Does AccountingWEB get SaaS?

Let me start this post by saying I’m a big fan of AccountingWEB
(in the UK, I don’t particularly follow the US edition).  For the
accountants in business and in practice or anyone interested in the
sector it’s one of the key resources to read – they cover everything
from tax to technology, but it’s the deployment of technology and
innovation within the profession that is my particular interest.  The
fact that it has blog like capabilities where you can easily comment on
articles is great.  The Any Answers
section has been a great resource over the years, where accountants or
anyone can ask questions (anonymously if they want) and get direct
advice from the community.  Like any online community they are subject
to the 90-9-1 rule,
where 90% of the audience just lurk and consume, with 1% doing most of
the talking.  The recent major revamp of the platform has smartened
things up very nicely, dramatically improved the search mechanism
(which for a period before was almost useless), and added discussion
groups which have the potential to be a good forum for debating some of
the key issues.  They have 63,000 or more subscribers (it’s free to 
register, but more on that issue later).  As a SaaS
accounting provider aiming at this sector AccountingWEB is one of the
first places I consider spending some of my marketing budget for
advertising and lead generation campaigns, and I know if you ask the
other cloud and online service providers selling to accountants and
SMEs (via their accountants), they would say the same thing.  My worry,
though, is do they really get the SaaS and Cloud topic?  Are they following, when in my opinion, they should be leading?

On Wednesday I attended an AccountingWEB Fringe event, hosted at their Sift Media sister company’s BusinesCloud9 Summit
in London.  The idea, set up by John Stokdyk and Andy North, was a kind
of focus group with accountants in practice getting together with many
of the UK’s SaaS accounting providers to discuss the barriers to
adoption of this new technology.  I think this was/is a great idea and
I got a lot out of the session.  However, I believe a big opportunity
was missed.  Andy and John invited four accountants.  They specifically
excluded anyone who had already made the jump from an existing
conventional product to one of the new cloud providers.  Two of the
accountants we met were servicing their clients online, but using a
mixture of traditional QuickBooks and Microsoft Office hosted by a
third party provider.  In terms of collaboration with their clients
they were emailing files back and forth or using an FTP
site to exchange data.  Very different from the latest tools in online
accounting or online collaboration.  We definitely learned something,
but the sample of 4 specifically invited practices was too small for
John’s initial article headline  conclusion “Accountants bring Cloud summit down to earth” and first line which says:

I get that tabloid style
headlines with negative spin increase the probability of your article
being read.  As a blogger I’m trying to learn some of those lessons in journalism
for my own writing.  But to spin that message on a selected sample of 4
is, in my opinion, wrong and I believe John drew the wrong conclusions
from the session in any case.  I was very pleased to see him say in the
comments later:

Part of the rules of engagement of the session for the vendors present was “no selling”. 
On one level that’s fair enough, but actually it hampered some of the
discussion.  When the accountants were listing what they wanted from a
SaaS product (stability of the vendor, speed of response, drill down
like QuickBooks, ease of reporting, export to Excel, VAT done
correctly, ability to edit transactions with audit trail, and bulk data
entry), most of the vendors were, like me, biting their tongues or
rocking backwards and forwards on our chairs in demented fashion, 
because most of us do all that.  Either we should have elected a
spokesperson to talk generically about what we SaaS accounting
providers can do, or even better, had some of our customers in the room
to explain why they made the jump from legacy products like Sage 50 and
QuickBooks to an online approach.  This was the opportunity that was
lost.  The focus group should have included the whole spectrum of
views, but particularly accountants like Richard Messik of Vantis or Philip Woodgate of Goodman Jones
(or a Xero, Liquid Accounts, KashFlow, Liberty Accounts or
FinacialForce.com customer) who understand SaaS and Cloud and why it
was worth jumping the barrier.  Similarly, there should have been some
contrarian views from an ultra conservative practice who wouldn’t touch
the Cloud with a barge pole.  We’d learn something from that too.

Actually,
when I take a step back and look at AccountingWEB, there are a few
things that confuse me.  They have an archive of very good content, but
it’s hidden from Google behind a membership wall.  It’s free to
subscribe, but the sign up process still puts plenty of people off
joining.  They should change the approach.  People would still join to
enable commenting and to get their Newswires (email newsletters), but
an open approach would increase their audience and discoverability of
their content through search.  

On another tack, I’m acting chair of the Intellect SaaS Group. 
This is a vendor trade group to promote the SaaS topic to UK businesses
that started from informal meetings 18 months ago between some of the
competitors in the room at the Fringe meeting.  We formalised in to a
group covering the whole SaaS space.  Our first deliverable is a free
20 page document – “The Business Case for Software as a Service” (available in hardcopy if you mail me, or for download here).  
I would have thought this would be just the sort of thing that would be
both newsworthy and useful for the AccountingWEB readership, but so far
I haven’t been able to get John’s attention, with numerous emails and
calls.

Then when I look at the material on AccountingWEB around
the SaaS and cloud topic, I don’t see any real thought leadership. 
Maybe I’m being harsh, but it feels like the writers are following what
is going on in the profession, rather than leading on the real
innovation, efficiency and cost savings that can be made using a SaaS
approach.  Take a look at Richard Messik’s post just after the recent Softworld in Accounting show to see how the proposition can be put elegantly and in jargon free words.  

Of course Dennis Howlett has chimed in with two takes on the same topic.

I
understand that Sift Media as a whole, across their 12 publications,
has around 600,000 members/readership.  I couldn’t attend all of their
BusinessCloud9 Summit, but from the people I spoke to there I know the
exhibitors would be delighted with the quality of the 400+ audience
attendees as potential prospects for their Cloud solutions.  But like
all media companies they are struggling with the new world of
publishing, community and user generated content.  They are challenged
with the changes affecting their advertising revenues and how they
monetize what they do.  They serve two masters, the vendors who
advertise and buy their data for lead generation campaigns, and the
readership they target.  At the moment I feel AccountingWEB has the
balance wrong in this particular area of their technology coverage, and
I’d like to see a lot more content and thought leadership around the
SaaS and Cloud topic.   A follow on focus group event on the barriers
to adopting online accounting with a more balanced selection of
accountants is a must.

(Cross-posted @ Business Two Zero)