You’ve made a couple of valid points, but to bill Books as a colossal fail is misinformation. In fact, you’ve done what you’ve previously accused others of http://www.accmanpro.com/2009/03/03/saas-marketin…

You know as well as we do that just because we are selling SaaS we should not forget that all marketing is done on the same principles.

Of course, you are right that people do want instant gratification, especially on the web. But this always has to be backed up by decent customer care, personal selling etc. (which is why it's set up how it is.)

Having said that, we agree that there should be an option for a "quick look around" – during business hours, we turn around requests for a trial more or less immediately and your trial site was set up first thing this morning. We have spoken here about this on a few occasions, and there should be a better way for the accountant to get a feel for the system that does not rely upon us being in the office – and this is coming.

Because of this you have not taken a look through the accountant's system. Had you waited for the response from us, you would have got to see the functionality that the accountant gets, which sets it apart from the individual and reseller version.

You make the point that the added value of the system for the accountant does not really warrant the extra cost. The way you have represented it makes this seem a statement of fact – it’s not. You have not considered the additional features which include…

Messaging which you identified and keeps all of their communications in one place – comparing it to twitter, skype etc is not a fair one. Why would it compete with those services? They are simply too disparate to be workable in an efficient practice. By all means use them, but this is different. It has specific topics and can be marked “dealt with” etc. Furthermore, it's easy to use as a newsletter delivery medium. By the way this facility is not charged for separately.

Shared access to the data – the accountants and the client can access the same data from their respective locations which makes maintenance, month end, year end etc processing simpler and less time consuming

Accountant controls the functionality the client has access to – this ensures that clients only see what they need and keeps familiarisation time and data maintenance down to a minimum

Branding – appears as the accountants own service

Integration with Keytime’s Accountants’ Suite of compliance software

Moving on to the idea of selling – the accountant is not selling on behalf of anyone. He's offering an additional service, and this is benefiting both the practice and the client. If the accountant chooses to charge for it, then that's up to the accountant – how much are his/her clients paying for other bookkeeping software presently (even Excel has a cost) which they could reasonably dispense with once they start using Books?

How many hours of time can be saved by the accountants and her/his staff not having to key in data from thousands of receipts and invoices now that even the smallest client business is entering it on line?

You ask if the system is multi-tenant or multi-instance – it’s the former, not that it makes any difference to the end user.

I cannot agree with you about the VAT and invoicing facilities. The vast majority of self employed are not VAT-registered. And anecdotal evidence suggests that most people don't bother with invoices. Of course, a lot of forward thinking businesses use invoicing as "one of the business’s [sic] key market presentation media". I question whether most businesses know what that means, let alone put it into practice.

Lastly, on the thorny subject of price – have you compared them to the competition? We have and we believe the pricing is more than competitive (Kashflow would charge £8800 for the same) and we are always happy to discuss discounts for multiple licences.

If there are screenshots, or better still videos, then it makes it so much easier for the potential customer to look and make his/her own judgement.

But, as a screencaster, I would say that wouldn't I

M