Australia’s two leading cloud accounting vendors were taking different approaches to a feature which could be one of the most important this year – the ability to submit electronic forms to government agencies online.
The federal Treasury has spearheaded an initiative involving the Australian Taxation Office, regulatory bodies and state revenue offices to standardise the fields used on electronic forms submitted to those institutions. The goal of the initiative, called Standard Business Reporting (SBR), was to automate the process of filling out common forms such as Business Activity Statements (BAS) and Tax File Number declarations.
Accounting and other business software that complied with the SBR framework could automatically pre-fill a form and submit it electronically through the SBR portal to the relevant authority. Small business cloud accounting vendor Xero was one of the first to submit BAS forms through third-party developer LodgeIT.
LodgeIT’s speed to market was a good example of the partner model playing out, Xero’s Australian managing director Chris Ridd said.
“I talk to a new developer every fortnight that wants to create something and integrate it with Xero,” he said. “We are great believers in tapping the developer market.”
Ridd said Xero had helped Noble by introducing him to Workflow Max, a document management platform that was tightly connected to Xero (which owns 15 percent of Workflow Max). Workflow Max had showed Noble the integration points in the Xero code which would let him pull data to populate the SBR forms, Ridd said.
Xero had “broken the model” when it acquired payroll provider Paycycle but that was a necessary exception, Ridd said. Xero intended to focus on core accounting features and partner with developers to add other functionality.
“Our model is still very much about advocating other cloud providers that integrate with Xero. That’s very different to how other players view the market where they try to build everything.”
Saasu, a cloud accounting program for larger businesses, took the opposite approach. Saasu planned to add SBR formats to its program so that users could submit forms without leaving Saasu.
“Too many third parties cost our customers more time (and) money and creates complexity. It’s better to save that energy for industry specific apps supporting specialist functionality or industry verticals,” said Saasu CEO Marc Lehmann.
“Simplicity is a major consideration for the industry now as the volume of interconnected systems is going through what looks like a Cambrian explosion. That’s why we built a connection to PayPal ourselves and we will do that again for SBR.”
Saasu had been watching SBR development for the past couple of years and had been biding its time, Lehmann said.
“We feel like this is the year that the demand is sufficient to warrant it,” he said. Saasu was starting the SBR project in Q3. “It wouldn’t take more than a couple of quarters to get live. It’s not a massive project,” Lehmann said.
Other developers such as GovReports and GovDirect (a joint venture led by Deloitte) have built standalone SBR portals through which businesses and accountants can submit their forms.