Why we charge accountants to join our Partner Programme

At KashFlow we’ve never been a company to follow the crowd and do things “because that’s the way it’s done”.

We judge what we’re offering based on its value rather than on what the rest of the market is doing.

This has resulted in a big difference between how we work with accountants and how other accounting software companies do. Namely, we charge £799 a year whereas others will invite accountants to be a “Partner” at no cost.

Despite this, we appear to have a bigger network of accountants recommending KashFlow to SMEs in the UK than any other online accounting software provider.

So with the launch of our new Partners website it’s probably a good time to explain why…

Your commitment to us

It’s easy to get someone to commit to being a Partner if there’s no financial cost for them. You’d say “Yes” just to get us off the phone or out of your office. But we don’t just want you to go through the motions, we want you to get your clients using the software.

The more of your clients that use the same software the more you benefit from all the advantages of using KashFlow in your practice and the more time you save by having them all present their data in the same way.

As David Brent might say, we want you to have “skin in the game”. If you have money invested in the solution, you’re more likely to actively onboard clients.

Our commitment to you

We don’t get you onboard and then leave you to it. You have an account manager that works with you on an ongoing basis to ensure you’re getting the most out of the software, that you’re all set up to attract clients from our existing user base and to ensure we continue to develop the software how you want it developed. We give you priority telephone support.

That all costs money.

We’ll be spending more money on our partners in other ways soon – but that’s all under wraps for now.

Savings

As a partner you buy your client licenses from us on behalf of your client and you pay less than half what they’d pay if they came to us directly.

Whether you mark up the cost to make a profit or not is up to you, but we can’t let just anyone get access to that preferential pricing or it becomes pointless

Value

We believe what you’re getting has significant value attached to it. It’s not just the ability to buy licenses at a discounted rate or co-brand the software or even the ability to switch on and off features and reports. We also give you a control panel containing tools that make managing, controlling and monitoring your clients so much easier.

We have Partners that tell us that just the new clients they get from being listed on our accountants directory is worth many times the annual Partner fee

Apples and Oranges

Just today a potential partner sent us a link to another web-based accounting application that charges a fraction of what we do. We suggested he take a closer look at their offering, beyond the price tag, to see the differences.

With KashFlow you’re getting an award-winning, feature-rich application that for years has beat all other accounting products – both web- and desktop-based – in independent surveys. With others you’re not.

We occasionally get asked to price match a quote you may have had from another supplier or even to totally change our business model to work in a different way.

We can’t deliver the above by massively reducing our prices, and we don’t want to skimp on service as it wont do either of us any favours.

The model we use works as we’ve proven time and time again with existing partners. It’s not practical for us to come to a different arrangement with each individual partner – deviating from the norm costs us even more as it doesn’t fit in with our standard processes.

Does this model work?

Yes, for us and for you.

We have numerous case studies where accountants speak about how the software is benefiting them.

Despite the fact we charge £799 a year and others give it away for free, we currently have over 200 accountants as members of our Partner Programme whilst our closest competitor has 30.

I hope that explains why it is that we charge an annual fee for our Partner Programme. But if you have any questions or want me to clarify anything, please do feel free to ask using the comments section below.

       

Tags: accountants, KashFlow, Partner Programme

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Accounting. 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.