Hundreds of Quickbooks users contact us every week looking for a Quickbooks alternative. Evolving a saas ERP that will stand the test of time means carefully listening feedback from every observer, prospect and customer about what they enjoyed about their previous experiences with other solutions. Most of the small business owners we talk to tell us how immensely valuable it is for them to have an accounting system that requires little or no formal accounting experience, yet helps provide financial structure and compliance. Unless I’m mistaken this was precisely the goal of the original Quickbooks development team who came up with a design for an accounting system that even today retains 80% market share.
We designed a Quickbooks alternative…
From day one in the seven year development of our saas ERP we were cognizant we had to design an accounting system that allowed small business owners and their teams to get the job done without being exposed to, or intimidated by the complexities of accounting. To a great extent I think we what we have in salesorder.com today has brought us very close to this goal. Just like Quickbooks, under the hood of our small business ERP is a powerful accounting system that affords business owners and accountants access to the nuances, numbers, reports and controls they need when they have to resort to fundamental accounting tasks.
Making a better Quickbooks alternative…
As we have learned from regular interactions with small business owners it’s not helpful to provide more features than the competition. It isn’t about which system has the most features, it’s about having the right features for specific type of business. Small businesses want the standard features found in most solutions. They also want features and functionality specific to their industry and their business processes, but they don’t have the deep pockets to pay for it.
This weekend we made a breakthrough on how to provide an affordable solution.
This is an extremely stimulating design challenge for our architects and engineers as the de facto standard in our market is to relentlessly increase functionality and add new features that not every small business needs. The classic solution to suppressing the exposure of too many features to end users is to design the system to be highly configurable. This added layer of complexity most often works in opposition of sustaining an economic model that is attractive to small businesses.
Many of our contemporary’s solutions such as NetSuite are now seriously afflicted with ‘feature bloat’ and whilst highly configurable, the result imposes higher cost burdens and steeper learning curves upon the end user. The resulting economics Netsuite to abandon the small business market and in turn their small business customers to seek alternatives or even return to Quickbooks.
By comparison to the first version of Quickbooks, the latest version is crowded with features and is arguably quite configurable. We want to our solution to keep up with Quickbooks and indeed maintain the ‘no formal accounting experience required’ focus.
What we are not going to do…
We are not going to bloat salesorder.com with features and neither are we going to make configuration of the system any more complex so as to increase the cost of implementation or the trajectory of the learning curve or indeed the cost of the system. As I said earlier this weekend we made an important breakthrough on how to keep the platform simple yet give business owners a solution to their specific needs so as they can have a Quickbooks alternative, a NetSuite alternative or whatever ‘specific solution’ they require at a cost they can afford.
Stay tuned, I’m going to be sharing this with you right here in the next few weeks….
NOV