The clouds are heating up for online accounting alternatives to MYOB
On my whirlwind tour of CeBIT in Darling Harbour today I came across some great people who started an online accounting solutions business that offers some great tools for small businesses. They use the best model I know of for getting businesses to love their technology: Give the base product away for free and when people get used to it and like it they can pay if they want to use all the features. It’s the way that most successful online services are offered.
SAASU is an accounting solutions that’s based in the cloud which means the datafile is accessible to you and anyone you choose to have access to it (like your accountant) no matter where you are. SAASU are even developing an iPhone application so you can invoice from your smartphone when you are on the run. The best feature about these accounting programs is not that you can use them from anywhere (because you are usually in the office when you do your accounts) but because you can give other people access to your accounting file at the same time you are using it. The best way of describing this benefit is come end of year when you need to give your MYOB accounting company file to your accountant for them to make journal entries and adjustments. During this time you can’t make changes to the file otherwise you’ll have two different files in two different locations! arrgh!
I mentioned a New Zealand based public company called Xero in a post I wrote about how companies offer their products as trials for people who want to get to know the product (Xero unlimited free trial). I’ve also been watching their share price by the way (and it’s shot up when MYOB’s founder, Craig Winkler invested in them). Well, SAASU have gone a step further; They are offering a consultants version of their software (up to 20 invoices per month) for free… forever. This way you can get started for free and continue in a small way without the extra overhead of accounting software costs. But best of all their pricing for those companies who want to use more features is much better than Xero’s. Their beginner package is $25 per month for unlimited transactions, which is the same price that Xero charge for their consultants package (5 transactions a month!) and you can see their list of features at this link: SAASU Online Accounting pricing. To see the less attractive Xero pricing, visit Xero Pricing Plans.
Either way you look at it, it’s great to finally have an alternative to MYOB with more features and flexible pay by the month pricing.
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