Archive for the ‘Accounting’ Category

A thread on UK Business Forums caught my attention today.Kelvin White is a driving instructor and asks for accounting software recommendations for his small business. He is in fact a sole trader driving instructor.  He has no need to file VAT returns or issue invoices to his customers. As well as the usual recommendations, some people suggested that as his requirements are simple, he should just use a spreadsheet.

Forgetting for a moment the room for human error in using a spreadsheet, it is in fact a perfectly good tool for simply keeping a record of the income and expenditure for this type of business.

So, should Kelvin just use a spreadsheet? If all he wants to do is record basic accounting data, it’ll probably suffice. What those that recommend a spreadsheet seem to overlook is the fact that your accounts are much more than just the data needed for the tax man at the end of the year.

Your accounting data is the underlying information about your business and if it’s recorded in a proper accounting application like KashFlow then  you can get so much more useful information from that data.

As an example: with a spreadsheet  Kelvin would have a hard time analysing where his new driving students come from – ie, how they hear about his services. With KashFlow you simply tag each new customer with the relevant source of business from your list of sources. This means you can, in just a couple of clicks, see instantly what sources of business work for you and which don’t.

Income By Source

This is just one of the many non-accounting type reports that can be generated from your accounting data and give non-accountant types insights into their business.

Additionally, the services Kelvin sells and the business-related purchases he makes can also be tagged so that when it comes to self-assessment time, the majority of the work is already done and the numbers for most boxes on the self assessment form are calculated. Thus reducing the bill he’ll get from an accountant at then end of the year.

An accounting application will give you the tools you need to reconcile your accounting entries against your bank account to make sure everything is entered correctly.

Yes, in theory a spreadsheet can also do all of the above. But the more you want the spreadsheet to do, the more laborious data entry becomes and the more room for error.

In summary, I think it’s quite short-sighted to see accounting as just something you have to do to keep the tax man happy and therefore opt for the most basic option possible for inputting data without considering the importance of getting useful intelligence back from that data

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.

Speak to any accountant who works with small businesses and they’ll tell you HMRC are a nightmare to deal with. Their systems, both technical and procedural, just aren’t fit for purpose

The accounting forum on UKBF is full of war stories. A company I’m involved with (not KashFlow) is owed around £4.5k as a tax rebate. So far it’s been over 3 months since it was asked for and we’re no closer to getting it.

The “accepted” procedure to claim a rebate seems to be to write to HMRC three or four times, then call them to find out why they’ve not responded. You then get told they never received your letters. Then write again another three or four times before phoning for the latest excuse. Thankfully the company can survive even with the cashflow problems this creates.

If it wasn’t such a complete waste of everyones time it’d be funny.

I say “everyones time” but invariably it’s the accountants that lose out. Our accountants don’t charge us more because of HMRCs ineptitude. HMRC don’t re-imburse the accountant for the wasted hours spent writing and chasing letters and making phone calls. So it’s the accountants loss. We all, as taxpayers, also lose out indirectly due the huge waste of resources (funded by us) at HMRC.

There are a number of bodies that represent accountants, with the ICAEW being one of the more prominent. What I don’t understand is why none of these bodies appear to be doing anything to redress this situation that has been going on for years.

I’m amazed that questions aren’t being asked in parliament about this. The overall cost to the economy must be quite significant.

Why do accountants seem resigned to unquestioningly playing their role in this farce?

Why aren’t they asking their industry bodies to use their combined clout to get something done?

If you’re a watcher of the accounting software market, you can’t have missed the fact that Microsoft withdrew their accounting product recently. The very short notice on the withdrawal of the software, along with the payroll element being turned off  left lots of customers stranded. The customer base was sold to Mamut who don’t have a great track record of looking after bought-in customer bases.

Richard Tyler at The Telegraph has picked up some interesting info from Microsofts PR firm.

Firstly the numbers:

There were 650 companies using the payroll element of the software. This was quite a neat implementation of their Software + Services strategy that I was dismissive of back in February. So the accounting software is locally installed but the Payroll calculations were done externally out in the cloud.

There were 90,000 users of the free version of the accounting software and 10,000 paying customers.

There were some seriously peed off MS customers talking to the media about how the short notice left them high and dry when it comes to paying staff over the christmas period.

Microsoft have stepped in and said it will now pay the 650 customers to use Mamuts payroll software. Good save!

Side Note: Mamut don’t seem to understand SaaS. A press release with the title “Mamut reveals SaaS service for Irish SMEs” caught my eye recently. Further inspection reveals it’s not SaaS at all. They’re just using the services of RentSoft who have technology to allow you to rent software you’d usually buy outright. RentSoft had a relationship with MYOB so I guess that’s how this came about.

We’re quickly getting lots of new applications integrated with KashFlow. One of the problems we’ve run up against is the sheer number of different e-commerce systems out there.

Those like OpenMindCommerce and and EasyWebstore are easily dealt with – just go to the vendor and work with them to get the integration done. But what about the likes of OSCommerce, ZenCart and Magento where there is no central company to talk to?

Enter CarryTheOne. CTO first started as a simple proxy service between OSCommerce and KashFlow. For a small monthly fee it will take your customer and sales data from OSCommerce and enter it directly into KashFlow for you. I initially thought the “small monthly fee” would be the killer. You’re already paying an ongoing subscription fee to use KashFlow – do you really want to pay another company for the additional services? It would seem I was totally wrong. Businesses are happy to pay the small fee because of the huge amount of time it saves them. CTO have grown and grown and grown and have some very impressive numbers.

As well as OSCommerce they also now support  KashFlow integration with CRELoaded, OSCMax, Shopify, ZenCart and Magento. and there are another half dozen in development.

As well as adding more ecommerce applications on the left side of the jigsaw above, they’re now also adding more accounting applications on the right-hand side of it. Each new application they integrate with, on either side of the equation, hugely increases their potential (and actual) customer base.

A very nice business that I’m sure will just grow and grow and grow.

I suspect as SaaS becomes increasingly popular without any agreed API standard, we’ll see more businesses like Carry The One springing up.

Earlier this year I attended the Business Startup Exhibition in London. They were running an event based on the Dragons Den format.

Someone was pitching an idea for a web-based personal finance application. One of the “Dragons” tried to humiliate him and told him there was no demand for that kind of thing. The muppet was more interested in be a Simon Cowell mini-me than being of any use.  The person I was with dragged me away to stop me shooting my mouth off in defence of the would-be entrepreneur.

There’s plenty of demand for something like KashFlow but for the peronal finance space. Over in the US mint.com has been making great in-roads and taking big chunks of business away from the incumbent player, Intuit.

TechCrunch broke the news yesterday that Intuit are buying Mint in a deal worth £170m (£102m). A very handsome price for a company that isn’t actually making much money. The software is provided free of charge to the user and the company makes money by other means as mint.com founder and CEO Aaron Patzer explains in this video:

In the US, Intuit is a far bigger player in the accountancy software market than Sage, the UK leader.

Intuit “got” the SaaS concept long before Sage did (I’m still not sure they have) and have been successfully offering a web-based version of Quickbooks (US only) for some time now.

So where to now for Mint and Intuit?

Intuit say they’ll continue with the mint.com application and brand and put Aaron Patzer in charge of its personal finance group.

Patzer said part of the appeal to him of the deal was the ability to tap into Intuit’s resources, particularly on the marketing side of things. I can certainly relate to that.

I hope he survives the move from calling all the shots to being an employee. I don’t think I could!

But the question remains, where is the mint.com equivalent for the UK market? I don’t see one. The online accounting software space for small businesses is getting very crowded with a new entrant every month (I was only aware of 1 or 2 others when we launched). My suspicion is that one or two of them will re-position themselves as being a personal finance app in the not too distant future.

Update: @roanlavery on Twitter just informed me of the existence on Kublax, a UK equivalent of Mint. Very slickly presented and appears to be well funded. I’m surprised I’d not heard of them before.

Something I really like about Australian companies is the provocative and memorable brand names they create. A typical example being Start Ya Bastard, an “Instant Engine Starter”. In the accounting software space there is the brilliantly named Mind Your Own Business - or MYOB.

I’m told that in Australia the MYOB brand is almost as well recognised as Coca-Cola. That’s quite an enviable achievement.

MYOB was one of the products I tried before deciding to create KashFlow as an easy-to-use and less clunky alternative.  We had a bit of a fracas with them early last year when their top man in the UK personally emailed our support desk to threaten legal action. A couple of months later they withdrew from the UK market.

A big chunk of MYOB was sold to Wolters Kluwer/CCH. Shortly afterwards it was announced that the “leftovers” were sold to Mamut of £1.7m. Mamut are a Norwegian company that, until recently, I’d only ever heard good things about – both in terms of their products and the company itself.

At the time of the purchase, Mamut’s chief executive officer Eilert Hanoa said

Customers will be able to use existing and versions and new version of MYOB for 2008-09, but we will look to give them dual licences so they get a free migration to the equivalent Mamut products, or can continue to use existing products as is best for their business.

Working with both MYOB and our UK partners, we need to make it as convenient as possible for MYOB users – but we hope they will be attracted by the better opportunity Mamut presents with its integrated ecommerce and CRM features

This made a lot of sense to me and I thought Mamut had made a really good move.

Fast forward to this month and it all starts to go horribly wrong for Mamut.

We offered our web-based software for free to anyone that could send us their old boxed software for our bonfire. I was surprised at the number of MYOB  boxes we were receiving. Tom McClelland at 12Pay said he was also getting a lot of sales enquiries from users of MYOB payroll software.

It turns out that Mamut are now trying to squeeze money out of the MYOB clients. Kate from Karate Kid posted on UKBF and said

[Mamut] have today offered to upgrade us [from MYOB]  to their E5 version so that they can ‘better support us in the future’ – the upgrade cost – FREE! Ah, but their OBLIGATORY service agreement is £348+VAT per year – we purchased 2 user licences from MYOB, so assumed that these would remain intact – NO.

We are told that each additional user licence costs £590+VAT, PLUS for every user an additional service agreement at £348+VAT per year!

Kate took advantage of our offer and is now happily using KashFlow for free.

In a bid to clear up the confusion, Bryan Richter from Mamut posted on the forum to say they are sole distributors in the UK for MYOB products but now that MYOB have discontinued the products they are:

 offering a migration path to the equivalent Mamut product and offering very attractive commercial terms to do so

Not quite the situation Kate and other MYOB users were led to expect last year. And I guess ‘attractiveness’ is a very subjective matter.

So now they’ve managed to lose some customers, all that’s left to do is alienate people. Bryan posted (twice!) the following statement:

Naturally, many of our competitors see this as an opportunity to convert the MYOB customers to their own products, as they are very entitled to do. As a result they are happy to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt on these message boards without necessarily declaring their vested interest in the issue.

I’m not arguing about taking the opportunity to convert some customers – it’d be silly not to. But I do resent the implication that myself or anyone else on UKBF (where I’m a  moderator) is spreading fear, uncertainty or doubt – especially without declaring their interest.

At first I thought Mamut had got themselves a good deal, but as more details emerge it doesn’t look so great. If they continue to cock up the migration to their own software then it’ll be a lot of money down the drain and a stain on an otherwise flawless reputation.

As an interesting footnote to this whole saga, MYOB founder Craig Winkler invested £7m of the money he made from the MYOB sale into a company that provides web-based accounting software, like KashFlow,  using the SaaS business model.

Back in March I said that we would give you our software for free for a year if you sent us your copy of an old-fashioned, boxed software for our bonfire.

After a slow start, the boxes have now started coming in thick and fast – much to the annoyance of our postman.  No “slow-burn” puns please. Some of the thicker manuals have already gone up in flames after being used as firelighters for bank holiday barbecues.

As well as the expected copies of various versions of Sage and Quickbooks, we’ve also had an unexpectedly high number of MYOB products. I suspect this is due to experiences like this with new owners, Mamut.

What’s been really entertaining for us all here is reading the notes that have come with some of the packages:

I would like to take advantage of your kind offer to rid myself of poxy software and jump ship to KashFlow. Here’s looking forward to never having to use bloated accounts packages again!

Dear KashFlow, Please find my old Sage software enclosed which you may destroy!

If you need any help putting the fire out, I will gladly urinate on my copy of Quickbooks after it’s been burnt to a cinder. More power to KashFlow!

The original offer was meant to finish at the end of April. Due to how popular it’s been we’re going to extend it until the end of July.

Same rules apply as last time:

• We must receive your product in it’s original Quickbooks/MYOB/Sage packaging and with proof of purchase.
• We can withdraw this offer at any time
• New customers only
• Your product must arrive with us on or before 31st July 2009
• Your product must have been purchased prior to 5/03/2009 (the date this offer was first announced)
• Offer not available to anyone who types ‘Kashflow’ (lower case F)

Send your package to our postal address and be sure to include your username.

If you’re not already trying KashFlow – sign up for a free trial here.

We’re backing a campaign to get the VAT registration threshold increased to 100k.

Currently, if your business turns over £67k or more then you are obliged to register for VAT.  Sometimes registering for VAT can be beneficial, and if you are using software like KashFlow then the administrative burden is virtually non-existent – it calculates files your VAT returns directly to HMRC.

But  for small businesses that sell to consumers, VAT registration can cause a real problem. Their customer can’t reclaim the VAT – so the business can either put up their prices or take a big hit to their profits.

Elaine Clark from Cheapaccounting.co.uk has started a petition. She says

I have a client who is approaching the VAT registration threshold. They cannot increase their prices to cover the VAT to be paid to HMRC as there is a large competitor in the vicinity and the price competition is tough so they will have to absorb the VAT into their profit.

It will probably mean the closure of their business and the loss of their livelihood. This is something which I think should be avoided.

So if this government are serious about helping small businesses survive the downturn, they can start by increasing the VAT registration threshold to £100k.

Please take 2 minutes to sign  this petition - it will help to save small businesses.

Our program of integrations via our API is really gathering pace now.

I’ve just announced on Twitter (where we now announce virtually all our news first) that we now have 3 more world-class applications integrated with us.

Javelin CRM

First up is Javelin CRM. This is a web-based (SaaS) Customer Relationship Management application. We have a whole page of information about it here.

Do check out the video on that page as it nicely illustrates how to get very tight integration between two powerful applications. This is the first CRM package to integrate with KashFlow,  so they can expect to pick up a fair number of customers from us.

ProWorkflow

Earlier in the year we announced integration from WorkflowMax for management of time and projects. We now have two similar apps more to add to the mix.  Using ProWorkflow you can automate processes, manage projects, tasks and time tracking on line, share documents and collaborate, track time with Widget as well as access your information at anytime from anywhere.

Again, we have a full page of information on it here.

Paymo Timetracker

Paymo is a great application for tracking the time you spend on different projects. The basic version is totally free. Now it’s fully integrated with KashFlow you can very quickly and easily create invoices for the various projects you’re working on. See www.paymo.biz to get started.

Besides the above three apps, we have loads more listed on our Add Ons page. There will be plenty more announced over the coming weeks and months too.

At KashFlow we make very easy to use, very powerful, accounting software for non-accountants. We don’t do CRM or Project Management or anything else.  We could, of course, but the resulting product wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as the leading applications that are already out there. 

So the approach we’ve taken is to integrate with “best of breed” applications that already exist.  So you, as a small business owner, can select from a menu which applications you want to use and have them all communicate with each other.

The approach is working well for e-commerce systems and time/project management – you can now choose from 3 great options in each of those categories. We’ll soon be announcing other products in the other categories on our add-ons page.