Who wants to spend time and energy on accounting? Most people would rather wash the car or even scrub toilets. That might change soon thanks to Less Accounting.

The whole goal behind Less Accounting is to make book keeping as simple and easy as possible. The team behind Less Accounting, Less Everything, believes that users will never again use Quickbooks. In fact, they're so bullish, they see themselves changing the accounting landscape as much as 37Signals changed project management with Basecamp.

So how does it rank in real-life? Less Accounting provides users with three main categories, Money In, Money Out and Watch Money. Money In allows users to easily drop in sales leads, notes, proposals, invoices, and deposits made. Money Out has areas to input Expenses and Mileage. In the Watch Money category, users can get an account summary with bank account activity and view all paid expenses and deposits. It does not tie into your online banking; it's merely another tool to use for cross referencing. Through Watch Money, Sales reports can also be generated, as well as reports for both paid and unpaid invoices.

Everything is pretty straightforward to use, and the design is clean and very attractive. A few things that were missing in the beta test included some kind of tutorial or walkthrough of the application, and it wasn't very evident where data could be exported from reports, which I later came across on the top right navigation which might blend in a little too much. Aside from that, it wasn't too earth shattering. I would like to maybe see this application tie into 37Signals for contact and project management the same way that Freshbooks does, now that might be something to get people going on this.

Highrise is an online contact manager built by the famous 37 signals, founders of the ever popular Basecamp project management tool. It was quietly launched yesterday to the public.

Highrise tracks leads, clients and vendors, allowing users to stay on the ball with who gets spoken to, when, and about what. This allows for members of a team to easily decipher the next plans of action. Notes, calls, and tasks can each have reminders set to them for easily remembering to follow up. When signing up for Highrise, each user will get a unique email address, when items are sent to this email, they will automatically become tasks, taking the extra steps out of lining up items to be completed. HIghrise is at its most effective when an entire company works with this online tool. Employees can share vendor, clients, lead, and co-worker information to see what has been previously communicated, and what was acted upon.

Rates vary with Highrise. There is a free plan with 2 users and space for 25 contacts which is great to try out the software and see if it could fit in with your current operation. Then users can choose to upgrade to a basic plan that allows for 400MB of file storage and 5000 contacts for $24/month. If that isn't enough, $149/month can get you unlimited users, 20GB of storage, and up to 50,000 users.

Highrise is a great compliment to the other online software packages that 37 signals offers, as data is communicated effortlessly between all of them.

In my ongoing search for the ultimate software system for use with the Getting Things Done methodology, I've recently come across a real winner. Tracks is a web application that was built from the ground up for the purposes of implementing a GTD system. Written in Ruby on Rails, Tracks offers the familiar Projects and Contexts organization system made popular by David Allen's Getting Things Done system, coupled with the sparse graphical design and easy functionality made popular by well-known Ruby on Rails applications like Backpack, Basecamp and Ta-Da List. Now I should mention that Tracks is not affiliated in any way with 37 Signals (the maker of the other three web applications I mentioned), but it's clear that the Tracks developers are inspired by what 37 Signals have done. Plus, I'm sure it doesn't hurt that Rails was released by 37 Signals as a framework with which to get productive with Ruby very quickly.

The installation of Tracks is unfortunately not for the faint of heart; if you're someone that would shy away from installing a web server on your local machine, or don't have access to a Ruby-enabled web hosting account, installing Tracks probably isn't for you. If you are, there are a number of sets of instructions available.

For the rest of us, our best bet is to find a hosted solution. Since Tracks is by its very nature multi-user, it appears to have been a relatively straightforward task to build a hosted solution, and allow users to pay a monthly fee for access.

My favorite of these hosted offerings is called GTDTracks. GTDTracks is extremely affordable, at $1.49/month, and they offer regular backups and upgrades. I'd much rather about getting my stuff done than messing with upgrading a web application that I know very little about, so this option appeals to me a great deal. Plus, they take care of what is arguably my biggest fear with online hosted services, which is the question of how to get your data out if you decide to move on to something else. GTDTracks has a policy of allowing users to cancel their account at any time with no penalty (so you're not on the hook for more than a buck and a half at any given time), and you can take your data with you, exported as a plain text file that can be imported into another installation of Tracks, or simply mined for the data it contains.

Using Tracks is very straightforward - simply create Contexts and Projects as needed, then create Next Actions (essentially tasks) and associate them with the project and context they relate to. Due dates can be set through a convenient calendar widget. One nicely done element of the application is the Done page - one way to get inspired to get things done is to see what you've already accomplished. The Done page shows items that were completed in the last 24 hours, last 7 days and last 28 days, as well as a link for everything older than that.

You remember the video, right?

I got my wish. Eleven days ago I posted about a new online productivity suite that I was dying to try. Well it's late on Halloween evening, and I've just spent the last hour playing with the various features in Scrybe that enticed me when I first saw the demo video. And so far, I think we have a winner on our hands.

After playing around with the user interface for a bit, which is sort of fun in and of itself, I decided to test the killer feature that puts Scrybe in a league of its own when it comes to online calendars and productivity applications: offline use and synchronization.

What can I say? It just works. I turned off my wireless adapter, put my browser into offline mode, logged in, and proceeded to add and change data in my Scrybe account. Everything worked as you'd expect - it felt like being online. Then I turned my wireless back on, put my browser back into online mode, logged into my account, and everything was there, as expected. Okay, so far, so good. So then, I moved over to another computer, and logged in to Scrybe. And, as expected, everything was there, as well. Perfect!

So what is there to complain about with the beta release? So far, surprisingly little. My one peeve is that the Scrybe window defaults to a specific size, which is slightly too long for my laptop's native resolution of 1280x800, and awkwardly short for my two available external monitor's resolutions at 1440x900 and 1280x1024. Given that Scrybe is written in Flash, as TechCrunch notes, it seems strange that they would have chosen not to make the interface fluid like, for example, Google Calendar. Certainly it should be possible. Let's hope this is on Scrybe's radar for future enhancements. For more thoughts on what it means that Scrybe is written in Flash, check out Ryan Stewart's thoughts at ZDNet.

I'm sure as time goes on bugs will be found, and fixed (oh, the beauty of online apps), but for now Scrybe is giving us a seriously strong first draft to play with. In terms of functionality, this beta release of Scrybe is almost feature complete, based on what they showed in the demonstration video. The only feature that did not make the cut for this version is the bookmarking / web clipping functionality. According to Scrybe this will be added in a few weeks, to be followed by the mysterious sharing functionality that is alluded to at the end of the first video.

Although I could take this time to walk through the functionality in Scrybe again, it's really no different than what we saw in the demo video, and I described in our first post about the system. That is to say that so far, everything works as I'd hoped it would.

Right now the only way to get a beta account is to sign up at Scrybe on their main page. Unfortunately for all of us excited users, Scrybe is doing a phased rollout of their beta program. Although this is frustrating for those of us that would like accounts and can't get them immediately, I think they deserve credit for deciding to do things right. Faizan, CEO and co-founder of Scrybe tells us "We could have launched with a bang and gotten another mega spike on Alexaholic, but the purpose is to control the hype and improve the product with focused users." That's a very refreshing perspective. For more information about the beta rollout, check out the Launch Details page on the Scrybe site.

In this era of worshipping at the temple of "The David" (Getting Things Done), there is no shortage of offline and online productivity suites. With that in mind, I rarely get all that excited about the new Web 2.0 offerings that get a bit of buzz here and there. But Scrybe appears to be different.

Way different.

Like wow different. Here, just watch:

Scrybe is an online organizer that is grounded in one word: context. The user interface is designed to always give the user context relating to the data they are dealing with. So if you're working in your calendar, you can fly up to a year view, or dig down all the way to a day view, and all of the related information is intelligently displayed so that you never lose track of where you are. Watching the video on their site, you immediately get a feeling of "that just makes sense". Google Calendar is good, but doesn't appear to be as good as this.