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Reviewing from the wrong perspective

April 19th, 2010 by

Through a combination of bad planning on my part and staff holidays, I ended up covering support this weekend.

It was interesting to see an old chestnut come up in the form of this email from an accountant.

Not impressed at all! Having been in practice over 20 years I can only say I won’t be recommending to ANY of my clients!

Further questioning on my part revealed

Not at all user friendly in setting up additional nominal ledger codes! Sage far more useful and better instructions

I’ve seen these kinds of comments from accountants before. What usually happens is that they hear the hype about KashFlow, often from a client, and decide to investigate for themselves.

Rather than looking at the software via our Accountants interface, they dive straight in to the end user software. They usually concede that Sage is too confusing for their clients, but they like Sage themselves.

As we deliberately set out to be different from Sage (why replicate the problem you’re trying to solve?) they find the way KashFlow does things to be counter-intuitive and deduce from that that their clients (the ones who don’t like and wont use Sage, remember) wont like it.

Spot the flaw in that logic?

Sure, an accountant needs to do some due diligence on a piece of software before they recommend it to their clients, but still too many make the mistake of reviewing the software from their highly-trained perspective, rather than from the perspective of the people they’re reviewing it for.

Although often when they’re given a guided  tour of our Partner Programme software and see the benefits to them of their clients using the software, they start to change their mind.

Then when they get their clients to look at the software for themselves, they’re sold.

And to finish things off, here’s another email we received on support this weekend from a web hosting company.There’s nothing exceptional about it, we get emails like this on just about a daily basis but we never tire of receiving them!

From: Jim McDonald
Subject: 1st Class Product

Dear KashFlow, I just wanted to drop you a email to say how fantastic your product is.

There are loads of great features on KashFlow and aside from a great price and ease of use and first class support from the KashFlow team the main one for us is the plug in for the billing system we use WHMCS, being able to update our accounts program when we make a sale is a great help and allows us to streamline our business.

Our only regret about KashFlow is we did not find this sooner!!

Kind Regards

Jim McDonald
Webhost 4 Less

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 9:40 am and is filed under Accounting, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.fordirecthire.com Marc Mapes

    Duane,

    Nice post. Good example of getting involved and getting to the bottom of the real issue. Nice lesson on considering things from the perspective for which they were designed.

    Keep it up Duane.

    Marc Mapes

  • http://www.accmanpro.com/2010/04/19/kashflows-brave-post/ Kashflow’s brave post

    [...] It’s a brave vendor that publishes negative stuff being said about its service [...]

  • http://www.maslins.co.uk Chris Maslinl

    Good post Duane.

    SaaS is taking over the small business bookkeeping marketplace. If accountants don’t move with the times they’ll soon find their client base dwindling (if it hasn’t already).

  • Jonathan Kettle

    We’ve been using Kashflow for over 2 years now for 3 of our companies. We’ve been very happy with the product and service. Our companies are now much bigger so we decided to review our accounts process. Our accountant and book keeper both suggested sage but we have stuck to our guns and continued to use Kashflow. As IT professional and director of my own business and can say without doubt Kashflow it the best solution for our business. Regardless of how big we get.

  • http://www.mattchedit.com/Blog.aspx Matt Chatterley

    I can imagine how an accountant (or someone else with very specific wants/aims who knows somewhat more about managing accounts than I) might not like how KashFlow looks and behaves to a normal user.

    On the other hand, I love it, because I doubt very much I use it like an accountant – and it has helped us to improve on one of our real weaknesses – the dreaded books!

    When I’m commenting on services – and particularly software and tools – I tend to criticise and then stop and think about things for a moment, because as a techie my perspective is very different to that of the average user – I make assumptions and have different expectations about how things should behave.

    It’s hard to switch mind-set, though – so always think and look carefully before complaining!

  • http://www.domybooks.ie Ralph Smith

    For the next few years accountants will be slow to accept the revolution of business software moving to online offerings.

    No doubt during this time more and more clients will complete their own book keeping in the cloud. As pointed out above this will certainly effect the slow moving accountants revenue.

    Ralph

  • Andrew Sturgeon

    As an accountant I get hacked off with my fellow professionals who persist in recommending SAGE. I can’t stand the software and I don’t know many clients who like it.

    I’ve just started trialing KashFlow for my wife’s business and I like its refreshing approach. The huge attraction for me is that it ticks 3 critical boxes –
    1. SaaS
    2. Free and extensive API
    3. Excellent support

    Automating as many business processes as possible is a key element of delivering great service and reducing costs. This software makes this possible in ways that SAGE never will unless it undergoes a complete rewrite and re-think!

    Being able to look at client data real time must be a massive bonus for accountants who want to deliver a better service to their clients.


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