Conflict of interest?
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.
Posted by Mark Davies
hi, first of all sory about my english..
i am cpa from israel and i found your blog from anather online accounting “clearbooks”.
i concsider to develope online accouninting softwear in israel.
I have apractice, and your blog help me to dicaide if the softwear linked to my ofice or brand to adifrent name.
you have exselent softwear!!!
and again sory about my bad english, i faild in school
Hi Shay. Thanks for the positive feedback! We have customers in over 60 countries, I’m sure we could provide service to you as long as you don’t mind dealing with us in one of our supported languages – we currently support English (both UK and International), German, Spanish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian.
Regarding branding, for all accountants we provide the ability for you to display your logo in the system so that it is visible to all your clients when they are logged in. You can also display your logo to potential clients in our accountants’ directory and we also provide is a direct log-in to the system from your web site. This way, your clients (and your colleagues) will always use your web site and see your brand when they are logging on to the online accounting system.
These facilities are all part of our free service to accountants.
Things have developed further due to some advice posted by someone at Crunch that has been called into question by a number of people. This is one of the reasons why we don’t give accounting advice and backs up my belief that marrying software with accounting services in one organisation will cause issues.
hi
i am apoligize again about my bed english, but im must say somting.
maybe all the saas softwear in uk are envy chrunch becouse they take your “job” ?
i think becouse the low cost of saas softwear, in the future all the accounttet have “in house” softwear, and one men from the company take care on it.
maybe the saas company should become accounting agency ?
everebody thlk tody about “free”.
i think in the future its become hard to take mony from users.
the mony is in another servise like consalting and anoter things’ but not mony from users.
and again sory about my mistake.
i love your softwear!!!
Our experience is that most accountants in practice are still trying to assess the role of online accounting. Some may fear that it will diminish their role, but I don’t think that’s actually going to happen. Aside from the statutory requirement for a trained accountant to sign off annual accounts, accountants who have experience and know-how will always be able to offer a valuable service to companies. In my opinion, online accounting will reduce accounting software costs and make the accounting process more efficient, but it won’t undermine the role of the accountant.
It remains to be seen whether Crunch have got a successful business – I wish them well with it. But here at e-conomic we will stick to providing the best system we can and leave it to the accountants to provide accounting services to their clients.