A while ago I wrote about Keeping your Books in Check – basically some information on doing book your accounts/book keeping properly and bringing up the professionalism with your invoicing.
As I had mentioned, there was a number of products I had used, tried out etc, including MYOB, QuickBooks, some smaller mac-based applications, and I was looking at a few online web-based apps. As soon as I started looking at the web-based applications I knew I was heading in the right direction – no software to install, accessible anywhere, no backups or updates required – adding to the simplicity.
However, I couldn’t find many options for Australian businesses, and the US-centric ones were too US, if you catch my drift (the things which accounting tools are supposed to make simpler were missing, such as GST/BAS reports…). I had been using a web-based system for the last 12-18 months, which was working out fine – it did what I needed it to do, and granted it was a little sterile and all over the place it still worked.
But, this system didn’t really work when it came to the ‘average user’ test. By this I mean, my housemate. Basically, my housemate, who is a professional wedding photographer, really needs to start managing his accounts properly. I think, to be honest, he just wasn’t doing anything before this year (which is not so good come tax time…), so I introduced him to this tool, and subsequently spent 2-3 hours explaining things to him, like how to fill in the details, how to create a new customer, how to add products etc.
His opinion, in short, is that the tool was too complex. Good point.
Now as I mentioned, I know of a lot of small business who do their accounts with Excel, or even pen and paper (remember the good old ledger books? I don’t). This, to me, looked like an opportunity to fill a gap, provide something which can do what they need, no more, and is simple and affordable. And when I say simple, I mean stupidly simple. The easier I can make it, the better.
So, last week I created the template for a new app, and started prototyping. Originally it was supposed to be ‘seeing how it looks’, but as soon as I saw possibility in turning the app into something good I ran with it. A week later I have an almost complete application. It’s missing some things like PDF invoice generation and emailing, quotes, personalizing, but it does the basics – it creates records.
I’m pretty happy with what I have accomplished in a week, especially considering it was done while working on other things as well. Given this progress it seems that I should be more then ready to start a public beta at the end of this week, and move towards monetizing the application. There are a few things I need to look at first, including reviewing the security of information, adding some additional protection against brute force attacks, and set up the security certificates…
How much is this likely to cost? Not a lot, I want this to be something small businesses will be interested in using because its affordable and suits their needs, so I’m thinking about plans starting from $10-$20/month, and depending on how things go, possibly add in different subscription levels.
So I guess all I can say now is stay tuned – the Accounting app will be launched very soon and hopefully once I start receiving feedback I can improve and polish and make it a tool which is really useful to a lot of users.
