Re: Clear competitive advantage

[Brian Wolf <..hidden..>]

Bob,

On 08/05/2013 01:52 PM, Bob Miller wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
>>          In my area, Sage Simply Accounting is probably in use by about
>>          90% of
>>          the businesses (yes, 90%), of the remaining 10%, probably
>>          about half use
>>          quickbooks or other Intuit software, and the rest use
>>          industry-specific
>>          or mac-oriented software.  Probably the biggest single reason
>>          for that
>>          is the accountants in this area; many of them won't look at
>>          your data if
>>          you don't give it to them in such a way they can drop it into
>>          simply
>>          accounting.  If an accountant will take it, often you have to
>>          pay them
>>          to convert it, which usually means paying them to manually
>>          re-enter all
>>          the data into Simply - needlessly expensive.
>>
>>
>> That might be a good use case for hosted solutions, and an ability to
>> grant an accountant access for a period of time and then disable the
>> user.   Why import when you can access and suggest adjustments (in a
>> batch or other unapproved transactions) live?  Again though usability
>> would be a key there.
> Agreed.  One of my customers who dropped lsmb went with a hosted
> solution.  it ties in with their google accounts and has feature sets
> that simply accounting does not have.  They are quite happy with their
> decision...

Our firm is hosting LedgerSMB for some clients and prepared to host 
more.  Speaking of tying in, we've written a tie-in with Amazon that is 
in final stages of testing this week.  It pulls sales orders from Amazon 
and adds them directly to LedgerSMB.  That will save a huge amount of 
manual labor to (re-)enter them in LedgerSMB.  We're looking at adding 
integration with other marketplaces such as Google and Overstock.

We also plan to roll out very soon an integrated payment screen;  it 
will perform the credit card transaction in just a few seconds, and add 
the payment transaction to LedgerSMB, too.  These types of integrations 
can boost LedgerSMB's usefulness, prominence and marketability.

>
>>          Simply Accounting also
>>          won't let you make an obvious mistake.  If you try to do
>>          something
>>          stupid, it will stop you.  As I am sure we have all dismayed
>>          at one
>>          moment or another, lsmb happily lets you do whatever stupid
>>          thing occurs
>>          to you at the moment.  Several times in a row if you insist ;)
>>
>>
>> Could you give some specific examples?  Defining "obvious mistake" is
>> hard and examples make it easier.  Just to let you know we have
>> tightened up certain sorts of controls for certain kinds of obvious
>> mistakes here during 1.3 and are working on tightening up some more,
>> but examples are really important to get so we can decide how to
>> differentiate them from legitimate but very similar workflows.
> Hmm..  I may be outdated with this statement.  The two examples that
> spring to mind from our old system; you could make a general journal
> entry that didn't balance, and you could also link accounts incorrectly,
> neither of which is something simply accounting would let you do.
> Apparently we have not tried to do either of those things since our
> recent migration to a current version of lsmb, so I can't say if those
> things still apply.
>
>
>>           2.  Their accountants will refuse them service or charge them
>>          unreasonable amounts of money if they don't use simply
>>          accounting.
>>
>>
>> We need to work with accountants then and reach out to them.
> Agreed.  These guys are the central pivot point around which potential
> customers choose their software.  If these guys like it, customers will
> use it.
>
>>           3.
>>          Simply Accounting is to dummy-proof and feature-rich not to
>>          use when
>>          compared to lsmb.
>>
>>
>> And we are missing important little things like payroll in 1.3.
> I am still looking for that guinea pig...
>
> Thanks for listening :)
>
>
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Version control is standard for application code, but databases havent 
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version control? Why should you start doing it? Read more to find out.
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