hi - new to practice management, but...

Have you seen the video demo of Practice Management?:
http://accountancy-practice.iris.co.uk/files/demos/pracmandemo/iris_prac...

(You will have to log in to view).

There are some KB articles and How To guides as well which may be helpful.

When I bought iris software as whole package I needed training as well.

I called iris and purchased online training for accounts preparation and self assessment and when I finished it I was in complete disappointment because program was very shallow and just tells the user click this, click that in order to quickly submit a self assessment tax return and disregarding other functions of the software.

Software itself very functional and professionally made but do not expect to find professionally prepared training material.

I have also had Sage line 50 training and their training material prepared very professionally every function of the program explained with examples and user work with actual program which is comes with other training materials.

5 stars out of 5 to Sage.

Hi - I'm a bit confused, have you looked at PM's help screen, that's what it's there for?  It gives you pretty much everything on how PM works, from staff control panel to data mining, setting tasks, job tracking, job profiles etc.

Having used PM from day 1 I'm pretty sure the help screens are the original manual and, to be honest, PM is not deep enough to need formal training, just follow the help screens.  I'm suprised Iris support didn't suggest you looked at it.

On the topic of your boss, it's his/her job to make sure staff are able to do their job, why don't you all just say that you won't use the software till someone shows you how to use it properly?

...many small practices seem unwilling or unable to invest in training and indeed I understand from our iXBRL trainer that the Reading centre is closing/closed, presumably through lack of demand.

There is the in house option, but that is expensive unless you have enough people to make it cost effective.

SAGE on the other hand came up through book-keeping, which is done primarily with commercial businesses and they seem more keen on training their staff, therefore SAGE have been better able to fund a good training program.

Also, SAGE was primarily at the lower end of the ability scale, so the training would need to be more thorough and more in depth to reflect the average abilities of the users.

Personally, with IRIS, I know what I want it to do and as some one who prefers independant learning (i.e. keep clicking buttons until you find the right one) to structured I don't find it that hard to make it do it on the accounting/tax side.

I admit I struggle with PM, but that is more that I am not a great checklist person and tend to work more intuitively, so find following rigid sequences and breaking tasks down into component parts a challange!

The above is just me surmising, so don't take it as gospel, I may be way off beam