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Accountants
It took us at KashFlow a while to realise that accountants were one of the key ways to get adoption within small businesses, but once we realised it we focussed a lot of effort on it - building an additional product for accountants to manage and control their clients that use our software and building a sales team focussing just on this part of the business . Sales to and via accountants now equates for about half of our revenue and we have over 200 accountants nationwide that are members of our Partner Programme.
Although web-based software is a real game changer, in terms of the business model for the vendor as well as the delivery model, there are still plenty of lessons to be learned from those who have been here before us.
What about growing businesses?
As John says, delivering solutions to the small business clients who haven't yet computerised their accounting system tends to be the focus of many SaaS providers. As a consequence this is the message that they are promoting whilst speaking to practices and we get messages like 'simplest', 'for non-accountants' etc.
However I think the point that is missed is that these businesses grow and also an increasing number of businesses using desktop solutions are looking to the web for replacements. Therefore, looking forward, addressing the needs of the small business client simply isn't enough (unless you want to suggest to clients that they change their accounting system).
If I take just two examples from Liberty Accounts partners accountants:
1. A business needed to post a single invoice of over £1m;
2. A manufacturing business needed to add in depth stock recording and reporting.
In both instances Liberty Accounts could be adapted to cope with the extended needs of the businesses and our partners didn't need to look at replacement systems.
Duane is also correct in his statement above that accountants are key and I'm pleased to see that they are developing an additional module to help accountants manage their business. For Liberty Accounts our accounting partners have always been key and we have always had a cross client reporting as a core part of our integrated service.
Neil Chadwick
Director
Liberty Accounts
View Software Satisfaction Awards with Caution
Software Awards can be like statistics - open to interpretation.
A 'huge' 100% increase sounds like a lot until you realise that a leap from 50 to 100 clients is just a drop in the ocean.
The relative modest inpact of 'cloud' applications was commented on in this thread - Software Satisfaction Awards
Our view of the consolidation of the software vendor market (good) is also mentioned in those comments. Competition between similar products / vendors is bad for software users and cheap or free software is unsustainable in the long term, which is also bad for users. (Microsoft Office Accounting, MYOB)
Both server-based and internet-based applications will have its fans. There are pros and cons for both but it may be some time before a clear winner is declared in the fight between the new vendors of these internet / SaaS / Cloud Computing applications. Which one is going to win? Which application should you start using?
Perhaps it is safer to stick with traditional accounting software from an established brand for now.
Ouch .
Neil
Your statement '.. A business needed to post a single invoice of over £1m ..' followed by the fact that the system could be adaped, is an interesting one.
Surely as a basic standard any accounting package will need to cater for up to 9,999,999.99 for data entry & more for reporting. Yes this approach may take up more screen/reporting 'real estate' but that is a fact of life in delivering a proper robust accounting package; one cannot just ignore things because they may be inconvenient!
This just highlights (across the market - not vendor specific) the little nuggets that come out about the latest crop of accounting systems that seem to be highly market focussed rather than products aimed at catering for most eventualities.
These little 'gotchas' keep being revealed and to a large extent they reveal 'quick' routes to market with the aim of 'customising' later when the need arises. For goodness sake please don't go down the Sage route of Marketing first & program quality/functionality a poor second!
For instance on the user/security side how many of the current crop of applications can cater for different levels of user and access rights - lets just keep it simple by ignoring (add, change, read, delete) and just focus on access/no access to screens depending upon user profile
Perhaps it would be a good idea to have a matrix of all packages and their ranges (limits) so that users can do a comparison against all products as well as functionality; from memory this always used to happen in the past with a lot of products
Ouch -Clarification
Hello Anonymous
It seems you got the wrong end of the stick, but only because we held it out!
FYI - the adaptation required to process a £1m invoice line was to a simple sanity check being applied to user input; there is no inherent inability to handle larger numbers. Admitted we initially set the sanity check at the wrong level because our largest live transaction line item to date is just shy of £9m so you can see we have some pretty serious businesses using Liberty Accounts.
With an oracle database backend and a hardware/software architecture designed for scalability proven in over 6 years of live operation I am satisfied with the robust nature of our offering, as are the ICAEW since we have recently successfully been through the ICAEW accreditation process, and we also go through regular HMRC recognition validation for our VAT, ECSL, PAYE and P11D online filing.
The point that Neil was making is that Liberty is much more than just software for recording micro-business invoices and expenses in a browser. As well as many sub-£150K turnover businesses the product is also catering for a diverse range of larger businesses who have carefully evaluated the available offerings before making an important business decision to trust Liberty to provide a key element of their business software infrastructure.
Alan Wright
Director
Different types of cloud
Neil - a useful exercise would be to define what is meant by Cloud because it seems to be a moveable target depending upon the vendor
For instance are SaaS vendors
hosting in the traditional way and calling it cloud (nothing new here for 10+ years with this type of hosting)using the Amazon etc. cloud based systemsabout to use target MS Azure etc style
If the Amazon style Cloud is being used how are rdbms (Oracle, SqlServer) databases being handled in this scenario because Cloud ideally lends itself to other types of file structure instead; although these may not be suitable for accounting type scenarios?
I am very much in favour of the SaaS approach but clarity over these issues would be nice because the term Cloud has become a 'catch all' definition that could utimtately even be used for Citrix style applications by some vendors
What is cloud?
As far as we're concerned it is just a marketing term and wouldn't want to get drawn into a debate as to what constitutes 'cloud' computing. It is many different things to many different people.
Neil
Liberty Accounts
Traditional accounting software vendors evolving?
I wonder if traditional accounting software vendors may also start to see opportunities in the cloud?
Would it be much of an evolution for the likes of Sage to start developing new packages that users can configure and use in a cloud environment?
May there should be three groups:
Tradional VendorsTraditional Vendors exploring Cloud SolutionsPure Cloud Solution Vendors