across the US.

About MyBizHomepage

MyBizHomepage (www.mybizhomepage.com) is a free, Web-based financial dashboard designed specifically for entrepreneurs and small businesses that gives them a comprehensive view of their business-critical financial information in real time and in plain English. For small business owners and entrepreneurs, MyBizHomepage offers a secure resource that synchronizes with their QuickBooks software and enables them to make informed decisions about their own business. MyBizHomepage was founded in 2006 by Peter Justen with the vision of empowering entrepreneurship in America.