The great cloud accounting software search of 2014 (part 2)

This post is a continuation of my search (see previous post here)

After a rather exhaustive googling exercise, I arrived at a list of products that I initially looked at. The list got quite long, so I started to eliminate as I went along by performing these basic checks:

• Does it have a free trial that includes all functionality, or at least all advertised functionality that I'm interested in?
• Does it support multiple currencies? Specifically I checked for the following:
• Supports ZAR as base currency
• Can I, in the trial, create an invoice in a different currency (USD), either by specifying the currency on the invoice or by specifying the currency on the customer record.
• Check if some basic accounting features are supported, especially functionality for deferred revenue and work in progress, even if only through manual journals.
• Price: I quickly realised that I would quite easily be able to find a good enough solution for less than $250 (USD) per month, so anything that would cost more than this based on our expected usage was eliminated.

The majority of the options that were eliminated were eliminated due to multi-currency shortcomings. This doesn't necessarily mean that the software doesn't have any multi-currency functionality, it just means that I could not get it to do what I want it to do within a reasonable time (about an hour) of trying in the trial version. Thus, in some cases elimination on grounds of lacking multi-currency functionality was rather a reflection of usability or trial edition limitations. Regardless, for my purposes, this is sufficient reason to not waste any further time evaluating such options.

Using this procedure I was able to eliminate the majority of options. I have to mention that some of these looked like really great software, but for some or other reasons simply didn't fit our requirements. This does not mean that it's bad software, it might be a much better fit for someone else. The full list in the order in which I evaluated them: Freshbooks, Xero (still in the running), Clearbooks, Kashoo, Kashflow (still in the running), Acumatica, Sage One, Intacct, Zuora, FreeAgent (still in the running), Quickbooks online, Netsuite, Outright/Godaddy bookkeeping, Big Red Cloud, Bean Cruncher, Zoho books (still in the running), Saasu, SMEasy, Bluubin, PingAccounts/CapitalOne.

Thus, I'm left with four options that I feel could do the job:

• Xero, www.xero.com
• Kashflow, www.kashflow.com
• FreeAgent, www.freeagent.com
• Zoho books, www.zoho.com

In both Kashflow and Xero's case some kind of time tracking add-on may be necessary too, but both of those seem to have a generous number of add-ons available. Although this adds extra cost it still looks like most combinations will be significantly cheaper than some of the more expensive options I evaluated and hopefully still well within my $250/month limit.

I'm now moving on to a next round where I'll compare features and usability against our requirements in a bit more detail and hopefully arrive at a final answer shortly. Although the available options may be quite varied in pricing I'm not too worried about price at this stage. As long as the price remains within certain limits (like $250/month), finding the best fit is a much higher priority than saving a few bucks.

The great cloud accounting software search of 2014 (part 1)

Exciting times as we're moving into a new phase of Xpedia's history and I'll hopefully be posting more often in the near future. As a starting point I'm going to document my search for new accounting software here.

I'm looking for a better accounting solution for Xpedia's applications division. Going forward this will be a separate legal entity that I will lead. Our current software is Acumatica, which is a very feature rich ERP suite. We host it ourselves, but it is completely browser-based so I've become spoilt with having something that's always available from anywhere. The only problem with Acumatica is that it is complete overkill for our requirements. This means the processes are too cumbersome as we don't have dedicated staff who can specialize in a single discipline/module like debtors clerks etc. When you have the staff to use Acumatica properly I think it would be a fantastic product to use, but we're simply not there yet. It also means the software is a little pricey. The Xpedia Applications business has a headcount of 20 and annual turnover in the R5 000 000 to R10 000 000 range (that's roughly $500 000 to $1 000 000 in USD), so a full-blown ERP is a little bit out of our league.

So for part 1 I'm going to list requirements and hopefully get some additional ideas on this and from part 2 onwards I'll expand on our search, the products we've looked at and the process to evaluate and arrive (hopefully very shortly) at a conclusion.

Here's a list of features we need:

• Cloud-based, hosted by provider
• Easy to use. Everyone always says that, I know... But it must have a free trial so I can check it out first hand and see if I find it easy to use.
• Must support South African Rand (ZAR) as base currency for our business.
• Must support multiple currencies (i.e. I want to be able to send a client in Mozambique or DRC a USD invoice instead of a ZAR invoice).
• Must support recurring invoice items (we have lots of clients with monthly retainers or recurring software license fees)
• Must support recurring cost items (e.g. recurring software license fee costs, our own retainers to suppliers etc.)
• Must support fixed asset depreciation, revenue deferral, work in progress, even if only through manual journals.

Nice-to-haves:

• Banking integration (we will use an First National Bank of South Africa account)
• Time tracking
• Support ticketing
• Project management
• Departmental transactions and reporting (not that we really have departments, just want to keep track of profitability of different products and services separately and traditionally something like a departmental breakdown appears to have been the easiest way to achieve this)