Online accounting review: AccountsIQ

Posted by Nigel Harris PM | on Wed, 16/11/2011 - 15:26 2221 1 comment

Continuing his round-up of the leading Cloud accounting applications, Nigel Harris reviews AccountsIQ, which offers sophisticated functions catering for mid-size businesses.

Launched in 2008, AccountsIQ has been gradually finding its place in the online marketplace. Having initially pitched at small companies it is now targeted at the mid-market, above the level of the other online services we have reviewed so far, offering around 70% of the functionality of top tier ERP systems such as NetSuite at a fraction of the cost. An ideal user would be a small group trading across several countries and needing to produce regular consolidated accounts. It is also ideal for franchises, with built-in functionality for back-to-back ordering.

Around 500 companies with around 2,000 individual users currently use AccountsIQ.

Continued...

Matters .....

JC | Thu, 17/11/2011 - 14:37 | Permalink

Pity that an internet company have not come to grips with IE9 & spurious " " commands. Have a look at this page - http://www.accountsiq.com/software_solutions in IE and spot the  + characters all over the page.

Especially relevant as the article claims that '.. Optimised for Internet Explorer, so Mac users may struggle with some screens ..' oops .....

@Nigel Harris - Additional comments

Can the user create 'user defined reports' in the system
On the Web-Services front - can users eCommerce systems use products/categories/groups etc. held within the main Db via the Web-Service? In this respect one would not only expect access to the aforementioned items but also changing stock quantities on sales, any sales fed back into the main Db as well as feeding in sales from other sources i.e. eBay, Amazon markets etc.
One assumes that it does not incorporate its own EPos module and relies upon other 3rd party products to perform this function

Interesting comment '.. Licensed concurrent user limits: quoted figures are the maximum concurrent users allowed for each version; companies can register an unlimited number of users, which could cause friction (or increased fees) if more than the allowed number try to access the system at the same time ..'

Don't really understand the issue because the whole point of the Cloud model is multi-tennacy (especially in conjunction with the likes of Amazon EC2 / Windows Azure which automatically scale) - unless of course it is being used as a reason to justify increased fee

Nevertheless, it would be interesting to know whether they use their own servers (assume they do) or provision via a Cloud Service Provider. In fact this should probably be one of the important questions/benchmarks in future assessments, as should a review of providers SLA's, which arguably are as important as functionality