With additional data charges through BankLink.
Accounting firm software provider Acclipse announced that it would start selling a full-featured online accounting program to compete with MYOB Live Accounts, Xero and Saasu within the next three months.
Acclipse had formed an alliance with financial services provider BankLink to distribute the program called iBizz through its customer base of 4,500 accounting firms. The software would only be sold to accountants and not directly to businesses.
The software included accounts payable and receiveable, invoicing and quoting but not multi-currency or inventory, Mike Chisholm, CEO of Acclipse, said.
“BankLink’s services used to cut out and they would say you need MYOB or QuickBooks. Now they can go up the pyramid and say anyone who wants online accounting, either cashbook or full accounting minus inventory or multi-currency, which is thousands and thousands of businesses, they’ll offer that,” Chisholm said.
“When Mike said it’s going to be an accountant-centric solution – it would only be delivered or sold by an accountant – that really resonated with us,” said Richard Reese, general manager of operations, BankLink. “Our whole philosophy is allowing the accountant to control the accounting process. It was a natural fit, in a way.”
Chisholm added that the software would be sold at “a game-changing price”. iBizz will cost $5 per month plus data charges charged by BankLink which Chisholm said would be about $5 for a small business.
“I’ve heard accountants saying, ‘I can’t put clients onto a program for $50 every month, it’s just too much’. Even if you get down to $30 a month they could just buy MYOB at Harvey Norman for $300,” Chisholm said.
“When you ask an accountant, How do you feel about $5 a month plus if you’re talking data feeds that’s another $5? You get a completely different answer.”
Accounting software vendors in the Australia and New Zealand market had failed to connect business software with accounting firms to bring about collaborative accounting, Chisholm said.
“It’s a changed world where you can be proactive by connecting the dots between business and the software the firm is running. Now that we’ve purchased iBizz we can actually put all that together.”
The decision to buy the accounting software was recent and discussions only started at the end of last year, said Chisholm, who was also a founder ofaccounting practice management software CA Systems which sold to MYOB and became MYOB Accountants Office.
“I’ve been trying to work with (accounting software) partners to build that world (of collaborative accounting) but it has just been too hard, it hasn’t worked. My guess is that business-centric suppliers like MYOB, Xero and Saasu in the end haven’t got the passion and vision for developing products that integrate with accountants,” Chisholm said.
Acclipse had bought the accounting software from an unnamed company at an undisclosed price. The previous vendor had invested 20,000 hours of development and had customers using the software. “I’ve described it as feature-rich, mature and proven. We bought it from a company that has been developing it over the past five years, longer than Xero,” Chisholm said.
Acclipse was spending the next months integrating the software with its cloud-based accounting practice management software, iFirm.
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