Online accounts, estimates and invoices. A NZ-based review as at August 2007

Okay, this one is a long one and has taken me a while to write. I'm happy to correct this and/or revisit this at a later date based on feedback; but these are my views of the various sites (I know I'm criticising people's babies).

I have been looking for a nice, self-contained, at-least-invoicing setup for Latam Design (free plug for my wife). I can't face MYOB or QuickBooks or anything of that genre. Every time I look at (non-SaaS) accounting software I cry internally "I could do better than that with my eyes closed, lets code one up in Erlang/Yaws and take-over the world". The reality is that:
a) I'd get dead-bored before I finished a proto-DB schema, let alone the core or the interface.
b) It is pretty nasty hard-core work that requires more than my cobweb-laden understanding of accounting.
c) It is boring. Oh I mentioned that. I like real-time millions-of-customers "you're down and you're dead" systems.
d) I don't need to be supporting this kind of stuff in my spare time.

So off I go, inspired by Rod's Xero Marketing (heh) to see what's on offer. While I was on holiday in Peru I discovered Cashboard. If you haven't tried any of these, I'd suggest you register for at least a couple to get the idea of what you can do.

Cashboard

Cashboard is pretty funky. All Web2.0'n'everything. It does estimates, invoicing and timetracking, and it can accept payments as well* . The MacOSX (grrr, StuDlyCaPs) widget for logging time is a nice touch, esp. given that side only uses Macs.

It didn't initially do NZD, which was a problem, but the owner added that pretty much instantaneously for me and gave me a double-your-grace period coupon. Great response, but it was the tip of the i18n iceberg...

You can create estimates very easily, although if you want to base them on effort but not disclose your hourly rate it becomes more tricky. If you have a paid account you can customise the format of estimates/invoices and send them as PDFs or links to the site. Nice. You can then turn the estimates into invoices, adjusted as appropriate, and auto-email the client (if you want).

It all works swimmingly from my two brief attempts. Adding new clients while in the invoicing process works just as you'd hope -- you can add them in situ without breaking your workflow.

Cashboard give you a .cashboardapp.com domain when you create your account. A nice touch and great for your customers should you provide them access.

The real problems come around the i18n side.

• US date formats everywhere, and I can't see myself sending invoices to clients (or showing them to the IRD) when 1/6/2007 means January not June. Confusion is not something I want to cause when I'm asking people for money.
  
• NZD is supported, although it helpfully says NZD everywhere. I just know someone is going to look unkindly on that...
  
• The only way to get my GST number onto an invoice is via the "notes" feature. This is the recommended way of doing it...
• I need TAX INVOICE on my Tax Invoices. This also has to go into the notes field.
• At the time it didn't do Timezones. It does now, which is helpful since auto-emailing clients with yesterday's dates wasn't appealling.
  

I know that Cashboard is developing quickly and has taken my/NZ i18n requirements on board, but the frustrating thing is that it is not usable for New Zealand until they get around to implementing most of them. I was quite prepared to pay for it, their rates are extremely good for what you get, and the ability to up/downgrade based on your success is fantastic.

* at least for USA'ns. The cascading requirement is that you must be able to accept CC's via a CC processor, which means you need a US bank account, which means a US address. This all ends up meaning "no, non-Americans can't". It just takes longer to work this out.

Xero

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Xero. I might disagree with Rod about what is holding back NZ from being the next Finland/Ireland/China^D^D^D^DHong Kong but I can't fault their product even at this early stage.

Xero aim to provide a complete MYOB/QuickBooks replacement. They're certainly well on their way to providing this although there are some rough edges. I was, for example, surprised to see that we tagged their emails to clients -- free advertising for them but it shrieks of Hotmail. To their credit they are looking at fixing this. The accounting side seems to be a little rough too, sure everything can be done by posting amounts around manually but remind me why we have computers again?

Xero have just reframed their pricing slightly but is still both expensive for small businesses at $50 a month ($600+GST a year for the math challenged), and probably too cheap for larger businesses as the same $50 a month. I'm struggling with the rationale behind this plan; either they don't want the micro-businesses (why not?) or they figure they have something compelling enough for these enterprises to spend more than they do today on accounting software/services.

The integration with local accountants is a clever strategy. The system is admittedly great for accountants that know it (and who will presumably recommend it because of this) as they can easily see the current state of their clients' businesses without leaving their desk. Less boring work for everyone is always good.

If Xero was cheaper then I'd take it by default as it is launching with the NZ-focus and NZ-bank integration. Yes I only care about i18n when it impacts me. Colour me selfish.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks looks like a direct competitor to Cashboard. I only recently discovered it (last week) but it has excellent i18n support and has been around a while . I feel these two things are related...

Freshbooks provides much the same estimating, invoicing and time-tracking capability as Cashboard. It can accept payments, using a wide variety of payment processors, but as far as I can see I'm limited to using Paypal as that's the only one I can get a non-US account from. I'm not asking my customers to use Paypal...

Freshbooks also give you a custom (.freshbooks.com) domain when you create your account. A nice touch and great for your customers should you provide them access, and Freshbooks also allow you to logo-ise this interface. Nice touch.

Freshbooks have an innovative option to send physical mail using an external provider. The cost and delivery time of this option for a non-North American business would appear to make this of little utility. Significantly they do not offer PDF, although you can format for printing (locally) or have them email your customers with an access link so they can see/ad

I really liked that your customers can comment on estimates and dispute invoices sent to them. I'm not so sure I like the focus on doing this all on-line, a number of our customers really need paper copies and I'd rather send them one and have it processed than have our automatic email lost/forgotten and not be paid since "we hadn't send an invoice".

Freshbooks does have a "free" option, eriely similar when compared to the equivalent Cashboard free plan but it appears to ramp up to become significantly more expensive at the high end.

Saasu

The Australians have arrived. It really looks like a traditional accounting package with a web interface. These guys have apparently been doing SaaS since before there was an acronym for what they were doing (1999!). Stability in your provider can only be a good thing...

Saasu NetAccounts is a fully featured accounting package, as a SaaS offering. They also have, listed separately but somehow part of the same system, NetInvoiceIt which is the invoicing only part. This seems to be placed as a bit of a teaser to compete with the other invoicing-only solutions above and also as an easy entry to the whole-of-business system they have.

Non-Australians are allowed to use this now although we are warned that NZ is only in Beta. While the NZ currency and stuff are there there are still an awful lot of country specific (and I mean Australian-specific) things in there too. At least they use G.S.T., but there are many exceptions and rates in Australia and these are reflected in the interface.

Two NZ banks are supported. The rest may be addable, I'll admit to not trying their BSB, but certainly were not in the dropdown lists. Still, two NZ banks are supported. This is far more encouraging than 0. No I'm not going to type Zero, or Xero.

I'm still trying to work out the pricing scheme. It's free unless you want to use it too much, although "too much" has some sort of point system based on the number of things you're doing. 5 invoices with payments, or 10 invoices by itself per month max based on my reading.

The sorta-flat-rate plan is A$228. It's not clear to me if it is a one-off payment or yearly (either way still cheaper than Xero). Ah, I see now (in the browser title); it is annual. Still, fairly good given the broad coverage. It would appear to my non-accountant eyes that this is a complete replacement for MYOB, but it is almost as ugly in places. Not much Web2.0 going on here.

Conclusion

None of these fit the bill at the moment. I was dead keen on Cashboard, and we may return to that if they can just redo all the date handing. They've only been live for 4 months so I'm being understanding.

In the meantime we're evolving our requirements for Latam Design. I think that the more we see of Xero and Saasu, the more we realise that perhaps we do need a little more than Estimates and Invoicing.

It is becoming clear to me that once you start using one SaaS provider then you may not be stuck (you can typically extract your data) but you, your users, and your customers will be slightly shaken if you have to start telling them to use the old system for the old invoices and the new one for new invoices. The retraining alone means that choosing a SaaS provider once is easy but changing mid-stream is much more complicated. The more you push the system out beyond the typical boundaries (e.g. to your accountant, to your customers) the more locked-in you get.

Comments and feedback are welcome, as of course are corrections and constructive debate :-)