Small Business accounting

I've spent the past few weeks talking to small / medium business people about the ambitions for their web presence and how the web might finally deliver what it promised 10 years ago.

Most of them wouldn't know about Service Oriented Architectures, Content Management Systems and Adwords. But they know what they want, having web sites that really work for them. They want up-to-date web sites which connect to their back office systems and they want closed loop marketing. On my part, I'm excited that much of the tech "coming down the pike" has potential to make a real difference to SME (or SMB in US-speak) organisations. And most of them don't know what's going to hit them. Well.... that is as long as the vendors of small business accounting software pick up the ball and run with it!

My experience is that accounting systems only allow one way traffic (for example, export customer details but not synchronise their details with other systems). While that might have been for good reasons in the past, it will be unlikely to satify those who have a vision of integrating Customer Relationship Management and Accounting information on a self-service web site.

It would appear that the Yankee group in their recent report believes that also, according to this InfoWorld article. [By the way, Infoworld, I hate your habit of providing re-directed links to vendors in articles, particularly when they fail].

"In the Yankee Group DecisionNote, called "Intuit Dominates Best Software and Microsoft in SMB Accounting Application Market," which was driven by the raw survey data generated from another report called "Small & Medium Business Applications & Web Survey." In the latter report Yankee Group is encouraging vendors to consider redesigning products to better work with a service-oriented architecture and give customers a choice of on-demand or on-premises delivery models."

I'd be very happy with a hosted accounting system which automatically adapted itself to changing accounting and tax rules and which I could access from anywhere.

In the mean time, the rumour is that Microsoft's next accounting system integrates closely with MS Office, surprise... surprise. I would call that swimmming against the stream.