Technology for Accountants in Practice | Top Accountants

Barclaycard are piloting allowing businesses using the their merchant services to raise invoices and collect payments using an “e-invoicing” service provided by KashFlow.

This posting on TechCrunch, prompted the above tweet from Duane Jackson, which Dennis Howlett picked up on immediately and wrote about here.

My initial reaction to reading the TechCrunch article was that this seemed like a significant development but, here’s my problem, the more I think about it the less important it seems to me. It may be a big deal for the two companies involved (great exposure for KashFlow particularly) but I can’t see where the importance to business owners might be.

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Reading this posting on AccountingWeb got me thinking about this unrelated piece at CPA Trendlines and what the future holds for the “Client Testimonial” – as used in the marketing materials of professional service firms, particularly on their websites.

I think testimonials don’t work and are open to abuse in many ways, as the comments on the AccountingWeb thread suggest. The fundamental problem is that the person reading a testimonial knows that they are only being presented with a partial view; they have no way to validate their opinion on it without access to the broader picture.

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Let me firstly say that, in the past, I have been a real fan of QuickBooks.  When I started Pearson & Associates in 1995, I recommended QuickBooks to any clients who would listen.  I have never liked Sage Line 50, it was QuickBooks all the way for me.

Then things changed.  Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks, seemed to lose their way in the early noughties.  With a commercial need to release upgrades regularly, to keep the revenues coming in, but with a product was functionally complete already, they had to resort to adding peripheral features, almost gimmicks, that most users didn’t really want or need.  QuickBooks 2008 was particularly badly received – especially as it left users of multi-currency completely in the lurch.

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I recently participated in a discussion on AccountingWeb where I questioned the value of including detailed technical and tax resources on accountants’ websites.  My long-held view is that such resources are a waste of money.  If I were a client, I would want to pick up the phone and get the answers I need.  I would not expect to find them for myself, “on the website”.

However, since there are many providers of technical content and many accountants including their services on their sites, I wondered if I was alone in my view – so I created an online survey and asked for responses.

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