Tag Archive for 'freeagentcentral'

Saasu to New Zealand - it’s only fair

Published by Ben Kepes on September 17, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 6 Comments

I posted a couple of weeks ago about the imminent entry of Xero into the Australian market. In what can only be described as a fair development, Australian SaaS accounting provider Saasu has announced the roll out of some internationalizations of it’s product.

For New Zealand customers this includes New Zealand default tax codes. Saasu is quick to add that the NZ codes are for beta release only (same situation for the UK).

tax-codes-nz

The interesting thing here however isn’t how Saasu will do in Xero’s backyard, neither is it how Xero will do in Saasu’s patch - the real test will come when both of them are fully entered into the UK market. Bear in mind that neither company has any particular brand following outside of their home location - UK then will be a great head to head battle - not to mention the fact that they’ll both be battling Free Agent Central for the smaller businesses and Coda2go for the larger players.

Let the battles (almost) begin.

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It’s about aggregation…

Published by Ben Kepes on July 6, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 3 Comments

ACCMan bought to my attention to the fact that FreeAgentCentral, the UK based SaaS accounting solution, is including tax tips into its corporate blog. As he points out this fulfills many uses;

  • Users get free information which they’d otherwise have to search for (read time and effort saving) 
  • The third part contribution both build credibility and increases the feeling of community
  • By offering this additional information, FAC starts to become a magnet for useful stuff that’s directly related to the service offering. That increases traffic but also increases the likelihood that FAC is seen as a trusted resource.
  • In developing community, FAC is sparking further discussion about its service and discovering fresh requirements.

So it’s a double win - the software vendor wins credibility, design suggestions and eyeballs, while the users gain the sense of community, being listened to and a value add.

I had an email from a SaaS startup the other day that asked me to explain what I meant when I said that “SaaS businesses need to think about aggregation”. My response to him went thus;

in this environment, where there are lots of “me too” offerings, I really like SaaS platform plays. This is where a product takes in information from many different sources and puts it in one place where it is easy for the user. Examples could include - Salesforce with Google apps, Zoho allowing login with Google login, FreeAgentCentral giving free tax tips on its blog - it’s all about letting people come in to share
So aggregation can be;

  • single sign-on
  • APIs
  • true aggregation (multiple data streams on one locale)

Good on FAC for seeing where this is heading - what will be the next aggregation play?

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Sage in trouble? SaaS disruption again…

Published by Ben Kepes on May 29, 2008 in IT, SaaS and Strategy. 1 Comment

Following on from my previous post about SaaS being disruptive and hence tricky for traditional software players to deal with, news that former chairman of large UK accounting software company Sage looks set to buy all or part of an unamed SaaS accounting company (guesses anyone? FreeAgentCentral? Xero? who else?).

Sage has 5.5million customers but the company has been criticised for being slow to embrace SaaS for fear of cannibalising sales of its shrink-wrapped software.

AccMan has an interesting take on all of this (but bear in mind he’s a shareholder in FreeAgentCentral). He says that;

If I was on the receiving end of an offer from Jackson would I be willing to sell out right now? That depends on a multitude of factors but the answer is likely to be no. If anything, I would thank him for adding validity to the SaaS story and suggest he think about making angel or early stage investments. Why?

Building out a SaaS business to scale for the very small and small to medium sized business is not easy. Viral marketing can take you some distance in the right markets but not in all segments and not without a good amount of hard work. Even then, operating economically at scale is not as simple as it appears. FreshBooks with its 300,000+ new users since 2004 doesn’t exhibit too many technical problems and is said to be doing very well with zero external investment. But it is only one of many vendors vying for attention in this emerging market. In the meantime, an investing entrant like Jackson, with his years of experience in the accounting market, will most certainly be welcome. If nothing else, it is excellent PR for the SaaS contingent.

Looks like SaaS SME accounting will start hotting up pretty soon.

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