T-Shirt Friday #5 – Xero
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
One Swallow Doth Not a Summer Make
Before any wit comes up with any other suggestions for the meaning of the title of this post, the “swallow” in the above refers to the bird, Stelgidopteryx serripennis, and not the physiological movement, phagia. For one swallow does not make the summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short [...]
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 – [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Xero Releases Multi-currency and First Hint of Tiered Pricing
(Disclosure – in the lead-up to the release of multi-currency, I did a very small amount of contracting to Xero to produce some marketing videos) A couple of months ago while I was in San Francisco I saw a sneak preview of some screen flows for Xero’s multi-currency capability. At the time I was pretty [...]
Channel Partnerships and SaaS
Well they seem to be coming thick and fast… Only a few weeks ago I wrote about Intacct scoring a coup in the US by having the American Institute of CPAs choosing them as the preferred SaaS accounting offering. A few weeks ago also I wrote about Xero having Telstra in Australia (and previously Telecom [...]
Multi Currency for Every Possible Permutation
One major differentiator between competing SaaS accounting products is in their ability to work in multi-currencies. Beyond the simple yes/no answer however is the degree the vendor goes to in order to allow every possible use case for multi currency. I’ve been invited to spend some time with Xero in a couple of weeks doing [...]
SaaS Accounting – Six (or Seven) Months On
I’ve been running my Accounting 2.0 series since the very first day of CloudAve – now, seven months on, it seems a good time to look back on what I’ve seen. In the past seven months I’ve reviewed around 25 SaaS accounting products, and written 30 or 40 analysis pieces looking at accounting 2.0. I’ve [...]
On Making Life Easier, and Worthless Whitepapers
A few days ago I heard from Javelin CRM (my review here) that they’d completed their integration with Xero (my review here). Take a look at the video explaining how the integration works; Javelin & Xero from Javelin on Vimeo. It’s kind of odd that after years of evangelising the benefits that SaaS integration can [...]
Business Finance/Personal Finance – It’s All Just Money
I came across a tweet the other day that was really interesting (at least to my small world). The official Xero twitter feed tweeted the following; This is actually bigger and more exciting than initial consideration would indicate. I was chatting with someone during a conference break the other day (as always the back channel proving [...]
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 [...]
