Due in July.Mid-market cloud ERP vendor NetSuite planned to launch an accounting package in July through its Australian partner, JCurve.
The accounting package was a stripped-down version of NetSuite’s financials module and would use the same code with other features switched off, said JCurve chairman and founder Graham Baillie.
“It’s directly aimed at giving an alternative to QuickBooks and MYOB, and will be priced accordingly,” Baillie, interviewed at NetSuite’s first user conference in San Francisco, said. “We will be beta testing it next month.”
<!–:sh–>The accounting product<!–sh:–> as yet unnamed, would include a set-up wizard to help small businesses with installation and would most likely cost $49 per user per month, in line with market leader MYOB, Baillie said. It would be the first accounting program that could take a small business all the way to a full-blown ERP (enterprise resource planning) application used by enterprise companies, he said.
Users and features could be added at extra cost and small businesses could move directly to the full version of NetSuite by turning on all the ERP features.
“In a way, small business has been starved of the business solution tools that mid-size and large businesses had. There’s no integrated ERP system that goes horizontally across the various functions in a business,” Baillie said.
“Rather you have a vertical financial dominated by MYOB, and to make up for the inefficiencies, Excel spreadsheets reign supreme.”
JCurve planned to release another cut-down product of NetSuite soon afterwards called JCurve Lite that added CRM to the accounting package. No price had been finalised for JCurve Lite, which included the set-up wizard.
The two new versions would join JCurve’s sole product, a small-business version of the cloud ERP program that was limited to 20 users and also sporting the set-up wizard. This version would be renamed JCurve Premium.
Small businesses had shied away from JCurve Premium because it was such a large step up from using spreadsheets and an accounting program, Baillie said.
“None of them who look at JCurve go and buy another product, they just stay with what they’ve got. We’re putting a couple of steps in there so when they want to (move to an ERP program) it’s easier, rather than taking a big jump.”
All three small-business versions would only be available in Australia, although there are plans to sell it through IT resellers. At the inaugural user conference in San Francisco NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson said the vendor planned to roll out the cut-down versions to other markets.
“We have every intention, as JCurve becomes more successful, to take it as a global program,” Nelson told BoxFreeIT in an interview.
JCurve has sold its Premium product to 250 customers in the year since launch. MYOB, the clear number one accounting vendor in Australia, has over 70,000 customers.
“We don’t want to take them head on, but 10 percent of that market would be nice, focused on the growing businesses rather than those wanting to run their business,” Baillie said.