QuickBooks under attack

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One of the great benefits of the current crop of publishing tools is that it allows anyone with an internet connection to add information to the global pool of knowledge upon which we can all draw and learn. One example is NMQB or No More Quick Books. As the site says:

We’ve been using the UK version of QuickBooks since 2005 – and it has served us well since then. However as our business has moved on, QuickBooks hasn’t kept up and there’s currently nothing available from Intuit which helps much. Hence QuickBooks – No More!

Harsh words perhaps but then the authors go into detail as to why they’re experiencing so many difficulties which principally centre around the lack of support in the UK.

I’ve said before but Intuit has never really demonstrated a commitment to the UK, concentrating instead on its huge US installed base. Even though at times Intuit’s reputation is hardly what you might call wonderful.

NMQB then goes on to discuss different on-demand offerings it has reviewed including Freshbooks, FreeAgent, Less Accounting, Kashflow, Blinksale and Acuinvoice. The reviews also cover open source candidates Dolphin Accounting, Front Accounting and Web ERP. NMQB did a thorough search because they rejected 47 open source candidates. If nothing else it shows that the open source world remains inventive if not always successful.

It is not clear whether NMQB’s authors were able to make a final determination because in their conclusion, they say that dual languages are a key requirement and that this made all candidates potential show stoppers. They did however say that Kashflow came the closest for their needs because of its strong payment gateway capability. Even so:

KashFlow was particularly strong in this area, offering three potential gateways we could use. However, after doing a bit more digging, it turns out that not all the integrations offer equal capabilities.

The potential complications with using these gateways caused us to rethink the role of online billing applications completely. By making them the centre of our system, we were limited to their integration and functionality. By moving them to the edge, and making our own back-office systems capable of being at the centre of things, we could achieve all of our goals.

However, we were now contemplating using just one-third of the capabilities of an online billing application – the book-keeping. We’d move invoicing to our own system and we’d talk directly to a payment gateway via its API. We’d talk to the online billing application via its API just to keep the books straight.

Clearly these guys are technically savvy and highly demanding. What interests me is that they are looking at the current generation of saas/on-demand applications. It is clear that having discovered the on-demand world offers a smorgasbord of alternatives, it’s fired the imagination.

That has to be a good thing for the developer community because it makes them think about next steps while retaining a relatively low cost profile out to the end using customer.

What they’ve hit upon though is just how tough it can be to get billing right. I use Blinksale for several reasons. Although I am usually juggling three currencies, the service manages it easily. It offers PDF output though I don’t take advantage of that service. Now I know it can also use billFLO so that becomes an alternative I can offer my customers. Multiple languages are not an issue for me which seemed to be the real showstopper for this organization.

As an aside, NMQB talked about the costs of operating WorldPay with a 3.75% cost to the fund recipient. PayPal is no different although it is incredibly popular. Instead they opted for Protx, now SagePay as their payment processing agent on the rationales that:

Almost every gateway we evaluated supports a merchant account with Streamline. Switching payment gateway is definitely a non-trivial process but it’s not as scary as it first seems. In the end we opted to use Protx as our payment gateway. They seem to offer the best pricing and features for our requirements.

I’m not sure why they might be running via merchant services. These are ridiculously expensive in the scheme of things and those costs have to be factored in. That’s why I’ve never been that keen on recommending them for modest payments. That’s a topic for another day.

Overall, I like NMQB’s approach to solving the billing and accounting problems albeit the views they took were not as broad in scope as I might have wished. Then again, solving end user problems is what we should all be about and to that extent, they are offering unique insights that would be hard to find elsewhere.

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Tagged as: billflo, quickbooks, sagepay