Online accounting system – e-conomic blog » Market info

Job available in E-conomic Germany

Kirsten Bjornsbo — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:58:06 +0000

Would you like to work abroad – or are you from Germany?

E-conomic International is presently looking for people to help establish our new branch in Germany.

We need a competent person with the following skills:

* Bookkeeping or accounting background
* German background, fluent in German language
* Speaks and writes English
* Familiar with “the online world”

Would you like to hear more about this possibility, then please send a short application with your CV to Vice President Kim Sneum Madsen at ksm@e-conomic.com

Job available in E-conomic Germany is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

E-conomic launches in Spain

Jacqui Sullivan — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:51:38 +0000

E-conomic is very pleased to announce today the establishment of its operation in Spain.

This growth brings the firm’s international reach to six countries including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the UK and is part of a strategic expansion programme which will see the business established in 12 countries by 2012.

E-conomic launches in Spain is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

e-conomic survey into accountants lifestyle

Jacqui Sullivan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:21:40 +0000

We surveyed 2,000 accountants to find out the true state of their work/life balance and what impact technology and in particluar online accounting could have on their daily lives. It makes very interesting reading. Let us know how you manage or have you got it sorted ? we would be interested to hear.

read our findings

e-conomic survey into accountants lifestyle is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

Vantis moves to e-conomic

Jacqui Sullivan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:55:59 +0000

Dennis Howlett, the never knowingly under opinionated independent software consultant interviews Richard Messik, the Vantis partner responsible for the groups online accounting projects on the many advantages of moving over to e-conomic and how Vantis are ramping up to move the first 200 online clients over to the e-conomic system by the end of December, with more to follow in the New Year.

Listen and enjoy!

Vantis moves to e-conomic is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

Website on new platform

Tue Skaarup — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:17:29 +0000

Last night the UK website www.e-conomic.co.uk was moved to a new platform.

This gives you and us a number of advantages.

To name a few:

More frequent and usable content and updates.
Easier development of new features and functionality.
Customers will be able to find relevant information on the new log on page.
Less noise on the website in general with the log on area moved to the log on page.

The UK website is now running on a new platform detached from the e-conomic accounting system

In a week or 2, the log on page will be moved from the website to the e-conomic application.

When this happens, customers can bookmark the log on page and access e-conomic directly. In this way, if the website is down, you will still be able to access e-conomic.

Hope you like the change and I am sure you are going to enjoy the future content and features on the e-conomic website.

Website on new platform is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

Mixam successfully tackles credit management with e-conomic and TAK-Outsourcing

Jacqui Sullivan — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:48:30 +0000

Mixam Ltd, a specialist UK printing firm in the UK, successfully reduces its debt by £65,000 in less than three months using online accounting software.

During a recession it is more important than ever to keep on top of debtors – nearly 5,000 businesses became insolvent in the first quarter of 2009, up 56% on this time last year. A good online accounting solution can help businesses to manage their finances better as Mixam found out. By choosing online accounting software e-conomic, Mixam is able to benefit from using an outsourced credit control service, which has reduced its outstanding debt by £65,000 in less than three months.

Mixam is a young successful company that has grown rapidly since its inception two years ago. Rami Zetuny, Mixam Director said: “As with many businesses, our management team focused heavily on winning and retaining clients in the early years and consequently some business processes had been neglected. In fact, it came to light that there was a problem with unpaid customer invoices, which in total amounted to over £100,000 and dated back nearly a year.”

Mixam chose e-conomic as its accounting software because, being online, it is possible to get instant up-to-date accounts from anywhere in the world. This proved to be the ideal when Mixam opted for credit management firm TAK-Outsourcing Ltd to manage its credit control. Despite being physically hundreds of miles apart, TAK can work seamlessly as part of Mixam’s business using e-conomic in a way that’s not possible with traditional accounting software.

Rami continued: “Handing over responsibility for credit control to TAK has meant that we have been able to concentrate on growing the business, safe in the knowledge that the sales ledger would be managed in a pro-active and professional manner. e-conomic has been very beneficial in facilitating a smooth partnership between the companies and it is very easy to use. Directors can access the most recent copy of our accounts at anytime and have a clear picture of the company’s finances.”

e-conomic is an online accounting system, which is provided as Software as a Service (SaaS), meaning that companies access the system through a web browser. There are no installation costs, upgrades are continuous and free, and support is unlimited. The basic subscription of £12.99 for businesses includes all the core finance modules needed by a business – general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable and electronic invoicing – plus a number of innovative time-saving features such as automated bank reconciliation and direct integration with Microsoft Excel. Additional modules are available including stock management, project accounting and scanning. e-conomic does not charge for the administrator’s module which is free to accountants and bookkeepers. e-comomic is used by nearly 20,000 companies and 3,000 bookkeepers/accountants.

Mixam successfully tackles credit management with e-conomic and TAK-Outsourcing is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

Polar views of online accounting and the question of risk

Mark Davies — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:39:52 +0000

Currently, many more businesses appear willing to talk about positive experiences of web-based acccounting systems than accountants in practice.

Here are some comments from the “IT Counts” online forum run by the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW). Only a very small sample of the Institute’s overall membership participate in the forum, but even amongst this group the comments show a reticence towards online accounting and SaaS:

“Most, if not all, of the Cloud providers are using servers which are outside the European Union.”
“If the provider loses your data, then your business is ‘toast’ which is clearly NOT acceptable for any accountant.”
“Cloud computing – a cautionary tale”
“Whereas beckaup and security of on-premise solutions are entirely controlled by the user, cloud solutions do require trust to be invested in the on-line supplier. If North Korea can hack into the White House’s computers, how safe is safe?”

I have personally checked out over 40 providers of web-based accounting systems in the UK alone. No doubt some of them have data centres outside the EU and some of them may not be robust enough to rely on. But the above generalised assertions imply that us vendors are fly-by-night operations who store your data in some far flung and insecure part of the world. This makes my blood boil because I know the effort that goes in to providing a stable, robust platform for our users.

Doing due diligence on your supplier is just as important with online systems as it is when you buy software to install. If you’re a customer of ours and the above comments have made you wonder, let me put your mind at rest…

Our hosting partner is Fujitsu. We selected them for the service they provide, their global reach and the credibility they bring. Today we only have one data centre and it’s in Copenhagen, which is in the EU. We may set up additional data centres to service other parts of the world, but we will not remove our presence in the EU and we will continue to develop and manage the software centrally in order to maintain the economies of scale that enable us to deliver a lot at a low price.
We backup your data every 15 minutes (or 96 times a day) and have a separate storage facility for the backups. You can also take your own backup at any time using the “Export data” button when you are logged on.
Some practices require local data backups to ensure that their clients’ data is copied to their local jurisdiction. This is a regulatory requirement in some countries (for the UK, the data just has to be in the EU) and it’s a service we provided through our hosting partner, Fujitsu.
When we were a new company, we made arrangements to protect customers if we ever got into financial difficulties. We still have them, even though today we have a strong financial and operational platform. Our track record shows that we have never made a loss whilst continuing to grow and our revenues in 2008 were £3.8m. There are almost 20,000 SME’s (that’s companies, not just users) using e-conomic along with their accountants and bookkeepers. We expect to grow by around 40% this year and have just opened new German and Spanish web sites.

We’ve been around since 2001 and have seen many phases of growth and development, both in the application and as a business, so that both our application and our company infrastructure are ahead of most of our competitors. Richard Messik, partner at Vantis (ranked 13th biggest practice in the UK in 2008), visited our HQ recently to see our core operations at first hand, feel free to ask his opinion directly.

While many accountants may be reticent, just look at this comment by Charles Verrier of CVC , a consultant to accountants. Charles was responding to a blog post by Richard where he asked what could be the tipping point that makes more people turn to SaaS. Charles uses online accounting and talks about the business benefits, the quality of service he receives and the issue of security.

While Charles’ views are the polar opposite of the above comments from the ICAEW forum, that’s not to say that all companies like SaaS and no accountants like it, but it does seem as if companies are taking more of a lead. Which is a pity, because the practices who are ignoring this technology are missing out on tremendous benefits, which means that their clients are missing out too.

Polar views of online accounting and the question of risk is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

European commissioner cites cloud computing as beneficial for SMEs and low-carbon economy

Mark Davies — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:49:50 +0000

The following are excerpts from an article on ZDnet quoting the European commissioner for telecoms and media, Viviane Reding. Speaking at the unveiling of the Commission’s Digital Europe strategy on Thursday, Reding said:

“99 percent of EU firms are small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but only nine percent of them use electronic invoices and only 11 percent have IT-based human resource management.

“If SMEs could access computing power over the web, they would no longer need to buy and maintain technologies or IT applications and services,” Reding said. “Such web-based services — called cloud computing — are the medicine needed for our credit-squeezed economy: they can make businesses more productive by shifting from fixed costs (for example, hiring staff or buying PCs) to variable costs (for instance, you only pay for what you use).”

Reding added that efficiencies brought about by cloud computing could “lead to electricity savings in computing activity of up to 80 percent”.

Full article here.

European commissioner cites cloud computing as beneficial for SMEs and low-carbon economy is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

The Proactive Accountant

Maria Sadler — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:15:57 +0000

A story by the Proactive Accountant stevepipehome on his Accounting Web blog quotes Cima as saying that Accountants may lose 17% of their clients who won’t make it through the recession.

He suggests that Accountants proactively start a dialogue with clients about what this means for their business and how to create action plans for dealing with the situation, and I quote ‘Every single one of our clients is facing the recession. Every single one of them appointed us as their trusted adviser. And every single one of them deserves our input’

How much easier it is to monitor your clients’ business when you have all their data instantly to hand in e-conomic, allowing you to monitor their business and give advice as and when it is required.

Incidently it’s now become even more cost effective go online – see our price comparison with Sage.

The Proactive Accountant is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

Conflict of interest?

Mark Davies — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:22:11 +0000

A new online accounting service called “Crunch” was reviewed in AccountingWEB yesterday. It offers a complete accounting service, based around their own online system, for £59.50/mth. The system and service are backed up by an accounting firm in Brighton. I felt compelled to comment and felt it worth putting on our own blog, as it’s relevant to the role that software providers play in the relationship between accountants and clients. These are my thoughts…

It’s good to see such forward thinking, but Crunch is cheeky to position itself as unique – there are several other online accounting systems that are also backed by accounting firms who also claim to provide a complete service!

What is the objective? To win more clients? Or build a software company? Or both?

The trouble with a solution that’s backed by an accounting practice is that it’s hard for another accountant to recommend it to their clients. So it’s hard to scale the solution up to volume.

The other issue is “focus” – it takes vast amounts of resource, skill and (most importantly) funding to build a competent, high quality software solution. Accountancy and software development are very different things, trying to do both may well result in a conflict of interests.

e-conomic sees itself as a software company that enables accounting practices to utilise technology to provide better services to their clients. In our case it’s a true partnership, because we give free use of e-conomic to all accountants and bookkeepers. Accountants often ask why we don’t increase our prices – presumably because they fear that it makes their fees look expensive. But we believe that the cost of the software should be a small component of the client’s overall accounting costs, because what clients really value is having their accounts filed etc. So the real value is in the service that the accountant delivers. Hence we maintain an incredibly clean business model, giving practices complete commercial control over their clients.

The most viable long-term approach for practices is not to develop their own software, but to work in partnership with software suppliers that you can rely on not to impinge on your client base or over charge you for the software.

Incidentally, we’ve just revised our pricing for the first time in our near 9 year history and the cost comparisons with Sage are compelling.

Conflict of interest? is a post from: Online accounting system – e-conomic blog

Online accounting system – e-conomic blog » Market info

Job available in E-conomic Germany

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