Now That’s Honesty – Clear Books Publishes SignUp Statistics
SaaS companies are often reluctant to talk about numbers in their early stages. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard that “We don’t release customer numbers but we’re really happy with how things are tracking”. I always take this with a pinch of salt and translate it as “Our numbers are tiny, [...]
SaaS Certainty – Escrow is the Answer
I got an email the other day from Escrow Associates, a provider of software escrow services that has just today announced the release of their SaaS software escrow agreement. For those not accustomed to escrow services, they are a contract where by the IP of a product is held by a third party and is [...]
Siondo – Review
Accounting 2.0 at CloudAve In an ongoing series of reviews and analysis pieces, CloudAve will be taking a deep look into accounting software for the new world. See the other posts at this tag Introduction & Background Siondo is a London-based SaaS vendor that has been “bootstrapped” into existence. Founded by Christian Steiner (CEO) and [...]
Nibbling Around the Edges – KashGuard for KashFlow
(Updates below) One of the exciting parts about watching SaaS companies gain critical mass, is seeing the business that start up around them offering a related, but not core, piece of functionality. It’s always a relatively risky place for a vendor to be – they’re reliant on the “parent app”, and the more successful their [...]
Channels – Direct or Partnered, Take Your Pick
I had a little online tete-a-tete with fellow SaaS commentator Dennis Howlett recently about market strategies for SaaS accounting companies. Dennis comes from an accountancy background and, from where I can stand at least, seems to have generally been supportive of vendors partnering with accountants as a major part of their go-to-market strategy. In his [...]
PostalMethods – Business process Automation or Gilded Lily?
I wrote an unusually abrupt post a year or so ago about PostalMethods a service that automates the sending of postal mail. At the time I merely looks at part of the offering and my doubt was expressed in no uncertain terms by saying; WTF? Postal Methods connects to the business via API to output [...]
30 Days With Xero
Yes, we have finally done it! After approximately 2 years of to-ing and fro-ing, we have moved our business accounting system to a fully Cloud based service. In this instance, we have chosen to go with Xero Accounting after evaluating a few online options. Ben Kepes has already done a review of Xero on this [...]
On Pricing, Demand and Critical Mass
Recently I received a press release from SaaS accounting vendor e-conomic (CloudAve review here) announcing the release of a new pricing structure. Their various pricing plans are dropping by a few pounds a month. Meanwhile they’ve increased the maximum transaction number to allow more companies to work within their small business plan. Commenting on the [...]
Crunch Gets It So Right, and at the Same Time So Wrong
I don’t want to enter into a debate about acronyms – Microsoft’s Software + Services moniker gets some die hard Software as as Service loyalists all fired up. For the purposes of this post I’m going to take it as read that we all accept the second “S” to be the most important one – [...]
The First of the Acquisitions
It was only a matter of time before one of the fledgling accounting SaaS vendors sold their business either in part or in full. Only last week I was sitting down with someone in San Francisco discussing what Microsoft’s canning of Money means for online accounting – we both agreed that the next couple of [...]
Adoption – Slow but not That Slow
Yesterday I took part in a meeting for an advisory group that I belong to that’s looking at ways to deliver Government services to small businesses in a more integrated, simple and customized way. At the session, interestingly enough, were the GM of a traditional desktop accounting software product, and the CEO of a SaaS [...]
Six One Way, Half a Dozen the Other – Traditional Vendors and SaaS
Someone sent me an email the other day alerting me to the fact that Accomplish, a vendor of desktop small business accounting software, has just announced that it’ll be providing a SaaS product. Nothing overly interesting in that, but what was interesting was reading the interview with Accomplish General Manager Grant Hewson and seeing the [...]
Coda 2go/Corefino Mash It Up
CODA and Corefino recently announced that they’re joining forces to produce what they’re calling a mid-market alternative to the traditional on-premise ERP offerings. Called Corefino 2go, the offering combines the Force.com-based CODA 2go accounting software with Corefino’s Triple-C Technology Platform. I’ve come across Coda 2go previously – they’re one of the few vendors that have [...]
Analysis – The Choice of a New Generation
Image via CrunchBase As part of this weeks Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston a launchpad series was run where four finalists were invited to pitch to the audience who would then vote for a winner. I posted about the four finalists before the event and made my prediction for the eventual winner. I’m pleased to [...]
More Multi-Currency and Product Pricing Discussion
Hot on the heels of the announcement yesterday by Xero about multi-currency, I received an email from someone commenting about some multi-currency and pricing issues around Saasu, another SaaS accounting product. Saasu have been developing multi-currency for awhile and the implementation of this feature had apparently been delayed for a period of time. On top [...]
