Pays $660,000 for 30% stake.
Reckon, the Australian distributor of accounting software QuickBooks and Quicken, has taken a 30 percent stake in cloud field management software vendor Connect2Field. Reckon paid $660,000 and would receive a seat on Connect2Field’s board.
“I believe that the ledger is going to become less and less valuable,” Clive Rabie, Reckon Group CEO, told BoxFreeIT. “I think it’s going to become more and more competitive and the more sexy part of these applications is going to be at the CRM side.
“Connect2Field integrates with the ledger and although it’s not pure accounting it’s the management of inventory, producing of invoices, and keeping your contacts and data on clients so it really is part of the accounting system.”
The capital investment would be used to develop the software and fund expansion overseas but otherwise it was business as usual, Connect2Field CEO Steve Orenstein said. The cloud vendor has signed up “hundreds” of customers in 15 countries in the three years since its launch, he added.
“We see Reckon as a really strategic shareholder because they have got such experience at building a business and a big network in a bunch of areas,” said Connect2Field board member Ben Kepes. “It would have been very easy to get money from anyone given what Steve has done but any high-growth company wants to think about who they have investing.”
Rabie said Reckon was considering quite a few investments this year and had one person whose job was just looking at strategic opportunities.
Reckon had no timetable for integrating Connect2Field with QuickBooks or other products but would work towards integration over time. Connect2Field already connected with the most popular cloud accounting program, Xero.
Reckon planned to introduce Connect2Field to a small number of partners and then look at pushing it further afield, Rabie said. Reckon has substantial businesses in the UK and the US.
“We’re not adverse to the UK and the US and I think most of these SaaS solutions will become interesting with the opportunity to take it to the rest of the world. But still our main focus is Australia and New Zealand when it comes to accounting products.”