FreeAgent Central

Technology consultant Ed Molyneux found he was frustrated with the time taken keeping track of expenses and raising invoices on spreadsheets.  For one and two person service based companies he found the accounting software wasn’t easy enough for non accountants. 

Ed founded FreeAgent Central an online service for small service based SME’s to deal with their financials.  What I found extremely interesting is Ed’s comments he made in an interview with Tom Raftery on blip TV.  Here are a few of his comments:

“Quite hard to do some simple things …sharp contrast to the rest of the way we’re running our business which is using technology and the internet”

“Accountants are offering a very valuable service.  Clearly there is a lot of information out there which you need to understand to run your business.” 

“It seems to me a lot of stuff they are doing is stuff that could be automated.”

I agree with all of the above.   Ed clearly realised that in addition to automating processes the online service must be as easy to use. 

This focus on usability is an extremely important one as both Amazon and Google know.  Most business owners don’t want to be confronted by the cockpit of Concorde when they open up a new piece of software.  In my experience they want something that is easy to use and gives instant benefit. 

Technorati Tags: small business medium sized business sme smb blogging accountants  sme-blog  technology

Comments

[Ed Molyneux]

Thanks for taking the time to watch the interview, Philip.

I think it's interesting that these sort of clients are exactly the sort many small accounting practices don't like: book-keeping, number crunching and compliance and, once they're up and running, not much chance to add value. I hope that what we're doing is taking away the uninteresting bits with a self-service model and let the accountant deliver precisely that value - priced accordingly.

Of course, it's not for everyone, even within our narrowly defined niche (which is still large in numbers terms).

Will your 'once-a-year carrier bag of receipts' client suddenly get organised? Well, maybe, if we make it easy, informative and dare-I-say-it 'fun'! The feedback we're getting on FreeAgent is that we're doing just that. How often do you hear that about accounting software ;-?

[Philip Woodgate]

Hi Ed

Fun accounting! Yep, well actually I do know a fair few accountants who have said how much they enjoy putting accounts together. In the old days the process was a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Only at the end did you get to see the complete picture.

The good thing with they way you automate so much of the process is you make it easy to see the complete picture very quickly. That's good news especially if your customers use that information to benefit their business as well as for compliance.