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Duane Jackson eviscerates the ICAEW report of online accounting systems:
The ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales) have recently released a guide to online accounting for accountants.
Emily Coltman expressed surprise on her blog that KashFlow wasn’t listed.
“I realise there’s a limited amount of space in these reports, but I was surprised not to see KashFlow, a recent winner at the Software Satisfaction Awards.”
I wasn’t surprised. I had a rant about it back in September on UKBF. Essentially, we didn’t want to pay the £3,5k to have a “review” in there.
To say that Duane’s a salesperson he clearly didn’t think to negotiate. -:)
Having said that, I sympathize with those who are critical of the pay to play model of reviewing. It can never be unbiased or at least as unbiased as is reasonably possible. Duane refers to the reviews undertaken by Nigel Harris over at AccountingWeb. Yep, Nigel does a reasonable job but the thing that is always missing from these types of thing is an assessment from the end user perspective coupled to a broad appreciation of the market.
For example, Duane thinks Twinfield is ‘enterprise’ class. I don’t. That’s because my definition of enterprise is coloured by the fact I get exposure to some darned big systems. CODA is enterprise, so is Oracle, SAP, CedAR, a bunch of the Infor stuff and even Microsoft Dynamics NAV now falls into that class.
I can visit any number of web sites and get glowing user testimonials but it is only when you’ve got your hands grubby from the non-accountant (as well as the accountant’s) standpoint that you get a genuine sense of what a product or service can do for you.
If you’re going to do any objective assessment then you need a set of standard test data that you can grind through the system. It needs to be ‘real world’ so that you can effectively simulate what someone does on a day to day basis. Otherwise you’re comparing apples and bananas. That’s what we used to do wherever possible on Information Week when I was running apps testing. That meant our reports ran 10,000 words on a basket of products and not 800 or less as is usually the case in blog posts on a single product or service.
Finally, peer review is essential. We all bring biases to the table and as is often the case, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Similarly, when you’ve got a few heads on the case then things are less likely to get forgotten. Like a certain company’s $1 billion cash balance. -:)
With all that in mind, and given that evaluation is much more broad in its requirements these days, I’m planning to undertake a series of reviews that will be pay to view. The vendors won’t get a say in what is written (hence they don’t pay to be in) though they may be asked to fact check. I have a partner in mind and we’ve discussed broad parameters and how it might work.
The idea is to take the pain out of the review process for decision takers by making evaluation as accessible and complete as possible. We’re working on a volume model which means individual low cost to the end user but can be a subscription to include updates.
I fully expect a significant amount of vendor bitching and moaning but that goes with the turf of offering independent opinions. We’ll see how it goes.
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