billFLO – Helping the World Communicate
It’s a big week for product launches – and a busy week for those commenting on the accounting software space. billFLO is this week launching its offering which it claims is the first low cost solution providing electronic invoice exchange for small businesses. Think of it as EDI for the rest of us… billFLO was [...]
Get Real With Pricing
Since beginning my Accounting 2.0 series I’ve reviewed dozen of accounting applications from lightweight invoicing numbers through to fully fledged systems. I’ve also seen a bunch of different price point thrown into the mix – from free through to many thousands of dollars per annum. The two ends of that spectrum can be safely ignored [...]
IAC-EZ Version 1.4 – All About You
Heather Villa, CEO of IAC-EZ (review here) gave me a sneak preview of their latest release which is full of new functionality. There’s a few things that stood out for me that I’ll detail below. I talked about the changes with Heather who told me that they spent a lot of time looking at what [...]
Disruption is in the Minds of the Users
I’ve written before about two distinct approached to SaaS. SaaS/s – where the offering merely substitutes the incumbent offerings, and SaaS/v where the product adds a significant value into the mix. These two classifications, while admittedly fairly chunky, fall within the thrust of Clayton Christensen’s book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, in which Christensen contends that there [...]
Intacct Scores a Coup – A Partner Channel for SaaS Accounting
Intacct will announce this morning an exciting partnership with the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) that will see small businesses enabled by the resources the AICPA has, and will see Intacct leverage the customer base that AICPA members have. Intacct sent me details of the partnership last week and yesterday I was given a briefing [...]
Xero Announces Second Funding Round
Xero has just announced its second funding round – they’re raising NZD23.2 million to enable a further scaling of their business internationally. This fundraising will be priced at $0.90 per share being a roughly 5% premium on the 5 day weighted avergae share price, but a 10% discount on that paid by the initial shareholders [...]
Old-timers Getting SaaSy
I’m always looking for interesting tales that show the backroom moves of incumbent players manoeuvring into SaaS plays. My team of intel gatherers have picked up an interesting story along these lines. Late last year Michael Jackson, the ex-chairman of Sage, tried to buy UK SaaS accounting player KashFlow for £2.3m. At the time KashFlow [...]
An Answer to the Burn Rate
It’s been exciting times in the last few days in Xero-land. First they announced their 31 March figures which showed a doubling of customers over the past three months. The very next day they announced that Telstra, the largest Australian telco, was including Xero in T Suite, it’s packaged suite of SaaS business products. That [...]
Standards – The Opposing View
Eric posted yesterday looking at why the adoption of standards can be a bad thing. Rather than discussing his post in the context of the recent Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum debacle (I’m sure calling it a debacle will get people from both sides of the divide fired up – but you have to admit it [...]
On Hockey Sticks and Sporting Teams
Xero today announced it’s interim 31 March year end results (and as an aside, the fact that they can announce on the same day as the end of the reporting period indicates the strength of the SaaS model – immediacy and accuracy). They’re understandably proud of their user metrics (graph reproduced below); There are a [...]
Review – CannyBill
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 From their site, CannyBill class themselves as a “complete web-based billing and invoicing system, perfectly suited to any [...]
Make It Relevant for ME!
A few weeks ago IAC-EZ (CloudAve review here) introduced state tax estimates to go along with the federal ones they already provided. At the time State taxes were limited to California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Virginia and Washington. Following their rapid develop and release strategy, IAC-EZ have just released a new version that includes State [...]
Merchant’s Mirror – Review
Accounting 2.0 at CloudAve In an ongoing series of reviews and analysis pieces, CloudAve is taking a deep look into accounting software for the new world. See the other posts at this tag Introduction & Background Merchant’s Mirror had the stereotypical genesis when a couple of guys, sick of using an installed application for [...]
The Small Business Web – The Rising Tide of Integration
I alluded yesterday to some stirrings in terms of small business SaaS ecosystems. I didn’t post specifics yesterday as the initiative was somewhat stealth. However at the SXSW conference, attendees were advised of The Small Business Web, a cooperative currently made up of the following vendors. BatchBlue Software Social CRM for Small Business FreshBooks Painless [...]
Finding a Babel Fish for Data
I guess the Babel Fish won’t mean much to the new generation of readers of this blog. In the 1981 series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish was a creature that, when placed in ones ear, allows anyone to understand anything said, no matter the language being spoken – (see video at [...]
