Accounting

Hi,

If RomanCart had the ability for you to enter your outgoings and to create invoices, profit and loss reports, generation of VAT returns - what else would you need it to do to completely replace your current accounting packages?

Many Thanks
Support

Dave P.,

Don't be such a grumpy old man!, it sounds like you need that holiday.

Support,

I don't currently use any form of accounting software other than manual entry of figures into good old MS Excel and when I saw this thread I was looking forward to seeing some positive suggestions that would lead on to the introduction of some useful new accounting features for RomanCart and raise the status of your system from 'excellent' to 'outstanding' so please pursue this endeavour despite Dave P's feelings.

Regretfully I'm not able give give much input on this subject myself as I'm not familiar with what is expected from an accounts package but hopefully other RC users will post some suggestions

Best Regards

Nick G.

A very happy RC user

Sounds like you're going to get 2 very different points of view on this issue. This post is likely to be a bit long too - sorry about that.

Our accounting requirements are quite complex.

We need:

1. Sales order processing - if part of a customer's order is not in stock, it records the rest of the order as a normal invoice and the remainder (out-of-stock products) as an order. That way, we can always get a get a report at any point in time of what orders/products are on back-order.

2. Purchase order processing - similar concept but from a supplier's point of view. Everything that we order may not be in stock at the suppliers or they may have inadequate stock. POP allows you to see what is on back-order with the supplier(s).

3. We sell to EU business customers so we need the EU Sales List feature for HRMC reporting requirements.

4. We buy and sell in 3 different currencies so we need a foreign currency feature. Currency gains/losses etc implications ...

5. We hold stock in multiple warehouses.

6. Although we don't use it, a payroll processing functionality (which, needless to say, requires updating each year to comply with changing tax rates and changing legislation), this is surely a must.

We currently use MYOB Accounting Plus. If you're not familiar with MYOB, it's an Australian package localised for the UK market. MYOB was bought out by Mamut (Scandinavian company) a couple of years ago. To cut a long story short, Mamut is making the MYOB software inoperable after 31st Dec 2011. They want customers to migrate over to their own crappy piece of software. Needless to say, many MYOB owners are not happy to say the least. Imagine buying a piece of software and then finding out 5 years later that it simply won't run anymore on ANY piece of hardware with ANY operating system!

I've looked at many reasonably priced alternatives, well-known and not-so-well-known. The well-knowns are the likes of Quickbooks Permier (around £250 exc VAT) and Sage 50 (around £750 exc VAT) and even cloud-based accounting packages. None of them - bar one - have all the features we need. Multi-location stock tracking is where most of them fall down flat. Sage 200 has this functionality but the starting price is £3500. Bright Pearl, a cloud-based piece of software, has this functionality and costs £69 a month (inc VAT? exc VAT? not sure). If I remember correctly, MYOB cost us around £200. Looking back on this, it was a bargain. MYOB does all we need and does it very very well. On top of that, it's fast and simple to use. All of the latest pieces of software have such poor and confusing interfaces - and I'm a qualified accountant!

Of all the cloud-based accounting software, Bright Pearl was certainly the best for our needs. It does have multi-location stock tracking. It even has an ecommerce module (£79 pcm extra) which integrates with the rest of the accounting functions.

Support, no doubt this is what you are aiming for. I have to admit, I'd jump at the opportunity of better integration between our carts and the accounting software. It will certainly cut-down on work. But it simply doesn't seem to be possible at the moment.

Bright Pearl had $1.5m venture capital funding last year and another $5m this year. The article from last year about their $1.5m funding mentioned that they wanted to expand to a team of 100 staff "within a few months". Are these guys who you want to go up against?

I love RC. I love the simple check-out process. I love the fact that it's not database and template driven so that each page on our web site, if need be, can be tailored to show exactly how we want it. No doubt the die-hard RC fans stick with RC just for the same reasons.

So, I whole-heartedly agree with Dave P and want to echo his comments. Please please fix all the problems first before you start looking at diversifying from your core business. And, like Dave said, consider writing export modules for the popular accounting packages.

Thanks Keith. Had never heard of that one so took a quick look. The web site alone put me off it. Looks to me like a small outfit. Who works from a place called Pratts Bottom?

I'm not ungrateful but I think I'll pass on this one. First impressions do count.

Hi

I too am in the 'please fix everything else first' category.

I've sent multiple support tickets and never even had a proper response never mind got them looked at/fixed!

The problem is bug fixes dont generate new revenue/customers. New functionality does.....(yes I am cynical!)