NB2BC and AccountingWEB lay groundwork for ebusiness drive

eBusiness has too many options to choose from - for even the most experienced, it is confusing.

It's not the Accountant's fault for not implementing eBusiness - it's the 'get-rich-quick 'experts' that brought down the dot-com era and now eBusiness.

The software industry has delivered eFiling in the form of PAYE, VAT, CIS, Self Assesment and Companies House returns - these have been widely implemented by small to large organisiations - they were simple to install, only one standard (the Government's) and in the main they were delivered as a free upgrade by all the leading software suppliers.

The same cannot be said for eBusiness - too many standards - few supported by leading accounting packages - and buyer dominated.

The way to implement eBusiness is not to shoot the accountants - but to sort out the mess of standardisation first - so that we have a simple universal means of doing business with each other. Like we have for telephoning, e-mailing, faxing, sending documents (pdf) etc.

Dennis Keeling has recently retired as founder and CEO of the Software Industry body BASDA - to return to his IT consultancy.

Well done AccountingWeb and the National B2B Centre. (Martin I am keen to speak to you at some stage.) We all know the stats and I think any organisation that is going to take some leadership to help the very busy practitioners out there is commendable. When I was in practice I found that technology provided significant benefits in terms of internal efficiency and increased value for money to my clients. The problem is that IT is moving fast and it is hard to keep up with the latest and greatest stuff. If you are going to run a similar event closer to London then I will certainly be attending.

Hamish Edwards
xero.com

BTW - Xero was specifically designed to empower the relationship between Accountants and their clients.