FreeAgent and SAP: the comparison?

Although I’m no longer involved on a day-to-day basis, it’s always nice to see a positive review of a service in which I had a wee hand. Nigel Harris has give FreeAgent a glowing report card and I was especially pleased to see that he’d got this bit right:

FreeAgent looks good, is pretty straightforward to use, and offers an unrivalled range of features for its target market. Firms with a significant number of IT contractors and one-man consultancies should certainly be looking at FreeAgent as at least one of their online offerings.

It was always my thought that FreeAgent provides the basis upon which an innovative firm can build a solid practice with the potential to hit a large addressable market. I also like the fact Nigel picked up on some of the ‘Web 2.0‘ aspects of the service that distinguish FreeAgent from SoSaaS offerings:

One of the most popular features of FreeAgent, and one which really shows off Web 2.0 technology at its best, is the Subscribe to your Invoice and Tax Timelines in Outlook/Google Calendar feature. While you can see impending tax deadlines (and Companies House filing deadlines now) and invoices due for payment on the dashboard page, FreeAgent goes one step further by enabling you to subscribe to a live feed of the data which is automatically slots those dates and events into Outlook (2007), Google Calendar or Apple iCal.

But it was the implicit comparison with SAP that struck me. Check the screenshot at the top of the page and you’ll see what I mean. OK, so it’s a bit of a stretch, but nevertheless it’s an object lesson in contextual advertising.