Running a business should be fun. Most of the time it is fun. Meeting new people, learning new things every day, seeing first hand the fruits of your labour – all benefits of running your own business. However, there is one big downside. Boring, tear inducing accounting. Every time I go to start up my version of Sage to do any boring accounts related stuff, I usually double click the icon, run off to make a coffee, and by the time I get back, the bloody thing has only barely finished starting up. Zzzzzz. As well as all this the interface is quite dated, the computer it’s installed on freezes up constantly, and if I ever want to take my work home with me I can’t. Thankfully several SAAS (software as a service) solutions have popped up, with the best looking one (in my humble opinion) being Xero. Only one problem – unless you’re in New Zealand, the UK, or Australia, you won’t be able to use it. Until 22nd December 2008 that is!
I’ve been looking around for about a year or so for a solution to allow us to move our accounting systems online. Within the last six months we’ve successfully moved our email and document archiving to Google Apps, we’ve moved to Salesforce CRM, and we’ve seen numerous productivity benefits. The only broken link in the SAAS chain has been accounting, and now Xero seem to have catered to our needs!
Xero is cool – just check out the feature list here. Everything is made easy, from invoicing to reporting. In certain territories you can automatically link to your bank account(s) to reconcile automagically, making this supremely boring task that little bit easier. Hopefullly Irish banks will play ball and we can have this handy feature sooner rather than later.
Migrating is – according to Xero – easy, and i’ll update this blog when I go through the process myself.
Anyhoo, I got a lovely email from them today notifying me that two key features are due to launch on 22nd December: a global version, and integration with Paypal to help businesses accept payments online.
The Global version will allow you to determine tax rates for countries you do business in, as well as handle multiple currencies. The Paypal integration will make it easy to take payments over the phone by creating Paypal requests which are automatically linked to invoices – from personal experience this will come in quite handy for accepting small payments from customers of the few hundred quid variety.
Another pain in the arse Xero have created a solution for is the annoying admin overhead that goes with filing expense claims. I bloody well hate this, and Xero have a feature to make this super easy. If you’ve a field sales team, or any staff who need to be reimbursed for expenses, you’ll love this. Check it out here.
Feature wise, what extras would I like to see? Salesforce and Gmail / Google Apps integration really would be the cherry on top. They have a developer API which several other vendors are using, so hopefully we’ll see some progress here soon too.
What do you think? Do you think in five years time most businesses will have moved their accounting to a SAAS solution?
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I do think it’ll take more than 5 years before “most” businesses move their accounting to SaaS. Currently, 45% of small businesses don’t use any accounting software at all – they’re just using Excel or pencial and paper based methods.
Still, I think SaaS software, including SaaS business software, will become increasingly popular among young business people and other tech-savvy entrepreneurs until it starts to grow more rapidly. Perhaps in 5 years, more business will switch to SaaS accounting software than to other kinds of accounting software.
Nice find
Currently looking into this too.
Have you come across winweb.com. Have messed around with a bit, looks good. Will be interesting to see how these two compare once Xero is launched.
Adrian
Adrian,
Interesting find – there’s also Kashflow.co.uk. To be honest though, Xero looks the best of the lot in terms of features and the general appearance of it.
Winweb have been around a long time. It’s well established, but doesn’t have the ease of use that Xero and KashFlow have. It’s still very much designed to the accountant rather than the small business owner.
Oh, and nice to see Xero will be knocking us (KashFlow) off our perch as the “Only accounting software with PayPal Certified Integration“. We’ll just have to update all our marketing stuff to say the “first” rather than “only”.
Well done guys!
Hi Hugh, thanks for your kind words.
It’s an exciting time as companies like Xero and Kashflow are innovating quickly in this space to make business easier for the enormous and important small business market. It’s great there are a few solutions getting out there now to help create awareness of the benefits of being online.
Multi-currency is not in this version (though you can manage manually for a small number of transactions now) but it’s not far away. We’ve built multi-currency into our core accounting engine and the team is working flat out on the interface and functionality now. I’m really excited about multi-currency because we’re doing it right and comprehensively.
2009 will be a exciting year for online accounting as the products are quickly catching up to the features of legacy desktop applications and then you’ll see the real innovation that comes from connecting small businesses to a myriad of other services.
Looking forward to your feedback on Monday.
Cheers
Rod
nicest thing about this post (or the comments after it anyway)? That the CEOs of two *competing* companies can be all lovey dovey and complementary of each other.
Might have something to do with the fact that neither are US companies maybe???
@ Ben,
Very true!
I think it’s because they’re both in a space that is just developing, so they both realise competition in such a situation is actually a good thing. If a customer sees plenty of competition in a marketplace, they can be assured of ongoing innovation and product development by all players in the space.
@Hugh
Agreed – and some of it has to do with the fact that they’re not US companies too
Not sure what Ben is trying to say but anyway global is out.
http://blog.xero.com/2008/12/were-global/
Cheers
Rod
Hey Rod,
Signed up for the trial today – the system looks excellent and great to see it working for the Irish market.
Quick one for you – i’m a busy boy and involved in several companies… do you have volume discounts for multiple companies?
Cheers,
Hugh
Yes, 2nd and subsequent companies are half price.
http://www.xero.com/pricing/
Cheers
Rod
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