Iris - negotiate reduction in fees

Iris - negotiate reduction in fees

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I am a sole practitioner (single user) and my renewal is coming up for the accountancy suite (AP, BT etc).

I am thinking about Digita but have yet to review that option.

However, would be interesting to know whether any person in a similar position has managed to negotiate a significant reduction in the Iris annual fee.

Replies (19)

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Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
20th Oct 2016 18:32

Hi geroge - I've never heard of a general fee reduction being negotiable with Iris because the individual practice finds it too expensive. For >20 years, despite the cost, I've found it great value for money, but then I use the other products as well, eg PM & CoSec.

Having now reduced my practice to <50 "compliance" clients I've dropped Iris AP, BT & PT and moved to Taxfiler saving myself over £3,000 pa. My clients are relatively straight forward, with the majority of Ltd Cos being Micros but I've yet to find anything Taxfiler is unable to handle.

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Replying to Paul Scholes:
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By geroge
20th Oct 2016 19:44

Thanks Paul, I will call Iris and see what they say, as I am seriously considering changing purely down to price.

Your client base seems similar to mine; I did take a brief look at Taxfiler, but it seemed very basic - have you come across anything yet which Iris handled but Taxfiler does not?

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By marks
22nd Oct 2016 22:21

For a sole practitioner with about 50 clients then IRIS isnt necessary. There are plenty of other packages out there that will do what you need at a fraction of the cost eg taxfiler, VT, taxcalc etc.

IRIS really is only necessary where you have a number of staff members and have say over 200 clients. As it is easier to keep a track of everything using the Practice Management integration.

That is the only reason we moved to IRIS over a year ago. We now have over 200 clients and couple of staff and IRIS pays for itself in being able to keep a track of where everything is at.

When you only have say 50 clients and it is just yourself it is easy enough to keep a track of everything in your head or a simple spreadsheet which you yourself are responsible for updating. That is how I did things when i started up.

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By marks
22nd Oct 2016 22:21

For a sole practitioner with about 50 clients then IRIS isnt necessary. There are plenty of other packages out there that will do what you need at a fraction of the cost eg taxfiler, VT, taxcalc etc.

IRIS really is only necessary where you have a number of staff members and have say over 200 clients. As it is easier to keep a track of everything using the Practice Management integration.

That is the only reason we moved to IRIS over a year ago. We now have over 200 clients and couple of staff and IRIS pays for itself in being able to keep a track of where everything is at.

When you only have say 50 clients and it is just yourself it is easy enough to keep a track of everything in your head or a simple spreadsheet which you yourself are responsible for updating. That is how I did things when i started up.

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By marks
22nd Oct 2016 22:21

For a sole practitioner with about 50 clients then IRIS isnt necessary. There are plenty of other packages out there that will do what you need at a fraction of the cost eg taxfiler, VT, taxcalc etc.

IRIS really is only necessary where you have a number of staff members and have say over 200 clients. As it is easier to keep a track of everything using the Practice Management integration.

That is the only reason we moved to IRIS over a year ago. We now have over 200 clients and couple of staff and IRIS pays for itself in being able to keep a track of where everything is at.

When you only have say 50 clients and it is just yourself it is easy enough to keep a track of everything in your head or a simple spreadsheet which you yourself are responsible for updating. That is how I did things when i started up.

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Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
24th Oct 2016 11:08

Hi Marks - I tend to agree with you however, with regard to the number of clients easy to handle, without a formal system, you forget to account for the "age" factor. At my age, and as a sole practitioner, I still need Iris PM to keep me on the straight & narrow!

Geroge - I've now prepared 7 sets of company accounts and 10 personal tax returns and haven't hit a problem yet. There are two aspects of Tf though you should know.

They use a fixed chart of accounts, ie you can't add your own accounts or edit the titles. I've only found one account (exchange differences) that was missing and they added this within a month. As all my clients are on Cloud accounting and so there's no value in annual accounts, this is no problem for me.

They have yet to release FRS 102 complaint accounts, although they are working on them.

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Replying to Paul Scholes:
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By geroge
25th Oct 2016 11:43

Hi Paul, thanks for the details - I must say it's that type of thing (not yet updated for FRS 102) that worries me about moving to a smaller supplier.

I have a similar client base to you but have already had to file 3 FRS 102 accounts (A/P starting after 1/1/16), due to cessation of trading and moving onto liquidation for funds extraction.

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Replying to Paul Scholes:
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By agillies
27th Oct 2016 13:49

I use taxcalc and recommend it - looks similar to taxfiler, taxcalc will cost more but I think its worth that and I have used them for many years. I look at it as cost per client.

I am looking to move clients to cloud, with smallest clients say on VT - larger ones with VAT etc (I have not used Xer yet) but by head says sage, heart says Xero - be interested in your views Xero v SAGE- main problem is clients don't always use staff end up sorting more than I should.

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Glenn Martin
By Glenn Martin
24th Oct 2016 13:59

Hi
You will be doing well to negotiate a reduction from IRIS as they seem to expect inflation busting increases every year and dont seem bothered if you threaten to leave.

If you are looking to move be aware of their termination as you have cancel 90 days before contract ends with a letter signed by both your grandparents ottherwise it auto renews.

If you are looking for another solution I would do what Paul suggests and look at Taxfiler. Its cheap and will do the job and is fully cloud.

The whole software market is in transition currently and there will be a lot of developments in next 2 years as MTD starts to unfold. I would wait 2 or 3 years then look at who has the best products once the dust has settled. The best solution may not even be available yet.

Taxfiler will get you where need to be, with the money you will save you could book a holiday.

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Red Leader
By Red Leader
24th Oct 2016 16:44

I tried to get a price freeze from IRIS. They wouldn't budge despite persistent attempts by me. I have been a customer for >10 years.
This and their constant large annual price increases finally p1ssed me off enough to overcome lethargy and commit to moving.
After reviewing the market, I have made a decision to switch to Taxcalc. My IRIS sub is up 30.6.17 so I will be giving notice next February and using the quiet period to set up and transition.
My practice is a one man band with about 150 SATRs and 50 ltd cos.

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Freddie
By Slim Freddie
24th Oct 2016 17:04

I don’t think you’ll have any luck. I tried myself when I had enough of their increased charges about two years ago. As Glennzy says you’ll probably also be lumped with a cancellation fee. IRIS don’t care about their customers. They only care about increasing prices every year and making it very difficult to leave them which made me more determined to leave.

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Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
25th Oct 2016 17:21

In their defense, Iris have been, for me, of real benefit over 20+ years and, having worked with them on several projects, the increase in fees are easier to swallow if you see what work goes on behind the scenes to innovate plus, in latter years, what influence they have had with .GOV over their developments and how they will impact on us and our clients.

Also, to be fair to them, in the past, when I've pointed out that the developments on a particular module can not justify a 6%+ increase they have, on a number of occasions extended my annual licence by a few months. (Mind you, this may be because I'm a very nice person?).

Geroge - In order to test out Taxfiler, what I did was to reduce my annual Iris licence to below the number I knew I'd need over the year and then paid my £10 pm to Tf to take up the slack for the last few months. Even this saved me money.

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James Mills accountant
By busjmil2
27th Oct 2016 11:00

I must admit that I am a new start up this year and decided to go with IRIS after testing Taxcalc and although being pretty impressed, I wanted to keep at the higher end and wanted the integration and also Openspace for E-Approval etc.

I've used IRIS since 2005 working in practice and had to push my previous practice to get the Practice Management and Automail options for the benefits, but obviously then it was a £600k fee base and about 10 employees I was managing.

I have now just agreed to go with Virtual Cabinet for my document management though and also have used Brightpay for Payroll, so I am wondering if I am getting the value from IRIS, as I am not "fully" integrated.

Especially as Virtual Cabinet comes with it's own Electronic Approval options, which was something I was keen on.

I haven't used Digita, but have been led to believe it that this could also be a solution.

The only other thing with IRIS is I do make sure the of the Practice Management, Automail and Company Secretarial, of which I would need alternative solutions, but it is obviously weighing up the cost/benefit. I'm not even sure how much Digita would cost in comparison.

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Replying to busjmil2:
Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
28th Oct 2016 11:39

Hi busjmil2 - a new start up, that means you can loose the tie! :0)

You are in the middle of a change over at the moment and so you might want to hang on a bit. I've been a wholehearted advocate of using integrated systems but, with the advent of cloud apps, the way it's going is that you will use the best app to suit your needs, for each aspect of what you do, and use their API's to achieve your own integration.

This is how Xero is able to offer so many add-ons and why facilities like Zapier now have over 700 apps they can integrate.

I can't speak for Digita but the problem for Iris is
that, with their commitment to develop cloud apps, they will have to try to offer both desk & cloud for many years to come and might also have to allow users to switch between the two, depending on where they are working from, ie to synchronise data on both platforms. The problem here is, as we saw with form filling Opentax, the initial cloud offering is likely to be a simplified version of the desk version.

As I say above, I'm sticking with PM, AM & Cosec but there are cloud apps out there that can handle all three and, with PM & AM now looking very outdated, and with AM unable to create proper emails, I'm likely to switch to a CRM app like Zoho, with perhaps a project management add-on, in the next year.

BTW - Openspace is free

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Replying to Paul Scholes:
James Mills accountant
By busjmil2
01st Nov 2016 23:18

Thanks Paul.

Yes the tie isn't a necessity now (although in North Wales, it's still behind the times!)

You have given me more to think on in terms of the cloud apps and obviously how IRIS will probably be going forward (my renewal is actually next June, so I have a lot of time to really assess the situation).

I agree that the PM and AM are very dated (they were when we started using 5 years ago in all honesty), but they do work quite well at what they do, so would need to a fair bit of research to look to progress. I've never seen Zoho so will look.

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Replying to busjmil2:
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By Fred Hoad
28th Oct 2016 13:44

Apart from signing stuff via the portal, is there anything that Virtual Cabinet does that can't be done through Windows anyway?

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By agillies
28th Oct 2016 13:38

Deleted

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By agillies
28th Oct 2016 13:35

I use taxcalc and recommend it - looks similar to taxfiler, taxcalc will cost more but I think its worth that and I have used them for many years. I look at it as cost per client.

I am looking to move clients to cloud, with smallest clients say on VT cashbook which is free

Larger ones with VAT etc (I have not used Xero yet but can see why it works well)

My head says sage, heart says Xero - be interested in views Xero v SAGE cloud for clients- main problem is clients don't always use staff and we end up sorting it.

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Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
08th Nov 2016 13:38

@geroge - just to say that Taxfiler have now released their FRS 102 (S1A) formats.

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