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Wolters Kluwer bags Twinfield

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14th Jun 2011
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The Dutch Cloud accounting pioneer Twinfield is to become part of the Wolters Kluwer empire, bringing online accounting into the same portfolio as the CCH ProSystem suite of tax and practice tools.

From comments on Twinfield founder Andre Kwakernaat’s blog, the Netherlands link was a major factor and positions Wolters Kluwer as the leading supplier of both accounting systems and professional information in its home market. More significantly for Twinfield, becoming part of Wolters Kluwer will give it more resources for development and expansion, and a global reach that will leave other Cloud accounting players green with envy.

Kwakernaat called Wolters Kluwer “a fantastic Dutch company, a listed international organisation with the infrastructure, employees and customers in countries where we too want to be successful. And Twinfield online accounting fits perfectly into their product portfolio! So why take six years to conquer one country when it can be done a lot faster and easier?”

Kwakernaat made the brave decision to leave a comfortable job with CODA and set up Twinfield with business partner Maurice Tijhuis in 2000 because he was convinced accounting functions would migrate to the internet. In the Netherlands, at least, the profession believed him and the company made inroads into the desktop software market through alliances with major accounting firms including BDO and KPMG.

Having expanded into Scandinavia and the UK, Twinfield now claims to handle the accounts of more than 80,000 entities.

It is believed that Twinfield will continue to operate as a distinct entity within Wolters Kluwer; the companies have not yet responded to questions about its product strategy and commercial direction.

What makes the deal with WK particularly interesting is that Kwakernaat and his colleagues have actively promoted the idea of building XBRL into Twinfield’s accounting engine and outputting an iXBRL file containing the clients’ statutory final accounts for efiling.

Not only does this streamlined view of accounting threaten one of the core services practitioners provide for their clients, if the idea really takes off, it could potentially eat into the revenues of CCH’s ProSystem accounts production software.

Simon Crompton, executive director of CCH UK, has frequently acknowledged to AccountingWEB that customers are getting more interested in software as a service solutions, but has had little to show them - until now. In an official statement, he commented: “The acquisition of Twinfield gives us new potential to develop collaboration between accountants and their clients with cloud-based technologies.”

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