December 1st, 2009 by Duane Jackson
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.
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Tags: Mamut, Microsoft, Payroll, Richard Tyler, telegraph
Posted in Accounting, Small Business, Technology | 3 Comments »
May 27th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
One of the things that’s been lacking in KashFlow has been an integrated, web-based payroll application.
We’ve been integrated with 12Pay for quite some time but a lot of our customers want a web-based solution which, like KashFlow, can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection – regardless of if you’re using a Mac, Windows PC, Linux or whatever.
Today I’m really pleased to say this is now available. The Payroll Site is a web-based HMRC accredited service that lets you create payslips for your employees from anywhere, at any time. If you give it your KashFlow details it will send over all of the accounting information to your KashFlow account at the click of a button – saving you lots of time and eliminating the potential for human error. They have a free trial available, so feel free to go and have a play.
We’ve also just announced integration with PayEscape. PayEscape are an online bureau service. So you just tell them the hours your staff worked and they do the rest – including automatically updating your KashFlow account via our API.
These are just the two latest applications/services to be integrated with KashFlow. There are loads more on our Add Ons page, and plenty more to come.
We want to integrate with as many other applications as possible. The way I see it is that the more applications we’re integrated with, the more choice there is for our customers – and the more attractive our product becomes for potential customers. And of course the vendor of the other application gets new business from our existing client base.
It’s one of those win-win-win situations that I see crop up more and more often with SaaS.
Tags: 12Pay, api, PAYE, PayEscape, Payroll, SaaS, ThePayrollSite
Posted in Cloud Computing / SaaS, Technology | No Comments »
