Packaged accounting software vs SaaS software
“Reports are an important part of any business, and no accounting system can provide every report that everyone wants,” Cowie says. “MoneyWorks has always come with a report writer in it, and we have substantially enhanced that in the last version. And that’s pretty well unique in the SME business market.”
Another important factor is interactivity. With the rise of real-time retailing and inventory systems, particularly driven by e-commerce activity, it is important that companies are able to input and access information from their accounting systems for use in other parts of the business as it is needed.
Cowie says Cognito has also worked to ensure that MoneyWorks will interact with other software.
“We’re very much of the belief that MoneyWorks is not going to do everything for everybody, and so our job is to provide a very good core accounting engine, but with hooks into other systems. So you can chose your CRM system and the chances are it will hook up to MoneyWorks.
“As businesses get more and more sophisticated, they want more and more functionality, and there are always going to be better solutions from specialist providers of those solutions than by general purpose suppliers who try and do everything.”
INTEGRATING THE WEB
Dixon says the new version of QuickBooks is ‘web-enabled’, meaning it can interact with other applications across the company network or over the internet. This means that information can be more easily accessed and entered through different applications, and maintained in real-time.
“You can integrate web applications and have them called from within the user interface and it can be, if it is done well by the third party, more or less seamless,” Dixon says. “We see already some examples of sophisticated applications are able to be added onto QuickBooks without having them embedded within the product itself, and I think that will help us in maintaining a reasonable level of sophistication for most of our customers.”
MYOB even went so far as to acquire a web hosting company, ilisys, to help its clients get set up and trading online.
“Small businesses are becoming more aware of the advantages that technology offers and are starting to look to technology to assist them with their business,” Reed says. “For example, more and more small businesses are realising the benefits of establishing a website to advertise themselves as well as a platform for delivering goods and services.”
My vote goes to Saasu, it is brilliant and I am so glad I found them by sheer accident.
Using their API I can capture my job board sales which is then entered into my Saasu backend, the sale recorded against my contact and the invoice is automatically emailed to the client.
Oh and did I mention they were an Australian company?
I choose packaged accounting software and check to it if the training and ongoing support are available or included in the package.
Package software if properly selected gives you several free add-on service.
We use Saasu with the Slink Magento plugin which allows use to import t-shirt sale and blank t-shirt inventory data to Saasu. This proves a great alternative to traditional software packages.
Visited InduistrieIT.com as a result of seeing this article. Seems they have gone out of business since this article was published.
I thought it ironic a IT service provider praising the very systems which would lead to SMB ditching servers and therefore kill there core business.