I have had some great customer service interactions this week from the comfort of my home office at incredibly odd hours of the day.

I had mentioned in a previous post awhile back that I used to be concerned about answering email inquiries outside of office hours for the fear of being seen as “unprofessional” or “amateur”, or worse yet, to be uncovered by my customers that I work from home. 

It seems like working from home has worked well for servicing our clients.  We noticed that in our target market, many people sign up and log in outside of normal business hours.  If I can make the assumption that most of our clients are self-employed or small business owners, this would make perfect sense.  The other day, I was doing my own bookkeeping from 10 pm to 3 am on a Saturday night er…morning… and my web analytics are showing me that most of our clients actually prefer to do their bookkeeping at night or on weekends (strangely enough, no one else works at 3 am though).  I also feel that there is more authenticity in my responses because I am in my own element.  I guess there goes the idea of “work life balance” (which I think is a total myth by the way). 

One time, due to pregnancy related heart burn, I got up at 6 am to drink some soy milk.  I thought I would take this perfect opportunity to check my email and how many new sign ups I’ve got (I wake up to new sign ups on a daily basis and this makes interrupted sleep that much more fun) when I noticed an email inquiry from someone in Eastern time.  6 am my time was 9 am their time and their work day has already started.  Needless to say, the person who sent the email was pleasantly surprised and impressed at my “excellent customer service”.  Another time, a client who just signed up wanted to know how to enter multi-currency transactions in our accounting software.  It was around 7 pm at in the evening when I got a help inquiry and I was able to provide a response within 16 minutes of receiving the inquiry.  I even got a reply from this new client saying “You guys rock”.  This could not have been possible if I was working during “normal” business hours.  I have even been responding to email inquiries from Japan at 11 pm with much appreciation from the client.

One thing I am beginning to realize is that our clients do not work during normal business hours and neither should we.  If I could speak to the decision makers of large companies, I would suggest they consider allowing their workforce to work from home.  Give each support staff an iPhone / Blackberry so they would be delighted to receive emails at all hours of the day.  Responding quickly and authentically to client support inquiries seemed to be more useful than looking productive during office hours.

That’s all I have to say for now.

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Recently I wrote an email to Ben Kepes, one of the editors on Cloud Ave – a blog dedicated to writing about the phenomenon of cloud computing.  He had mentioned on his blog posts he was interested in reviewing a few online accounting software applications and I thought I would just write him an email and see what becomes of it. 

What resulted from our interaction was my first guest post ever.  I wrote a post about what I really think about SaaS (software as a service) and where I think this industry is going.  Before entering into the blog world with my personal blog Manifestation Stories (which has been long neglected since I started working on Clarity Accounting), I never thought of myself as much of a writer.  Less than a year after I started blogging, I am now writing for other blogs. 

Here is a quote on what I think about SaaS:

It is unclear at this point if any SaaS player will ever reach significant market share in their target market. Probably not in the way Intuit (creator of Quickbooks) can capture 90% of the US market share in the small to medium sized accounting software space. Interestingly enough, even Quickbooks Online struggles to get the kind of market share in the SaaS business accounting space, reaching 100,000 users online in 2007. This is nowhere near the numbers they are used to in comparison to their offline distribution.

Consumers are increasingly looking for SaaS solutions that can precisely meet their needs. One great example is Freshbooks - an online invoicing software that began by addressing only the pain of invoicing. They have since attracted more than 500,000 users worldwide. While there have been some grumbles within their online forum for them to add additional features to become an accounting software, it seems like Freshbooks is sticking to their plan of being the best online invoicing software possible for the time being.

It really seems like the most successful SaaS players are the ones who take on one or two pains and address them extremely well. Companies who create SaaS solutions with more features do not seem to win over those who focus on just a few features.

I also offered my crystal ball rendition of the SaaS market:

I have seen this as an increasing trend in the SaaS market place. In fact, our online accounting software has been approached by many of our customers and SaaS vendors to consider “integrating” with other SaaS applications. We couldn’t agree more. It doesn’t serve us or our clients for us to be the “jack of all trades and master of none”. It would be a lot better if we can just focus on what we do best and let others focus on what they do best. At the end of the day, we all win when customers get the best of all worlds.

As I am writing this blog post, Dobes is in the process of finishing and releasing our first working API.  If anyone is interested in testing it out, please let us know!  We already had 2 requests yesterday alone for a working API.

I think only time will tell if my opinion about the SaaS market has any merit. I certainly hope I am right — that way, I can be viewed as an expert. :P 

Where do you think the SaaS market is going?  Any thoughts?

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It is amazing how hard it is to get back in the game of blogging after an extended absence.  For some people, a 10 day absence might not seem like a big deal.  But I am starting to realize that the longer I don’t write, the harder it is to get back to the groove of writing.  In my defense however, I must say that I have been working very hard on the help files for our online accounting software.  The help file section is created like a whole other blog on our website.  We found this method to be useful in organizing help information as well generating consistent relevant content and SEO credits.

Many interesting things are happening on the Clarity Accounting front.  We are now being contacted by people from all over the world.  Today, we had a phone conversation with people over in Singapore (a place I used to call home for 3 years of my life) and we are getting requests from people all over the world to tweak Clarity Accounting to support their accounting needs.

One of the most important features we have to support international users is our strong multi-currency feature.  From our research so far, I can honestly say that Clarity Accounting has some of the best multi-currency support out there.  We now support currencies in the following countries: United States, Canada, Mexico, Britain, Switzerland, Japan, Dubai, India, Pakistan, Japan and of course, the Euro for countries in the European Union. 

If you would like your currency to be included in Clarity Accounting, simply contact us and make your request known.

To record multi-currency transactions, you would have to use the “Enter Invoice” tab under the Income section or the “Enter Bill” tab under the Expense section. 

Recent requests from our international customers for multi-currency support also made us realize a wonderful vision for Clarity Accounting.  We are the accounting software that can connect small businesses together all around the world by providing a tool that faciliates doing business with each other.  This is a very exciting vision and we are looking forward to serving people from all over the world.

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Two major upgrades last night.

First, we’ve moved Clarity Accounting to new servers at a new hosting provider with the following benefits:

• Server “Hot Failover”: If one of the server computers running the software dies for any reason, all the work it was doing is automatically redistributed to other computes while that one is replaced
• RAID-1 storage: All data is saved onto multiple hard drives, so that if a hard drive wears out no data is lost.
• Isolation of components: The major components of the servers run inside their own virtual machine, so that if one of them is compromised the others are not affected.  For example, if someone hacks our blog, he can mess up our blog but he can’t access any financial data.
• Intelligent firewall with intrusion and attack detection
• Improved security practices, including using non-standard ports and public keys for SSH server access
• More powerful servers that can handle more users and virtually unlimited data storage
• Learn more about the security of our new hosting service here.

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A few bugs fixed:

• Entering income or expenses with no due date or payment terms caused errors to show up in the income and expense sections of the application
• Income and Expense mini-reports were showing all-time income instead of year-to-date income
• Income and Expense mini-reports were showing first/last name instead of the company name for income/expenses by customer/vendor
• Fixed the indentation of some rows in the Balance Sheet report

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Tonight we posted a new version of clarity accounting, our online accounting software, with a beautiful new look and feel!  Go take a look at the demo (or sign up) and let us know what you think of it.

In this release:

• Great new look and feel, thanks go to our excellent graphic designer at Triay Design Vancouver and our XHTML coders for their assistance
• Changed the date picker so you have to click on the date icon (not just anywhere in the text box) to pop up the calendar picker
• “Paid” and “Unpaid” amounts in the income and expense sections are replaced with a single column “Status”, showing whether it’s paid, due, overdue, or partly paid and by how much.
• Income, Expense, Adjustment, and Transfer sections now have mini-reports on the side, like the dashboard
• Added the “Cash” account type; this is generally the same as ‘Bank’ except it doesn’t show up in the Bank Statement Reconciliation page
• Added the “Taxes and Remittances” account type; this is clearer than using the less specific “Other Current Liability” account type for these accounts
• Added Excel export to a few more places that didn’t have it
• Added currencies: New Taiwan Dollar (NTD) and Indian Rupee (INR)
• Pop-up windows and alerts now have a gray overlay to make them more “modal”
• Account drop-downs that only show some types of accounts now have a “Show All…” action which shows all accounts.  This is helpful for those special cases where you need to use a different account type
• Made a variety of usability tweaks, renamed some fields, improved the consistency of some sections
• Fixed a bug where if you edited a record, its date would reset to the current date

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Our story begins in the gritty metropolis of Richmond, British Columbia. May and I sit side-by-side across a yellow-brown desk from our Accountant. The room smells like dust, ink, and the ozone smell produced by the giant Lexmark laser printer in the corner.

The accountant was asking me if I know an easier way to collaborate with his clients; he’s currently using a solution called “VNC” which lets him control his clients’ computer remotely in order to work on their books. My spider sense is tingling… suddenly I feel like I have stumbled upon a genuine pain in the market. Who else, I thought, struggles on collaboration between Accountant and Business Owner?

This connected with another train of thought that I’d been having, which went something like “Man, does Quickbooks ever suck!”. Although accountants and bookkeepers seem to love it, I find it barely usable. Does it make sense for a long-time computer user (and programmer) with comfort around accounting jargon to find accounting software like this confusing and frustrating?

Given the answers “yes” and “no” to these questions, I decided there was a gap in the market to fill. I envisioned an accounting solution provided online - a “Web 2.0 Accounting Application“, if you will - that was tremendously easy to use and made collaboration a matter of course.

And so I started work on it. Now, almost a year later, we have something ready to try out, show the world, etc.. I hope you like the direction it is going; I do!

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