ICAEW “Report” is just overpriced adverts KashFlow Accounting Software

Expensive Adverts The ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales) have recently released a guide to online accounting for accountants.

Emily Coltman expressed surprise on her blog that KashFlow wasn’t listed.

I realise there’s a limited amount of space in these reports, but I was surprised not to see KashFlow, a recent winner at the Software Satisfaction Awards.

I wasn’t surprised. I had a rant about it back in September on UKBF. Essentially, we didn’t want to pay the £3,5k to have a “review” in there.

We’re not the only noteworthy online accounting software firm to have been excluded for not paying up.

Whilst KashFlow seems to have the UK SME market wrapped up, Twinfield are the leaders in enterprise-level online accounting – not just in the UK, but in Europe. Gartner even named Twinfield as an important vendor in a recent report on SaaS.

I really do think the ICAEW are doing a disservice to their members by giving them such a half-baked guide. As for those non-members that are actually paying for the report under the belief that it’s impartial and covers the whole market - I hope they can get a refund.

If you want impartial reviews of accounting software, check out the various reviews by Nigel Harris at AccountingWeb.

Tags: ICAEW, SaaS

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Accounting, Cloud Computing / SaaS, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Ben Kepes says:

January 16, 2009 at 2:59 pm

Or alternatively you could always check out http://www.cloudave.com/tag/accy2 for reviews of online accounting applications!

;-)

David Terrar says:

January 17, 2009 at 11:16 am

Many thanks for the Twinfield reference Duane – we get mentioned in the latest IDC SaaS report too. I wonder which other good SaaS accounting products didn’t want to “pay to play”. These reports, and certain analysts, need more transparency on this.

I agree on Nigel’s objective review on AccountingWEB being worth a look, and Ben’s Cloud Avenue stuff is great too.

Mark Davies says:

January 19, 2009 at 12:15 pm

We decided to advertise but felt the charge for a “review” was too high, especially as there is no assessement of each product’s capability vs. the others.

However, I think it is wrong to rubbish the report completely – as I said in the AccountingWEB thread, the first 15 pages will help practices come to terms with online accounting.

On reviews | AccMan says:

January 19, 2009 at 9:20 pm

[...] Duane Jackson eviscerates the ICAEW report of online accounting systems: [...]