FreeAgent gets friendly
May 8, 2008
FreeAgent has signed up five firms of accountants which will act as partners for the FreeAgent service.
Partnerships of this kind are usually regarded as ‘tick on the box’ arrangements designed to show that professionals have some interest in the service. On this occasion, the situation is different.
Each of these firms specialize in or have business units devoted to servicing the freelance community. That makes FreeAgent a good fit for these practices rather than using the scattergun tactics that other vendors choose.
The goal is to assist professionals in providing a streamlined service that shifts the emphasis to value add. At the same time, FreeAgent is engaging in a limited amount of co-development that will see the service improve in areas like error trapping and provide intelligent information for the professional to assess expense deduction validity.
Links to practices:
CODA2go almost ready to go
April 30, 2008
Yesterday I got a sneak preview of CODA2go, CODA’s on-demand solution that builds onto Salesforce.com’s force.com platform. It’s impressive. I’ve written a good amount of detail here but my take for this blog is somewhat different.
A bit of history - I’ve known CODA for more years than both of us care to remember. They pioneered the highly scalable world class, single ledger financial accounting system. While they’ve been through a few owners’ hands in the last 10 years, they’ve come out smiling and stronger. In Jeremy Roche, the company has a strong leader, always necessary for companies going through transition. They’re able to take all that experience and apply it to the new platform.
Anyone who has not seen business process deisgned into an application system will get something of a shock when they look at CODA2go. You don’t naturally enter through a ledger but into a process. In this case sales order to cash. CODA is picking up the accounting end of the process from the order point onwards. In other words it’s handling the transaction elements.
Since it is built on the force.com platform, there’s a lot of ’stuff’ CODA doesn’t have to do that other vendors would need to build. This means it’s cost to getting the service out to market is relatively low and has allowed them to develop in an incredibly quick time frame. It also means that the incidence of bugs should be much lower than a traditional Version 1.0 product. This is not a half baked solution. It’s the real deal, including the kind of reporting with which professionals will be familiar for both sales and the general ledger.
Just as important, CODA is going to build in support for its Excel products which already provide fine graimed control for reporting.
You really have to look at CODA2go in action to get a feel for what the service can deliver and to that end, they are offering free 30 days trials. That may seem odd when thinking about enterprise class software but it’s in keeping with the Salesforce.com method of going to market. It also means that professionals considering this approach can run some quick tests to get a feel for what they need to do.
I will be following this story very closely because for me, CODA is showing us a new way of business computing that holds the promise of low cost, easy to use, manage and control software. We’ve been craving it for years and this may just be the first iteration. I’m excited.
Once CODA has this bedded down, they plan on moving to purchase ledger. That will be a harder nut to crack because Salesforce.com is only handling one side of the overall transaction. However, if (or when) Salesforce.com understands the notion of vendor relationship management - which is really the flip side of CRM, then it will be onto something interesting.
Disclosure: CODA isa sponsor for this site. That doesn’t guarantee I’ll be nice to them.
Zoho’s serious move on Excel
April 28, 2008
I’ve written a brief review cum opinion piece about Zoho’s announcement that it’s added limited support for Visual Basic macros and pivot tables to its spreadsheet service. I’ve also posed a question to Simon Hurst about this over at IT Counts (private registration, sorry) where I ask whether in his opinion these new additions represent the kind of game changers that could help tip Zoho towards the mainstream and pose a threat to Microsoft.
I’m genuinely excited about this. While I personally hate messing around with pivot tables I know they’re beloved by my professional bretheren who see them as a way of doing some funky analysis. I’m thinking about it beyond analysis.
Just as we had Winforecast, until it became part of the Sage stable, Zoho could - and I emphasize could - become the bones of a reporting and analysis engine for the many finance applications that are starting to emerge. Some will say that baking analytics into the application is enough. I disagree. At least for now. Accounting data serves many purposes and right now, the emphasis is on user specific requirements. That’s fine except we should never forget that regulatory purposes need attention. If Zoho can become a reporting engine then it means someone, somewhere can make a very nice living by providing that service. Just an idea.
Video comments
April 24, 2008
In keeping with my insatiable appetite for new toys, I’ve added two new features to this site, both of which relate to commenting.
First I’ve added threading so that if you want to reply to a particular comment then it should become part of that conversation as opposed to a general comment river.
Second I’ve added in Seesmic video commenting. Many will know I was an early Seesmic user and know founder Loic LeMeur personally. I first saw this implemented over at TechCrunch earlier today and it is attracting a good amount of attention. It seems to be an obvious addition to the blog, let’s see how many people feel brave enough to use it.
Instructions for setting up your site to use the Seesmic plug-in, which currently only works with Wordpress blogs, can be found on this page. They’re all straightforward. The only thing you need is a Seesmic account. That’s free. If you need an access code then you can select from this list on GoogleDocs and Spreadsheets. Anyone can amend the document. All I ask is that if you take an access code that you update the document accordingly.
