QuickArrow Small Business Edition is a new offering launched yesterday that comes from a ten year veteran of professional services automation software. QuickArrow’s other products are used by over 30000 users worldwide and is used by some high profile companies. QuickArrow is based in Austin, Texas and is a privately held company.

The solution provides three main areas of functionality;

• Time and Expense Management
• Project Management
• Reporting

It’s designed for teams of up to ten users and is targeted at those who currently use manual systems to track and manage their projects. QuickArrow is priced at USD1995 per annum for up to ten users. This is a departure from the more traditional monthly billing cycle that most SaaS vendors use and potential is a barrier to adoption. It would take the maximum ten users to get the price per user to a competitive $17 per month – I can’t help but think that the combination of annual pricing and a ten user pricing regime is a little indicative of a desktop software approach towards customer acquisition and retention – in the SaaS world stickiness should come from the product itself, not from the pricing strategies.

In terms of functionality, one line, just one line got my blood boiling. This from the FAQ page;

Because QuickArrow is an online service, there is no hardware or software to buy, install or maintain. Open Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 6 or 7) to the login page

It’s a failed online service in my books if it only works with Internet Explorer. In their defence QuickArrow did say they’re working on Firefox support – but no mention of the other browsers out there.

QuickArrow SBE is natively integrated with Microsoft project and is also able to be integrated with Salesforce and QuickBooks. They also have integration either currently or pending with the majority of the larger accounting systems – in my discussions QuickArrow seemed unaware of any SaaS accounting products targeting small business – given the demographic they’re aiming for with their product, and the number of solutions I’ve reviewed here, that indicates something of a naiveté about the marketplace. SBE also charges USD1500 per integration - again the promise of SaaS is quick, easy and generally free integration - I'm not sure how many businesses will be happy paying a grand and a half to make to SaaS apps work together.

I was quite impressed with the level of granularity that QuickArrow gives individual users. Many SaaS solutions go easy on complex user permission/role options in order to lessen the QA cycle time for frequent releases – it was good to see QuickArrow bucking this trend. QuickArrow SBE provides a nice dashboard that gives management a good overview of utilisation and performance.

Overall QuickArrow SBE feels kind of legacy – sure that is totally a personal perception and the “feel” doesn’t really impact upon usability – but the looks combined with the pricing structure kind of left an uninspired taste in the mouth of this reviewer.