Ben Hwang, a resident of Winston-Salem, announced on his personal blog the launch of a new small business accounting product that his company created.  The product is called Merchant's Mirror and here's a little of what Ben wrote:

Those of you that know me on a personal level know that recently I've been working diligently on a startup with John Brown called Merchant's Mirror. In planning and development it's been over a year in the making and we're happy to announce that onJanuary 1st, we released it to the public. At $15.95USD per month, we provide a small business with everything necessary in accounting (and if you prepay a year, it's $169.95USD per year!) at a fair price.

Creating invoices for customers and paying your vendors doesn't have to be a difficult process, so why make it such? While only in our first release, we're already looking into methods and ways to make it easier for the small business owner to take full advantage of doing their accounting the way they can understand it, not because they're forced to do so.

There's one thing that we stress and that's the fact that we're not only writing this for our clients, but with our clients. That means that every person that uses Merchant's Mirror is in fact helping craft and shape the tool. Keeping track of your books shouldn't take you all day nor should it confuse you. And as such, we'll be striving to work with our customers on all things great and small to try to provide the best in SMB accounting.

Ben and I had a brief chat via IM last week and I could tell that he was excited to get this thing launched.  I don't even want to think about how many nights he and his business partner lost to developing this thing.