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.
Read MoreManage your Contacts in the Cloud
You may have noticed that I have written several articles about CRM options, that Customer Relationship Management. I’ve also had an iPhone for close to 2 years and love the fact that you can get applications for that phone that enable you to have all your information at your finger tips.
The reason for this post today is I have found a blog post that has summed up the user experiences of quite a few people who are looking for a “hosted” contact management solution. Before we move on though, I should probably explain that I am moving away from being tied to costly software that I can only operate on my computer, but also want an online solution that many fellow workers can access from all across this wide land.
My latest research has brought me to a combination of the Software as a Service (or cloud based applications) called HighRiseHQ by 37 Signals and Gmail. They appear to be the best and easiest way to manage a project that I am working on. If you are interested in learning more, please visit this link and read the comments section after the post… Excellent reading
Read MoreThere are plenty alternatives to SalesForce.com CRM
I recently wrote an article about my negative experience with SalesForce.com, the commercial Customer Relationship Management software as a Service that you access from the Internet, cloud computing they call it. You might remember that I didn’t like the monthly fee that they explain and then tell you that you need to pay it yearly in advance…..
The good news is that in my search for an alternative (because I am a huge advocate for cloud computing) has come up with a large number of alternatives and most of these new alternatives have the tradition try before you buy offer, with a low payment by the month feature. Best of all they integrate with a lot of other popular cloud computing applications.
Here’s a list of a couple online CRM packages that I will evaluation over the forthcoming month to assess the one I believe to be the best:
http://www.cloudcontacts.com/ (doesn’t look so feature rich)
If you happen to know about a good cloud based CRM product, please let me know so that I can review it.
Read MoreWhat about SalesForce.com as a CRM
I recently had the pleasure of signing up for a free salesforce.com trial. They had an AutoResponder prompting me every few days of something new I can do to get my information into the trial system. I receive emails and calls as well from employees praising the cloud and drinking the coolaid. I then dug a little deeper to explore the intricacies of the system and how well it connected with other services I wanted to use it with.
It connects with Google Apps so that the SalesForce CRM can keep track of emails you write to prospects (leads) in your SalesForce CRM system, but it was a little more confusing than I thought and I wasn’t always seeing all the emails. Keeping in mind I wanted to be able to send emails directly from Gmail as well as from SalesForce.com, I mean surely if they are linked I could do that. So, I keenly contact SalesForce support to be given an answer that I would normally expect from an Open Source solution. When I drilled a little deeper the support person (more like sales support) gave me a couple links to read so I could WORK IT OUT FOR MYSELF..
I then also discovered that SalesForce.com sell their system on a monthly fee basis. That’s right it $49 per month, pretty easy on the cashflow you’d think, until you learn that you need to pay yearly in advance. The reason I was given was that they need to ensure that the sales people get paid… Wrong! You can see that this company is much more sales focussed than support.
Lastly, they only give you a 30 day trial. From what I have heard I would need to register all over again and do all the setting up from scratch if I were to trial it for a longer period! Why would you go through that every 30 days until you understood how the system works.
Give me www.xero.com accounting software’s model any day. Free trial for as long as you want, get to know the system, ask questions, no pressure and when you are comfortable with the system you only pay for it by the month. Maybe not the best practises from a sales/reward basis, but much feeling from Xero than from SalesForce.com. I’m almost tempted to pursue getting to know Sugar CRM or vTiger a bit better.
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